We’ve already covered the basics you need to know to be a good facilitator and how to get better over time. But if you’re already good, how do you become a great facilitator? Manage your energy and attention It took me an embarrassingly long time to learn, but I’m much worse at facilitating if I’ve…

To get better at facilitating (or almost anything else in life), you just need to do two things: That sounds simple! But because lots of us find facilitation intimidating, we never even get started. I’m going to break those two steps down to make it more approachable. Practice: find lots of opportunities to facilitate You…

So many brainstorms are painfully bad. Someone asks for options, and… crickets. Or you get the same few not-quite-right ideas that are either ridiculous or the very bland suggestions that come up every time. Or, more subtly, you quickly hone in on one idea without stopping to explore if there are better alternatives. Idea generation…

It’s not that hard to be unusually good at facilitation, because most people don’t know the first thing about it. It’s a low bar to clear! With a little knowledge, you can be delivering workshops and meetings that stand out from the crowd. This is probably overkill for simple meetings like one-to-ones or stand-ups. But…

Facilitating a meeting means guiding the process to make sure everyone can participate and you meet your goals for the session. It’s all about asking good questions, creating shared thinking spaces and keeping conversations on track. There’s a difference between chairing and facilitating meetings. Whilst a chair actively leads a meeting to reach certain conclusions,…

Strategy and agile can seem at odds. Agile is all about working in short loops, learning and adapting as you go. That seems like the opposite of the long-term approach needed for strategy. But many common problems with strategies could be addressed if they were approached in a more agile way. How often have you…

Last week, I said that great project planning starts by collectively setting outcomes as a project team. But how exactly do you do that? And what else should you include in a project kick-off? How to set outcomes together Collectively deciding what you want to achieve from a project means that everyone involved has ownership…

Like RACIs, project plans have a lot to answer for. Most project plans are hard to read, hard to update, and almost immediately out of date. I’m pretty sceptical of any project documentation that requires lots of time spent up-front to only approximate the reality of what you are doing, and project plans are often…

When we think about accountability, we default to thinking about managers. Managers keep people accountable by telling them what to do, and creating consequences if they don’t do those things. But people aren’t dogs waiting to be biffed on the nose with a rolled up newspaper for peeing on the carpet. When someone fails to…

Last week, we discussed why the RACI model sucks. Planning out responsibilities in detail at the start of the project can prevent you from learning and adapting as you go. A much better approach to divvying up responsibilities is to have a regular, structured conversation about them. That’s the “R” in RACI, but what about…