What I learnt about executing on strategy

The book argues that whilst we focus our time and thinking on strategy development, executing on strategy is a far bigger challenge for most of us. Executing is fraught with difficulty: unclear understanding of the goal, especially at lower levels within the organisation; murky accountability; problems translating plans into action.

There’s also the pull of business as usual – or as they call it, the whirlwind. I love the way this captures the irresistible pull of our day-to-day work. Even when you have clear and compelling goals, it’s hard to focus on those in the whirlwind of deadlines and daily expectations.

The book sets out a process that starts with setting just one or two wildly important goals. You then pick a small handful of lead measures that are influenceable and predictive of those goals and monitor these with a scorecard. Each week, you meet briefly to review the scorecard and commit to actions that will help you make progress on the lead measures.

If those brief meetings sound familiar, yes, there’s a lot of overlap with stand-ups – and I’ll come on to some of the takeaways I’ve used to improve my own stand-ups. But some of the concepts about strategy as a whole have been even more valuable to me.

Firstly, the idea that you should only have one (or at most two) core goals – as they call them, wildly important goals or WIGs. That’s not to say you can’t have other goals. But the more you try to do the less you will accomplish. The clarity of a strict one or two goal limit makes it much easier to make progress. This emphasis on focus is a very agile idea that resonates with what I’ve written before on backlog refinement.

To help you identify your WIGs, they encourage you to ask, ‘if every other area of our operation remained at its current level of performance, what is the one are where change would have the biggest impact?’. This is such a freeing question. So often we get stuck in setting goals around things that are already working. Of course we want to maintain our success in x, y and z, but often that will happen without much effort. Focusing on improving one thing is less overwhelming than asking what the most important thing is overall.

Reassuringly, they say that 80% of your team’s effort will probably be spent on the whirlwind, rather than your WIG. This seems realistic and helpful to acknowledge. Focus on a few things, do those well, and accept that whatever your intentions, your day-to-day job will automatically take up the bulk of your time.

They also encourage wide involvement in setting your WIGs, another very agile idea. As they put it, senior leaders should be able to veto, but not dictate direction.

Creating accountability

I mentioned that the weekly WIG meetings described in the book are very similar to stand-ups. These last 20-30 minutes (so a little longer than a typical stand-up) and are a chance to hold each other accountable. Each member of the team reports on their progress on the commitments they made last week, reviews their scorecard and makes new commitments for the following week.

There are a few bits of this that go against what I would recommend. There’s a real benefit to stand-up’s brevity: limiting them to 10-15 minutes makes it much more likely that you will stick to it and not get bogged down in conversation that’s not relevant to everyone. I’ve also never quite managed to get a satisfying scorecard going. I love the idea (and would love to hear if you’ve made it work for you), but distilling work into a small handful of lead measures always seems very tricky in practice.

Having said that, I absolutely agree that using a structured, focused format can help everyone keep themselves accountable. It’s also really motivating to acknowledge progress on a regular basis, whether that’s in the scorecard they advocate for, or in simply ticking things off in a more typical stand-up.

Empowering the team to keep each other accountable, rather than this solely coming from the manager is also really powerful. I also like the way each team member picks their own commitments each week. They know most about what’s possible to achieve, and if they chose themselves, they really are committing to it. Again, the framing is helpful: ‘what’s the 1-2 most important things I can do this week to make progress on our WIG?’.

I tend to use stand-ups in one of two ways. Either it’s for teams to organise all of their work together, or, in keeping with the book, it’s focused on a key project or goal that’s separate from the whirlwind. There’s value in either approach, but often the latter is an easier way in for teams that are newer to agile.

I’ve never followed the full process outlined in the book, but several of it’s ideas have strengthened my agile practice. I’d love to hear from you – does any of this resonate with you?

This is the third in a series sharing agile lessons from books that don’t describe themselves as being about agile. Subscribe to my newsletter to get a monthly round up of posts, and my free guide, How to Make Better Decisions with Agile.

This rhythm of working in short cycles, alternating between the two modes, also feels very agile. But the emphasis on language in the book is a subtle nuance often missed when thinking about agile ways of working.

How Leadership is Language relates to agile

Red and blue work need different approaches. Thinking mode benefits from embracing variability, getting diverse ideas and perspectives to improve decision making. Doing, on the other hand, benefits from reducing variability – focusing on consistency and execution.

This idea might sound familiar if you’ve read what I’ve written on convergent and divergent thinking. Again, these are two different processes, and we need to separate them out within our meetings.

Marquet is applying a similar concept to our work as a whole. We should look at as many ideas as possible in brainstorming, and at lots of different perspectives before decisions making. But in day-to-day execution, you should just focus on one thing at a time to avoid being pulled in too many directions. The trick is to get the right balance between the two modes, working in short cycles of doing interspersed with thinking.

This absolutely resonates with many agile practices. Agile encourages you to work in short cycles, pausing at regular intervals to reflect and improve. We don’t describe them this way, but retrospectives and idea generation should both be drawing on the blue thinking mode, introducing variability to help you improve. Marquet calls this ‘improve, don’t prove’. It’s all about a non-judgemental reflection on how things are going and what you might want to do differently.

Stand-ups are all about reducing variability, efficiently clarifying what you are focusing on that day. You should be breaking the work down into small, manageable tasks and completing them one-by-one. This is exactly what Marquet argues for as his ‘complete, don’t continue’ play.

But my favourite secretly-agile part of the book is the section on ‘collaborate, don’t coerce’. Marquez encourages leaders to empower their teams, listening to them and encouraging the sharing of ideas. Where possible, he wants you to let the doers be the deciders. Again, this is a very agile idea.

How the book can help you take agile ideas further

Unsurprisingly given the title of the book, some of it’s best ideas are about language. And it’s particularly helpful on ways leaders can use language to create true collaboration without subtly prompting the group just to agree with them.

This is how the book puts it:

‘When leaders attempt to collaborate with their teams, they often end up skipping the divergent part (“What does everyone think?”) and jump straight into the convergent part (“Here’s what I think. Does everyone agree?”). This represents the language of too many brain-storming and decision making meetings, where the boss states an opinion and others fall in line. Bosses try to be compelling, not curious. They ask leading and self-affirming questions. They suppress dissent and push for consensus. This is not collaboration. This is coercion disguised as collaboration.’

The book is filled with great ideas for how to tackle this. A few of my favourites:

1. Vote first, then discuss. I’ve written a lot about anonymous dot voting as a way to get input from a group rather than just the loudest or most senior person. The book takes this further by suggesting you vote before you discuss, so you aren’t influenced by what the leader thinks.
2. Asking probabilistic questions rather than binary ones. For example, asking ‘how likely is this to work?’ rather than ‘will it work?’ to allow more space for varying opinions.
3. Highlighting dissenting opinions in a non-threatening way. If you’re responding to a comment that’s an outlier from the group (perhaps added privately in a retrospective), asking questions like ‘What might be behind this?’, ‘What might someone who said this see that we don’t?’ invites the group to explore it, without automatically assuming it’s wrong.
4. Leaders speaking last in discussion, something I’ve also advocated for in my blog on how to be an empowering manager.
5. Asking good questions, without an implicit answer embedded in them. For example, ‘what are we missing?’, ‘what do you see?’ rather than, ‘is this right?’, or ‘have you thought about the needs of the client?’.

This is a book I keep coming back to. You probably can’t implement all the suggestions in one go, because remembering to change your language in the moment is harder than introducing a new practice like a retrospective. But just taking one or two ideas from it each time can make a big difference to how you are as a leader.

Have you read Leadership is Language? Did the resonances with agile strike you?

This is part of a series of reviews of books that are tangentially about agile. Subscribe to receive my monthly newsletter and not miss a post.

What David Allen says about agile

Team has a whole chapter on types of new work like agile or Lean. It describes them as a response to classic organisational dysfunctions like hierarchical structures, silos, slow decision making and rigid planning. That’s right on the money.

It also distinguishes between Agile (a rigorous, prescriptive framework) and agile (a less formal way of working in a way that enables small iterative enhancements). Each can have value but Agile requires substantial changes to organisational structure.

It’s a helpful distinction, but I think the line is blurrier than they are making out. I would also emphasise the mindsets behind agile more than the book does. It’s no good rigorously implementing an Agile methodology if you still have a hierarchical approach to decision making, or default to planning longer term than is realistic. Agile techniques should in theory help you make those shifts – but if you are rigidly imposing them on teams that aren’t interested, that’s a warning sign in itself about hierarchy. Teams should be adapting Agile (or agile) to suit themselves, reflecting regularly on what they would like to change.

Two of the book’s insights that I really appreciated: Agile (capital A), works best for groups who don’t have great workflow themselves. If you are starting from a low base, you’ll notice the most difference from implementing a more robust system!

It also notes that sometimes we resist moving to less hierarchical systems because we actually like the protection inherent in the old ways. As much as you might complain about having to get sign-off from six different people to make every decision, it does at least remove the risk of you being blamed if it goes wrong. That’s why I’d come back to mindsets again. If a team or organisation has really poor psychological safety, agile isn’t going to work for them.

Beyond the specific discussion of new work, there are several ideas about capturing, planning and prioritisation that Allen has written about that have really stuck with me over the years. For the most part, these came from Getting Things Done and so focus on individual time management. But they are easily extendable to groups, and I think having already internalised them made lots of agile concepts more immediately obvious to me.

Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them

A core insight of the Getting Things Done (GTD) system is that you should be rigorously capturing ideas and tasks in writing as they occur to you. Not only does this prevent you from forgetting them, it frees up your mind for other things. No more trying to work on a big project with nagging thoughts in the background about your shopping list and that email you really ought to reply to.

This seems almost embarrassingly obvious when you look at it, but for lots of people (me included!), this has had a transformative impact. It’s also one of the easiest ideas from GTD to adopt, even if you ignore the rest of the advice.

The corresponding agile idea is to capture your collective work in writing. I’ve talked about Kanban boards in the context of stand-ups before as a way to do this, but whether or not you hold stand-ups, this is helpful, easily actionable advice. And having a shared record of what you are doing together brings a lot of clarity. Listing tasks and responsibilities in writing removes a lot of ambiguity. It makes it much easier to avoid duplication, or lots of back and forth as you try and work out who to talk to about a particular project.

Planning, but not over-planning

One of my favourite bits in Team is the discussion of the annual planning cycle. It says, ‘So much effort goes into planning that in the end there’s a sense of, “Well, we’ve spent all this time planing it, so this is how it’s going to be, dammit!”… It is a form of magical thinking. Unfortunately, just because it’s been planned down to three decimal points in a spreadsheet won’t make it happen.’

The book goes on to say that whilst over-planning is a fool’s errand, not planning also doesn’t work either. Instead, they advocate having a clear purpose and vision, balancing that structure with more nimble responses to what’s happening around you. This is in many ways very similar to what I’ve written before about taking a more iterative approach to planning and strategy: starting with the outcomes you want to achieve and working out how you are going to achieve them as you go.

At a much more granular level, I love the GTD concept of next action. Instead of capturing everything you might need to do on a project, work out what you need to do next to move it forward and add that to your list. I think about this regularly in stand-ups. We don’t need to capture what we should be doing a month from now on our Kanban board. But we do need to capture what we should be doing now! Keep project planning light weight and review it regularly.

Prioritisation can be intuitive

The third area I draw on regularly from David Allen’s work is prioritisation. Firstly, that it’s important! Hopefully this is obvious by now, but having clear priorities for what to focus on is hugely valuable – and that’s a very agile idea.

Secondly, GTD advocates prioritising using your intuition, and whilst that initially might not feel like enough, it’s much more powerful than you think. If you have a regular, rigorous review of what you are committed to, you should be able to decide in the moment what to focus on. Frankly, half the battle is just making the decision. Choose one task, complete it, and then think about the next one – rather than spending half an hour fretting over what you should be doing, or flitting from one task to the next.

I also think collectively prioritising at a team level is easier than we make it out to be. Agile emphasises people closest to the work making decisions together, but people often resist this because it sounds difficult. Surely it’s much more straightforward for the manager to decide for the group?

But group prioritisation doesn’t need days of agonising over a complicated scoring system. My guide Using Agile to Make Better Decisions gives you lots of options, but at it’s heart decision making can be much more intuitive than you think. For example, in backlog refinement, just asking the team what’s most impactful to focus on now almost always elicits a clear answer. Occasionally you need to debate something for a couple of minutes, but almost always you’ll find ranking your priorities is very straightforward. You just need to spend a little time together to work it out.

Over the next month, I will be exploring other books that have influenced my thinking about agile (without strictly being about agile!). Sign up to my newsletter to get a regular round-up of posts with tips and questions to help you become more agile.

The trick with prioritising is not actually prioritising. It’s deprioritising. We’re very good at choosing things we want to do, but understandably much less good at picking what we won’t do.

Two pieces of advice make prioritising (and de-prioritising) work much easier: do it regularly and do it together.

If you are prioritising on a regular basis – say monthly – then it is much easier to choose what to focus on. If you don’t pick a particular task this month you can always go back to it next month. You have a regular opportunity to course correct if things go wrong or you learn something new.

Prioritising together leads to better decisions. How many times has a manager chosen something, only to learn that actually it’s not realistic, or overlooks a key dependency? I know I’ve done this frequently! Prioritising together as a team means that not only are you using everyone’s knowledge and expertise, but that you will all be bought in to your choices. It’s also a big shift towards being a more empowering manager.

Thankfully, there is an established process that gets you to do this collective prioritisation of work together. It’s called backlog refinement.

Backlog refinement, step-by-step

Before you get started, you need to build a backlog. This is a list of all the tasks you might like to do. Scour your current to do lists, any questions that have been nagging at you, things you’ve talked about doing someday, opportunities you might wan to explore and so on, and put these all in one long list. You’re not committing to doing something if you put it on your backlog, but you will consider it when it’s time to prioritise.

Then your regular backlog refinement session should go something like this.

1. Check in (5 minutes): Each participant answers a warm-up question in turn.
2. Review your priorities from last time (10 minutes): Ask people to individually tick off what you said you would do last time. Briefly discuss things that haven’t been completed.
3. Retrospective (20 minutes): Give participants four minutes to answer each of the following questions in turn:
   
   What’s gone well over the last month?
   What’s gone less well?
   
   Group together any themes and spend a few minutes discussing these as a group, before moving on to what you might like to try differently next month. Take notes of any actions that come out.
4. Choose next month’s priorities (15 minutes): Your goal here is to choose 3-5 priorities from your backlog to prioritise for the next month.
   • Ask people to individually shortlist possible priorities first, by silently grouping those post-its together.
   • Take two of the shortlisted priorities and ask which of them would be more impactful to focus on for the next month. Get people to shout out answers! Start ordering the priorities with the most impactful one at the top. Add in one priority at a time and compare it to priorities already discussed till you have ordered your shortlist.
   • Decide the cut-off point – how much of your list is realistic to do in the next month? Be ruthless – if you don’t think you can do it, it’s not a priority.
5. Break the task down (10 minutes): Ask participants to individually list out tasks and responsibilities for the priorities that are above your cut-off. If you are using stand-ups, one of you should transfer the tasks across to your Kanban board after the meeting.

What if something never gets prioritised?

If something never gets prioritised, then it genuinely isn’t a priority. And that’s ok! We can’t do everything. As long as you are regularly creating space to genuinely reflect and consider what would be most impactful to put your time into, if something doesn’t make the list then it doesn’t make the list.

Let’s face it, you probably weren’t doing those things under your old system. And if you were, what were you not doing instead? It’s much better to be honest with yourselves about the choices you are making.

What if we keep getting additional priorities imposed on us?

It’s next to impossible to prioritise if a week from now you’ll be told to focus on something else, and that’s true whether or not you are using backlog refinement.

If this is an issue for you, make sure you’ve communicated clearly about when and how you prioritise and set expectations what’s realistic for you to take on at any one time. It’s easier for others to accept that x isn’t the focus right now if they understand you are currently working on more important tasks y and z, but you’ll take another look at x on the first Monday of the month, say.

If additional prioritises are coming from more senior stakeholders, it’s worth spending time getting really aligned about the outcomes you want to achieve. Once they are bought into your overall goals it’s easier for them to leave it to you to decide how to achieve those. It can also be helpful to get them to shadow one of your backlog refinement sessions so they understand how you are making choices and advocate for your priorities amongst their peers.

You get better at prioritising over time

I’ve noticed several patterns with teams who use backlog refinement regularly.

After a couple of months, almost every group realises that they are prioritising too many things and adjusts. I think you have to experience this first-hand to really appreciate it and be more realistic about what you take on.

Experienced teams also get more decisive. Prioritising is a muscle, and the more you use it the more you strengthen it. You can make those choices, knowing that what you prioritise now doesn’t have to be the focus forever. You’ll also learn more about your colleagues perspectives – what their likely take will be and where it would be particularly helpful to get their input. All of this means you get better at prioritising over time.

Do you use backlog refinement? What impact has it had for you?

This is part of a series on agile ceremonies. We’ve already covered stand-ups and retros. Subscribe to my monthly newsletter so you don’t miss a post.

Teams benefit from two types of reflection: thinking about what they did and how they did it. Almost everyone knows they should be thinking about the former, regularly evaluating their work and reviewing how they did against their targets. But the latter gets much less attention. And this is odd, because how we work is much more within our control.

Retros, or retrospectives, are a structured way for groups to reflect on how they are working together. Retros are the agile tool I recommend more than any other. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with a team who wouldn’t benefit from some reflection time like this.

Retros are even more important if you are trying new things (which I hope you are!). When you are experimenting with your ways of working, having a regular opportunity to step back and reflect on it is really valuable.

Retros, step by step

Here’s a simple agenda for a monthly retro.

1. Check in (5 minutes): Each participant answers a quick check-in question in turn (eg “what’s been a highlight from your week?”)
2. Individual reflection(15 minutes): Give participants five minutes on each of the questions below. Ask them to note down their thoughts privately, using private mode on a virtual whiteboard like Mural, or by writing physical post-its where others can’t see them.
   • What’s gone well over the last month?
   • What’s gone less well?
   • What would we like to do differently next month?
3. Reveal and discuss (15 minutes): Turn off private mode or ask people to add their post-its to a central place under the question headings. Ask everyone to read over what’s written and group any similar post-its together. Then ask for any reflections. Are there any themes?
4. Vote (2 minutes): Give three votes to place on things they would like to explore further.
5. Problem solving (15 minutes): Look at the top 2-3 issues from voting in turn. Discuss as a group how you could approach this and what actions you would like to take.
6. Check out (5 minutes): Summarise any actions.

There’s lots of fun formats out there if you want to mix this up a bit. My favourite is Rose, Thorn, Bud, replacing the three questions in step 2 with roses to celebrate, thorns to address or buds to grow. Depending on your team, you might enjoy some more creative prompts, or you might just be happy keeping it simple!

Encouraging open reflection is the heart of a good retro

Retros work when people feel comfortable sharing both positive and negative feedback. You want to create a safe space to both celebrate what’s gone well and to tackle any issues that emerge. There’s a few things you can do to make this easier.

As with stand-ups, I recommend rotating the chair of your retros so that you are distributing the power more evenly across your team.

You might also notice a couple of things in the sample agenda above. Firstly, there’s options for people to contribute both verbally and in writing. This allows people to raise things in the way that best suits them. I also recommend allowing people to input privately, at least at first, as it can be easier to raise tricky topics this way. Setting timers for people to add comments helps too: five minutes isn’t an eternity, but it’s long enough to make it clear that you are expecting constructive feedback.

Everything we covered in how to be an unusually good facilitator also applies here. You have a head start with retros because they are an established format that’s already structured around how people think. But if you want to take your retros further, consider the questions you ask in group discussion and make sure you are comfortable with silence in meetings for the individual bits.

The regular rhythm is what makes retros work

I encourage teams to schedule retros monthly or at another regular interval. The regular rhythm means they know they have a place they can raise issues and so don’t need to bottle things up. Holding retros regularly also means the issues raised are easier to tackle, and can be tackled more promptly. There’s nothing worse than learning about something six months into a project that you could have addressed ages ago.

Of course, you need to be able to demonstrate that you are addressing issues raised in your retros. That’s why I recommend voting to choose 2-3 things to focus on, to keep it manageable. Make sure you’ve worked out who is responsible for any actions and transfer those to your Kanban board if you have one. It can also be helpful to spend a couple of minutes at the beginning of each retro reviewing what you said you’d do last time.

Do you hold retros? What works well for you?

This is part of a series on agile ceremonies. Check out the previous blog on stand-ups and subscribe to receive a monthly round-up of posts.

If you are feeling frustrated by interminable status meetings, or your team is failing to communicate enough, stand-ups might be the solution. These are quick meetings, traditionally held daily, allowing fine grain coordination. Having an efficient, regular check-in like this allows you to get clear on what you are trying to achieve together, hold each other accountable and notice if anyone needs help.

There’s some flex in the format: for non-tech teams, I usually recommend holding these weekly or twice-weekly. But there’s also an awful lot of things that get called a stand-up that are something else entirely!

The most important thing that often gets missed is that stand-ups should be quick, no more than 15 minutes or so. If they take longer than that, you’re almost certainly repeating information or discussing things that aren’t relevant to the whole team.

Stand-ups aren’t the same as a status update. They are deliberately brief, aiming only to make sure everyone is clear on what they are working on and there’s no blockers or duplication. If something needs more discussion, have a conversation outside the stand-up to resolve it.

Stand-ups, step by step

Before you start holding stand-ups, you need a Kanban board. This is a visual record of what the team is working on, split into columns like “in progress”, “blocked” and “to do” (for anything you haven’t got to yet). I recommend using something like Trello or Planner for this and keeping it simple. Don’t worry about capturing everything perfectly straight away – you will add to it as you go.

Then during your stand-up, one person should share the Kanban board on their screen. They go to each person in turn, filtering the tasks on the board for ones assigned to them.

1. First, run through the tasks under “in progress” one by one – is there anything you can tick off? Is anything unclear or blocked? 
2. Next, check if there’s anything you in the “to do” column that you want to start working on before the next meeting. If so, move it across to “in progress”. 
3. Finally, review what’s in “blocked”. Do you need to chase those tasks and move them over to work in progress?

This should only take a few minutes per person.

How not to hold stand-ups

I’ve mentioned that stand-ups should be quick. If you’re part of a stand-up that’s taking much longer than 15 minutes, you’ve probably lost sight of the purpose of the meeting. My guess is that at least some of the attendees are frustrated and feel it’s not a good use of their time!

If that’s the case, I would start by reviewing the format. Are you getting into protracted discussion about tasks that should take place elsewhere? Is the chair encouraging on swift check-ins, following the questions above and focused on work in progress rather than future tasks?

Often, lengthy stand-ups is a sign that you aren’t holding them often enough. If you can’t remember necessary context for tasks on your Kanban board, or if you are repeating things each time, try meeting more regularly. Having quicker, more effective stand-ups once or twice a week is much more helpful than winding lengthy discussions once a fortnight.

Watch out for deadlines. As in project plans, using deadlines in a stand-up slows you down and encourages you to prioritise solely based on urgency, rather than importance. As long as you are reviewing work on a regular basis, you shouldn’t need deadlines to make sure you are doing work on time.

You don’t need to update the board outside of the stand-up either – doing it there and then means you are sharing the most up-to-date information and don’t need to do additional admin outside of the meeting.

My final watch out is to make sure you haven’t got an overwhelming long list of things listed as “in progress”. Firstly, this will make your stand-ups take longer. More importantly, it also makes it harder for people to tell what they are focusing on. Prioritising a few things over a short period makes it much easier to make sustained progress. Limit the “in progress” column to things you are actually working on between now and the next meeting and don’t allow this to become unrealistic.

How to hold even better stand-ups

Ok, so you’ve got the basics of stand-ups down. How can you make them even better?

Make sure you are rotating the chair. If everyone in the team takes it in turns to run the stand-up, you all quickly learn what works well in the format. It also means you share both the work and the power that comes from facilitating. It’s a subtle nudge towards more empowered teams if everyone can chair rather than just the manager, and it makes the team more resilient for cases where the usual chair is away.

Another empowering techniques is for the chair to use coaching-style questions when they notice something is off. Saying, “This task has been blocked for a while. What do we need to take it forward?” or, “Is this set of tasks realistic?” helps everyone keep themselves accountable in a supportive way. I also like to ask “What did we notice about our stand-up today?” at the end. Often, something will come up that helps us improve the format or work better together.

If things frequently emerge in your stand-ups that need more discussion, one final idea you might try is magic time. This means blocking out a bit of time in your diaries immediately after the meeting. It’s not a meeting in itself, but if you’ve all held the time then it’s easy to grab some time with anyone you need to chat further with.

Do you hold stand-ups? What practices work for you?

This is the first in a series on agile ceremonies. Subscribe to my monthly newsletter to get a round-up of the rest of the posts.

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 been in back-to-back meetings all day. Taking ten minutes before a session to review my notes, stretch my legs, take a few deep breaths and get present leads to much better results.

This is worth keeping in mind throughout the session. Take regular breaks to maintain energy levels for both you and other participants. I won’t go longer than about 90 minutes without pausing for a break, and I try to structure these so I haven’t got lots of prep to do during them.

Having a cofacilitator is enormously helpful. It feels like you can outsource a big chunk of your thinking if you can get someone else to deal with any tech issues, note taking and monitoring the chat. That allows you to focus your attention on the more impactful parts of your meeting.

Plan to adapt

The difference between a good facilitator and a great one is how well they are able to respond to unexpected things that crop up.

Three strategies that help with this:

1. Plan in detail. Yes, you might end up abandoning parts of your plan, but you’ll have a much better chance of deciding whether that’s a good idea or not if it’s thoroughly thought out. It’s particularly helpful to think in advance about what you would drop if your session runs over time.
2. Notice what’s happening and check in with the group if helpful. If you see a topic getting heated, or the conversation has swerved off the agenda, or the energy in the room flagging, say so! Be matter of fact and give some options. For example, “I’m noticing this discussion is taking longer than we originally planned. We can either move on or drop a later item from the agenda – which would you prefer?”
3. Prepare to deal with common issues. Have some go-to phrases in your pocket to help you respond to things like one person dominating the conversation or a disagreement between participants.

It’s worth spending time working out what could go wrong. As part of planning, I will list out everything I’m worried about and then consider how to address these worries one by one. This helps me head off problems and makes me more able to respond seemingly on the fly when things do go wrong. It also makes me more confident going into sessions, which in turn helps me manage my energy and attention.

Adapting your facilitation to your audience

Keep in mind as you plan:

• How well does the group know each other? You’ll need to spend more time on introductions and building trust if people haven’t met before.
• Is any of the tech unfamiliar to them? If so, share what you are using in advance, allow more time at the start and get a cofacilitator if you can.
• What power dynamics are at play? More unequal groups might need different activities to make it easier for everyone to contribute – less open discussion and more commenting in writing, for example.
• How chatty are participants likely to be? My experience is that more senior groups tend to have strong opinions and will dive right in, but more junior groups might need warming up. Plan your time accordingly. More senior groups are also less likely to do any pre-reading or pre-work, so don’t rely on that for them!

Improve your questions

One last tip: we’ve already covered how asking good questions is an essential facilitation skill. Something that made me much better at questions is coaching. Regularly coaching others (and occasionally being coached myself) has taught me so much about what makes a good, non-leading response to what’s emerging in the conversation. I’ll write more about coaching in future blogs!

This is the last in our series on learning facilitation skills. If you would like more advice like this, subscribe to my monthly newsletter.

To get better at facilitating (or almost anything else in life), you just need to do two things:

1. practice
2. reflect on your practice

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 can’t improve if you don’t try, but trying facilitation feels risky! Having a growth mindset helps. Remember that no one was born being a brilliant facilitator. It’s a skill that comes with practice, which means that you can learn it too.

When you are just starting out, it’s helpful to lower the stakes. Facilitation feels less risky if:

• It’s with a small group and/or for shorter meetings
• You know and trust everyone involved
• The results aren’t high pressure

Think about opportunities where one or more of those things are true. For lots of people, team meetings are a really good space for this. It’s a small group of people you know really well, and you meet regularly so it’s not make or break in one meeting. This makes it a good setting to give things a go.

Once you start looking, you’ll find lots of other opportunities. Perhaps you have a project group meeting where there’s space to do something a bit different. Perhaps there’s a twenty minute slot in a wider meeting where you could use some facilitation skills. Or perhaps you want to try something that already has an easy set structure like a retrospective.

If you can persuade others that they want to grow their facilitation skills, even better.  It’s less daunting trying things in front of others who are committed to learning about this, and you can share advice and support as a group. Or even just saying at the start of a meeting that you are trying something new and you’re a bit nervous about it can lower the stakes. Usually you find that everyone is rooting for you to succeed!

Cofacilitation is another great learning option. Cofacilitating means supporting someone else in leading a meeting, usually by doing things like taking notes, theming ideas and monitoring the chat. Cofacilitating for a more experienced facilitator is a great way to learn from them. Observe how they structure the meeting and what sorts of questions they ask. Notice what’s in their facilitation plan – and where they leave the plan behind to adapt on the fly.

Over time, as you practice you will build confidence and find yourself able to take on bigger facilitation challenges. Soon the skills will feel like second nature!

Reflect: build in learning

Practicing lots is good, but you need to reflect on your practice to cement your learnings. There’s a few things I do that really helps me with this: noticing, asking for feedback and spotting patterns.

After every session, I take 5-10 minutes to write down anything I noticed about my facilitation. Perhaps I should have switched up the discussion formats, or allowed longer for introductions. Or perhaps I tried a new activity that really worked, or I asked some really good prompt questions, or adapted well on the fly… I capture anything like this in my notes file.

I try and ask for feedback within my sessions, especially if it’s a session I will repeat or a group I will facilitate with again. The trickiest bit about this is getting people to give you critical feedback! People want to tell you the good things, and need a little prompting to mention things to improve on. Make it easy for them by giving them prompts for both positive and constrictive comments. My favourite structure for this is to set a time limit for participants to add comments under “I like”, “I wish” and “I wonder”. Once they’ve given you a few things they liked, they are usually much more comfortable mentioning things they wish could be different!

Helpful feedback like this also goes into my notes file which I review every couple of months. Usually some patterns will emerge, and I can think about how to address those.

You’re going to muck up some meetings

There’s a saying in my household: you’re going to muck up some pizzas. (Our version might not be quite so polite, but you get the gist). It’s from an amazing pizza cookbook which has inspired many amazing dinners over the years… and also the occasional failure.

It’s good advice for pizzas and it’s good advice for facilitation. You are going to muck up some meetings and workshops every now and then. It’s an important part of the process! After many years of facilitating I still have the occasional session which really does not go to plan. But these are often the ones I learn most from, and they are almost never as bad as I think they are.

Remember that you are likely your harshest critic. No one other than you will know exactly what you had planned for a session. Plan thoroughly and adapt on the fly if you can – but also accept that it will go a bit wonky from time to time. Breathe, give everyone a break if needed and get through it.

How have you grown your facilitation skills? Share your advice in the comments.

This is part of a series on facilitation – subscribe to my newsletter to get a monthly round-up of posts.

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 doesn’t have to be like that. Like any facilitation, it’s a skill you can learn. Here are my five fundamental lessons to make your idea generation better.

Lesson one: warm up first before generating ideas

As we said last week, how you start your session really matters. This is particularly important when you’re generating ideas. Very few people can go from zero to ideas without warming up first. So, start your idea generation with a few minutes helping people get present and comfortable with each other.

The best creative icebreakers are a bit silly. If you can get your participants to laugh, they’ll be much less disinhibited in coming up with and sharing ideas later. My favourite icebreaker for ideation sessions is the 30 circles challenge. For this, start with a grid of circles on paper on on an online whiteboard. Set a timer and give your participants three or four minutes to turn as many of the pictures as possible into pictures. This gets their creative juices flowing as they come up with lots of ideas.

Once the ice is broken, you’re ready to introduce the challenge. Don’t assume that everyone knows everything they need to jump straight to ideas. Instead, give them some stimulus to jump off from. That might be results of your last campaign, quotes from customers or screenshots of your competitors’ offerings. A few minutes reflecting on the insights up front will help you come up with much stronger ideas.

Lesson two: quantity before quality in idea generation

To get one really good idea, you need lots of ideas. If you come up with lots of possibilities, the good ones will eventually emerge. But if you stop at two or three ideas, chances are they won’t be very good.

This is often referred to as the even-odds rule, based on the work of psychologist Dean Simonton. He found that the number of successful ideas from a creator is proportional to the overall quantity of ideas they generate.

It’s not that creative geniuses are generating amazing brainwaves every time – creative geniuses generate more ideas, and some of those pay off. The same goes for group ideation. The more ideas you generate as a group, the more likely it is that you will generate good ones.

Lesson three: early critique kills ideas

Last week, we discussed how to structure meetings around how people think. The most important takeaway is that coming up with ideas needs to be separate from critiquing them.

Divergent thinking like generating ideas requires a different frame of mind from analysing or prioritising between them. There’s no quicker route to shutting down new ideas than starting to criticise the ideas you already have.

In order to get a large volume of ideas, you need to hold off from critiquing immediately. There is still space for that! But it should be a separate stage. I’ll give an example of how to structure this in the agenda below.

Lesson four: generate ideas individually, build collectively

The unexpected corollary to lessons two and three is that people generate ideas best individually. Even if you are all in the same room together, getting people to list out ideas by themselves before sharing reduces the fear of criticism, so they are able to think more freely. Ten people writing simultaneously will also list way more ideas than they could if they were discussing ideas one by one. All this means you generate a much greater volume of ideas if you do it individually.

You might be wondering why people should come together to brainstorm if they generate ideas more effectively alone. There’s two reasons. Firstly, very few people will actually spend the time and effort coming up with new ideas if left to themselves. Coming up with new ideas is hard! It’s not surprising that we procrastinate over it, or get distracted by more important things. Having a time limited period where the whole group is expected to do it forces everybody to push past their initial thoughts and dig deeper for more creative options.

Secondly, there is still value in the group’s input. Seeing others’ ideas can spark new thoughts for you. The best ideas are often combinations of previous ones. And one you’ve got some initial ideas, spending time together building on them will reveal new insights.

Studies back this up. The most effective brainstorming process is one that involves both individual and group ideation. I find it’s most effective if you spend time individually coming up with initial ideas and then prioritise and build as a group.

Feeling a bit of pressure in the individual stage is no bad thing. The Crazy 8s activity in the agenda below is a good way to create some healthy creative pressure.

Lesson five: prioritise to turn ideas into action

The worst brainstorms generate lots of so-so ideas that go nowhere. That’s partly about the quality of the ideas, but it’s also because it’s unclear what you should focus on. If you prioritise three or four ideas, you might take those forward. If you’ve left twenty or more ideas floating around, nothing will happen.

Prioritisation works best if you do it in the session, using the collective knowledge of everyone involved. The most straightforward way to do this is to give everyone a small handful of votes to choose between all the ideas you’ve generated. There’s several more advanced collective decision making techniques in my guide Making Better Decisions with Agile.

Simple ideation agenda

Let’s pull all these lessons into one agenda. I’ve assumed you only have an hour, and you have 6-10 participants who already know each other. This is what I would do:

1. Check in (5 minutes). Introduce the 30 circles challenge by asking people to turn as many as possible of your grid of 30 circles into pictures in three minutes.
2. Stimulus (10 minutes). Give people four minutes to read over the stimulus in silence (yes, silence!) before opening the floor for any reflections in group discussion.
3. Crazy 8s (15 minutes). Each participant should have a grid with eight boxes. Give them a minute for each box to add an idea before picking their favourite idea and spending five minutes fleshing it out.
4. Prioritising (10 minutes). Each person in turn should explain their top idea briefly in turn. Then give everyone three votes to pick their favourites. Usually two or three ideas will come out top from this.
5. Building out (15 minutes). Split into two or three breakouts for ten minutes, each looking at a different one of the top ideas. Give the breakouts a couple of prompt questions to answer, like ‘how could we take this idea further?’, ‘what would we need to implement this?’. Allow five minutes for the breakouts to report back in the main group.
6. Check out (5 minutes). Summarise next steps. Depending on the question you are exploring, you might be able to implement several solutions or just one. If it’s the latter, do another round of voting to choose which of the ideas from your breakouts you will settle on.

Learn more about good facilitation

This is part of a series on how to facilitate good meetings. We’ve already covered why this is an agile skill and what you need to know to be an unusually good facilitator. Next week, we’ll explore how to grow your skills and get better at facilitation. Subscribe to my email newsletter to get a monthly roundup of all the posts.

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 for anything more complicated, there’s a few things you need to know.

Remember what meetings are for

Meetings are for interactions. If all the information in your meeting is going one way, that’s not a meeting. It should have been a webinar, or better yet, an email. Meetings are for back and forth –whether you need to hear different opinions, generate ideas or make a decision.

If it’s not interactive, it shouldn’t be a meeting. But you can think pretty broadly about how to make it interactive. Here’s a few ideas.

• Build in genuine time for open group discussion, making this the focus rather than an afterthought at the end of a long presentation.
• Ask each meeting participant in turn for a reaction to an idea or question.
• Split into pairs or small groups for more focused discussions.
• Get people to contribute ideas in writing in the chat or on post-its.

Getting people to write things down in silence is a surprisingly powerful tool that is underused in meetings. It’s much more efficient in getting a large volume of input quickly than discussing as a group, and it allows everyone to contribute on an equal footing. This can be particularly helpful in ideation (as we’ll explore next week), but it’s useful in lots of different settings.

Whatever you choose, if it’s a long meeting make sure you mix up your formats to keep people engaged and appeal to different styles. This feeds into my next point.

Structuring meetings well is the key to good facilitation

People often think that the secret to good workshops is knowing lots of possible activities to draw on. And whilst that can be helpful, it’s not really the secret.

The secret is structure. If you start and end your meeting well, and structure the session around how people think, your sessions will dramatically improve.

Less complex meetings need less complex structure. But if you’ve got more than a handful of people for more than 45 minutes, it’s definitely worth taking into account. Start with an icebreaker, so that everyone gets present, introduces themselves if necessary and becomes familiar with any tech you are using.

People often skip the icebreaker because it feels a bit cheesy or a waste of time, but the impact of a good icebreaker can be felt throughout the meeting, especially if you are working with quieter groups or people who don’t know each other well. It’s amazing how much more you’ll hear from shyer people if they’ve had the chance to say something early on in the meeting. So build this into your plans with an icebreaker that gets everyone sharing. Use a check-in question generator if you need inspiration.

Allow time to end the session well. This meas recapping and summarising any actions and ideally getting feedback about how the session went.

So far this is probably all things you already know, at least in theory. But do you know about how to structure meetings for the different types of thinking?

Structure your meeting around how people think

Good thinking needs two sorts of brain processes: divergent and convergent thinking. Divergent thinking is expansive. It’s all about taking on new insights or coming up with new ideas. It’s the opposite of convergent thinking, where you narrow down by evaluating or prioritising.

Most meetings need both types of thinking. If you are trying to make a decision, you should consider it from multiple angles (divergent thinking) before settling on one (convergent thinking). But you can’t do both at once. Choosing between options as you think of them shuts down discussion and makes people self-censor.

So don’t do both at once! Make them separate agenda items, and redirect people if they start evaluating too early.

Ask good questions

So, you have warmed up your meeting and you’ve identified some topics for divergent thinking. How do you get people talking? You ask a good question.

A good question is simple and easy to understand and doesn’t have an answer built in. ‘Have you thought about x?’ is not a real question! Instead try questions like:

• What’s most important here?
• What are some ways we could approach this?
• What would a good outcome be?
• What’s getting in the way?

Remember, you can get responses verbally or in writing. If you’re discussing as a group, pause after you ask the question! Hold the silence and wait for someone to speak. It can feel uncomfortable, but eventually someone will chip in and get the ball rolling. And then you’re off!

Subscribe for more facilitation secrets

Mastering structure, interactivity and questions should be enough to make you an unusually good facilitator. Next week, we’ll look specifically at one of the most popular forms of facilitation: idea generation workshops.

Sign up to my newsletter so you don’t miss a post. You’ll also get a free guide on how to use agile to make better decisions. This includes to a deep dive into convergent and divergent thinking and some of my favourite tools to make convergent thinking much easier.

In the meantime, what have you noticed about the structure of good meetings?