Facilitation Scenario:
The planning meeting is becoming heated as critical issues surface and key players dig in and clash over ideas. The energy shift is palpable and the breakthrough you were hired to deliver seems to be in jeopardy.
What do you do to break the impasse and cool off the tension??
No matter how thorough the pre-planning and planning process or how focused the power point presentation, these all reflect a hypothetical trajectory, a guide for how we intend events to unfold. However, once the facilitation meeting begins, variables such as context, content, and learning dynamics intersect to shape the experience. This experience, then, reflects the actual trajectory and to ensure effective facilitation, nimbleness is essential.
At Audacious Inner Works, we conceptualize nimbleness as that artful dance of reading the room, anticipating challenges, striving to meet the needs of diverse learners who possess varying backgrounds, knowledge sets, and learning dispositions, and adaptive problem solving whilst moving the process forward with poise to achieve desired outcomes. No easy feat!
At its core, nimbleness is underpinned by mindful presence, social-emotional literacy, and the facilitator’s own sense of daring. Nimbleness is responsive facilitation.
Let’s revisit the opening scenario, which is not uncommon. During tense moments, our facilitators like to conduct a quick mental self-scan to maintain self-composure because panic is never an option (social-emotional literacy); a cool, calm disposition almost always prevails in such moments. As professional facilitators, we also maintain our focus on what’s happening in front of us rather than worry about our bottom line! Here’s a truism we bear in mind when facilitating and collaborating with others:
By virtue of convening people in a process, one can expect that beliefs, perspectives, and challenges will surface and some clashes will be inevitable. In fact, underpinning beliefs, values, and challenges SHOULD surface to be explored and achieve alignment.
Having said that, knowing what to do in those moments of tension—possessing the skill sets to direct traffic—is indispensable and highlights why facilitators are key partners in capacity building initiatives.
Historically, we’ve employed a combination of techniques and approaches to address such situations to shift the dynamics, achieve common ground, and move the process forward.
Depending on factors such as what’s happening, where in the agenda the issue arises (beginning, middle, or end), and what’s at stake, we might engage in any of the following ways:
- ✓ Use direct communication to name what’s happening and challenge participants to move beyond habitual responses/behaviors—this is the daring, courageous part!
- ✓ Invite participants to breathe (and perhaps invite group/parties to visualize what success might look and sound like to move forward).
- ✓ Take a water/stretch/snack break.
- ✓ Remind participants about norms and agreements for good faith engagement.
- ✓ Ask the parties involved to describe the other’s point, identify commonality, name the disagreement, and characterize the nature of the disagreement. (This task requires empathy, holding one’s thoughts in abeyance to understand another’s, and tends to afford the parties a novel way of thinking about the disagreement especially if they’re talking at cross purposes.) Essentially, the parties and the organization are learning how to learn to resolve challenges.
- ✓ Retrace discussion journey, highlight the progress made (and perhaps name how it was achieved), and then re-position the current dilemma.
- ✓ Clarify the issue(s) being addressed, acknowledge the parties’ commitment to organization (issue, cause), recognize the value being offered by parties relative to where they sit, and identify common ground (e.g., perhaps there’s agreement about the general approach but disagreement about finer points, which can be hashed out in committees).
This is by no means an exhaustive list of approaches, but as you can see, nimbleness is an essential quality in effective facilitation and is optimized when paired with a robust toolbox. Nimbleness can be the difference maker in re-focusing a highly spirited meeting and pre-empting hard-core challenges from derailing your meeting. (In fact, we strongly recommend that deeply ingrained conflicts and challenges be explored as part of the planning process!)
May your meetings be nimble and impactful towards advanced learning, human development, and organizational capacity!
At Your Service,
About Glenda M. Francis
Glenda M. Francis is the founder of Audacious Inner Works Institute, a personal development and capacity building service organization. She is an ICF credentialed life coach specializing in confidence building and women’s wellness and power.