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?

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, a facilitator creates the space for the meeting to reach its own conclusions. This is a vital shift in perspective for working in an agile way.

Facilitating good meetings is an agile skill

Effective collaboration is at the heart of agile and unsurprisingly, meetings are a big part of that. That’s true whether you’re using agile ceremonies like retros and backlog refinement, diving deep into big topics with design sprints, or taking a less formal approach to implementing agile. Facilitation skills help you get the most of those meetings.

More than that, both agile and facilitation draw on similar mindsets. Both recognise that empowered teams are more effective. Enabling people to make their own decisions gives them ownership and makes the best use of their knowledge. Doing this collectively draws on the wisdom of the whole group – and facilitation skills enable you to do just that.

Reflection and adapting as a team are also core to working in an agile way. It’s very difficult to do either of those things without talking about them. Good facilitation helps you create the psychological safety necessary to give feedback, admit mistakes, be open to trying things differently and generate new ideas.

In other words, facilitation gives you the tools to live out the agile mindsets.

Can you still use agile if you don’t have a facilitator?

Most tech teams using agile will have a formal facilitator-type role, whether that’s an Agile Lead, Delivery Manager or Scrum Master. But that’s rarely available outside of tech.

Teams without dedicated facilitators can absolutely still use agile though. Facilitation is a skill you can learn, and agile is an easy place to get started! Many agile techniques involve tried-and-tested approaches to recurring meetings, giving you a simple structure to follow. All you need to do is to follow the established pattern.

Not having a dedicated facilitator also has several advantages. I always encourage team to take it in turns to facilitate simple meetings like stand-ups. This helps distribute the power more evenly and gives everyone more ownership over the practice. It also stops there from being a single point of failure if your normal facilitator leaves or is unavailable.

Most agile practices are fairly straightforward. There’s lots of ways you can take it further once you grow in confidence as a facilitator, but it’s also fine if you want to stick to the basics.

How to get started with facilitation

I’m going to say it again because it’s very important: facilitation is a skill you can learn. There’s some basics you need to know about meeting structure, but beyond that it’s a skill that comes with practice. Over the next few weeks I’ll share practical tips on getting started, covering the fundamentals and some advice on maximising your learnings as you try things out. If you want to stay in the loop, subscribe to my newsletter for a monthly roundup.

But for now, I want to give you permission to think of yourself as a facilitator. And this means you have permission to not have the answers. Your role is to help people come up with their own answers together.

Here’s your challenge: in the next week, can you ask a question in a meeting where you truly don’t know the answer? Listen with curiosity to the responses and summarise what you hear. That’s step one to being a good facilitator!

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 seen a 5-year strategy that’s no long relevant after 18 months? Or worse, you don’t know if it’s relevant because no one refers to it or remembers what it says?

A good strategy should be a live document. It should paint a picture of what you’re trying to achieve whilst still giving you space to adapt as you learn things along the way.

Agile mindsets for strategy

Agile mindsets changes how you approach strategy. Most importantly, they encourage you to learn and adapt as you go. The lesson here is similar to one we discussed about project plans: recognise you can’t predict the future. For planning, this means thinking big picture in the long run and only getting down to details in the short term.

For strategy, it means starting by thinking about the big picture outcomes you want to achieve, then identifying some strategic bets that might help you get there. Break these down so you are trying something small, building in reflection points so you can learn and adapt as you go. Be much more detailed about what you will do in the short term, and keep long-term plans at a high level.

In short, get clear about why and what you want to achieve, but work out how you’re going to get there as you go.

You should still be making clear choices in your strategy. This toolkit from the Charity Change Collective explains it well: strategic decisions are considered choices made after having considered your options. If there’s no possibility of failure, it’s not a strategic decision – that’s just business as usual.

This probably means that not everybody will agree with your strategy off the bat. But the other agile mindset that’s helpful here is about sharing power.

Strategy shouldn’t be developed by a small group of senior leaders in isolation. Firstly, they will miss things. Hearing from diverse voices exposes you to more ideas and strengthens your thinking. And secondly, it’s much easier to get people on board with decisions that they had a hand in making, even if it’s not exactly what they would have chosen on their own. Collaborative decision making gives ownership to everyone involved, so think carefully about who you need to own your strategy and how you can get their input.

Tools for shaping strategy collectively

How do you do this in practice? I would always start by gathering insights. Again, you want to hear from diverse voices and a range of sources here. Make sure you are learning about your audience, your products and the market from different perspectives. Done well, some of this should surprise you. If you are only looking at insights that confirm what you already think, you’re probably not looking hard enough!

I’ve got two tools I like to use with groups who are exploring strategy once they have spent time reflecting on insights. The first is affinity mapping. That’s a fancy name for just theming. Start by asking people to individually add possible answers to a question like ‘What options could we consider?’, ‘What principles should guide our choices?’, ‘How should these insights change our approach?’. Use physical post-its or an online whiteboard for this, getting people to add one idea per post-it and setting a time limit of five minutes or so.

Once the time is up, ask them to cluster similar post-its together. Then go cluster by cluster, suggesting how you could summarise those ideas and asking the group to improve your wording. This gives you a set of clearly articulated thoughts that draw on the wisdom of the whole group.

The other tool I like to use is even-over statements. These help you make those concrete choices I discussed earlier. For this, give people pairs of conflicting choices. For example, would they choose long-term growth or short term income? Would they prioritise new audiences or existing ones? Get everyone to place a dot on a scale from one extreme to the other and use their votes to inform where you land on each decision. ‘We prioritise x even over y’ forces you to articulate what you are focusing on, rather than letting different people assume different things.

What have you seen work well in developing strategy? Do you have any tools you like to use?

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 of those goals. It gives you a north star you can refer back to throughout the project, which is very clarifying when tensions crop up. And people like being asked! Giving everyone a chance to share their personal goals for a project means they are more bought in to what you decide on together.

Setting outcomes collectively can be simple. It’s helpful to give people a chance to input individually so you aren’t led too much by the chattiest people in a discussion. This is easiest to do on on online whiteboard or with physical post-its, but you could adapt to do this in a shared document or in the meeting chat if necessary.

Give a little context to the project and then ask everyone to individually add what they are hoping to achieve together. Set a timer for about 5 minutes for this, allowing everyone to work in silence. When the timer is up, ask the group to theme similar answers together. Some clear themes should emerge!

Often, project managers avoid doing this because they are afraid that the goals the group decides on won’t match their desired outcomes for the project. But I have never seen this happen. The group might nuance what the project manager would have said (usually in helpful ways!), but it’s very unlikely to contradict it. And frankly, if your group does have very different goals, this is true whether or not you take the time to find this out. It’s always better to know – and given the thinking space, people will usually hone in on similar goals.

What else should a project kick-off include?

I’ve written about some things it probably shouldn’t include: complex RACIs or detailed long-term plans. But a project kick-off is an excellent chance to set the tone for the rest of your project and answer some big picture questions.

It’s helpful to start by thinking about the relational aspects: do the project team already know each other? Do they have established ways of working together? If not, I recommend dedicating time to a get-to-know you style icebreaker. You might also find it helpful to run something like a team charter, identifying the values and behaviours you want to live out as a group.

What’s different about an agile project kick-off?

There’s no one agreed formula for kick-offs in agile. But kick-offs are a key moment to start embedding some mindsets, especially things like empowered teams. By deciding on your outcomes and maybe a team charter together, you are already modelling that you aren’t going to work in a top-down way.

In an agile approach, it’s important to start by getting clear about your outcomes. This means the difference you want your work to make, rather than the tasks you’re going to do to get there. For example, a mailing or an email series are both examples of outputs. Inspiring people to take action is an outcome. Spending time on this in your kick-off helps make sure those outcomes are at the centre of your project.

Finally, your project group might explicitly decide to use some agile tools like stand-ups or retrospectives. Your kick-off is a great moment to agree how to approach things like keeping each other updated. Remember, you don’t have to use a particular tool to approach things in an agile way. The mindsets (like empowerment and outcomes focus) are more important.

Sample agenda for a winning agile project kick-off

Let’s pull this all together. This is how I would spend the time in an hour-long kick-off meeting:

1. Check in (10 minutes). Ask everyone to answer a getting-to-know-you question (eg ‘please share your name, role, and a highlight from your week’).
2. Context (5 minutes). Introduce the project and any context people should be aware of. Keep this short – you want the bulk of the meeting to be interactive.
3. Outcomes (15 minutes). With that context, what outcomes do you each of you want from the project? Give people a few minutes to note ideas individually before theming and discussing.
4. Team charter (20 minutes). Give people three minutes to note down values you want to share, theme and summarise, then do the same thing for how  that translates to behaviours.
5. Check out (10 minutes). Summarise your conversation and explain next steps, including the pattern of any future project group meetings.

Are there other activities you find helpful in a project kick-off?

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 an example of just that.

With agile, instead of spending a lot of time developing a detailed plan at the start of your project, you take a more iterative approach.

That doesn’t mean you do no planning. But it does recognise the limitations of planning.

Why planning is difficult

It’s helpful to start by recognising why planning is so hard. The biggy is that things change. We have imperfect knowledge to start with about how long something will take, even before you take this into account. But inevitably, what’s true at the start of your project won’t be true six months in.

Someone will leave your organisation, or the priorities will shift for a team you rely on. Things change externally too – tech, legislation, public opinion, the economy… It’s increasingly true that unpredictable global events will impact what you are working on. And the further ahead you try to predict, the more unpredictable things are, both internally and externally.

More than this, things should change. You should be learning things as your project progresses that change your approach. A project plan that doesn’t allow for this is unhelpful!

Deadlines are difficult too. We tend to use them to keep projects on track, but when things change, deadlines change too. This causes two problems. Firstly, setting and adjusting deadlines is very time consuming. It’s easy to spend a ridiculous amount of time repeatedly updating dates on a Gantt chart.

Secondly, deadlines do funny things to your brain. We use them as a signal of importance, but urgency is not the same as importance, and most deadlines are somewhat arbitrary anyway. This leads to lots of stress trying to meet deadlines that probably weren’t realistic in the first place. And this isn’t necessarily the same as doing the things that are most important for your project.

An agile approach helps address these challenges.

Things change, so your plans should too

When you work in a more iterative way, you stop trying to plan the future in detail. Instead of nailing down every step you are going to take, you start by working out what outcomes you want to achieve and then consider what you can do now to help you get there. Only once you’ve done that do you consider your next iteration. In other words, you plan in detail for the short term, but stay much more light touch for the long term. There might be some big milestones you need to meet along the way, but beyond noting those you don’t spend much time planning an unknowable future.

This only works if your plan is a live document. This means it needs to be easy to update (a Kanban board is much better for this than an Excel document), and you need to have a regular structure for reviewing it so that you are maintaining your planning for the short term. This is where I sing the praises of stand-ups again. Using a similar structure (perhaps less frequently) for project plans at a regular cadence allows you to plan as you go and keep things on track.

Avoid deadlines where you can

This one is counter-intuitive. But it made a huge difference when I stopped trying to add deadlines to everything. And holding on to deadlines is one of the biggest blockers I see to teams trying to adopt stand-ups.

If you are truly reviewing your plans at regular intervals, you shouldn’t need the deadlines just to make sure you do the work on time. Instead, each time you review your project plan, you should be prioritising what work you want to do before your next review. This gives you the opportunity to spot if something is truly time-sensitive and needs to be done now. But it also allows you to take other factors into account in your prioritisation, so ultimately you make better informed choices.

My formula for an agile project plan

Ok, that’s a lot of theory. But what does this look like in practice? You still need to do some work up front. It’s just not as detailed as in a non-agile approach.

1. Start by spending time working out what outcomes you want from the project. If you can do this collectively as a project group, even better – it helps give them buy-in and ownership for the final results.
2. Break the work down into areas (eg marketing, website development, internal comms). List any activities you are already aware of under each area (eg develop marketing assets, chose marketing channels etc).
3. Plot activities on to a high-level roadmap. For some projects, there will be natural phases you can split things into, but if not, keep it simple! A Kanban board with columns for ‘now’, ‘next’ and ‘later’ should do the trick. You should have just a few things in the ‘now’ column and lots more in ‘later’, to help you plan in detail for the short-term whilst keeping the long-term light touch.
4. Review your roadmap regularly. The frequency will depend on the type of project, but make sure you have a regular, predictable pattern to review. This probably needs to be at least once a month, and possibly as often as weekly. Each time you review, plan in detail for what you will do between now and the next review. If you think of something that needs to happen later on, capture it so it’s not floating round your head. But you won’t plan that in detail until you get to that point.

How do you approach project planning? Do you have a rhythm that works for you?

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 do something they were accountable for (or that their manager thought they were accountable for!), this is almost always down to a lack of clarity, skill or motivation. Clarity is the big one: they didn’t fully understand the task or their role in it, or they weren’t clear on how to prioritise it over other things. Lack of skill is straightforward: perhaps they just aren’t able to do what they’ve been asked to do.

Motivation is more subtle. It’s usually not that people lack any motivation to do their jobs and are continually looking for opportunities to goof off. But often we lack motivation for tasks that are ambiguous or where we don’t understand the purpose. Both of these come back to a lack of clarity again, and more importantly, to a lack of ownership.

Whatever the reason, relying solely on managers telling people what to do isn’t the solution for accountability. We often expect managers to give full clarity about responsibilities in a single conversation, but this is a big ask!

Managers don’t know everything. They don’t know what their report doesn’t know. And they often don’t know what their report does know, the things the report is aware of that will impact on the task. Managers shouldn’t try to be experts in everything their report does – that limits what the team can achieve to just the things the manager knows about in detail. It’s good for a team when different people develop different expertise!

Teams perform best when each person has clear ownership for their responsibilities, and can develop their expertise in those areas. Just telling people what to do isn’t going to achieve this.

What does work for accountability?

Clarity and ownership are the essential ingredients for accountability. And agile can help with both of these.

I talked a couple of weeks ago about how stand-ups can bring much greater clarity on responsibilities. Having quick, regular and structured conversations about what people are working on makes it clear what the expectations are and reveals blockers early. If someone doesn’t understand a task, or doesn’t have the skills to complete it, that should quickly become obvious in your stand-ups. And this shouldn’t be threatening – stand-ups are not a space for managers to catch their teams out. Instead, stand-ups should be a safe space for team members themselves to raise questions and concerns and get support if they need it.

One of the surprising shifts you make in stand-ups is that it stops being just the manager holding people accountable. Instead, the whole team is setting expectations about what’s needed, observing whether people have completed tasks they have committed to or not. And it goes both ways – the team gets to keep the manager accountable to their commitments too.

Stand-ups are my number one tool for creating clarity. But agile can help with ownership too. The shift I just mentioned is part of this, as it gives the whole team a clearer collective responsibility for their goals.

The other big shift is involving people in the decisions that affect their work. Being a more empowering manager gives people the opportunity to affect direction, which in turn gives them more ownership. This works even better if there’s space to create a shared vision for the work, perhaps using one of my favourite meeting formats to get input from the whole team about what you are trying to achieve.

The manager’s role in agile accountability

This might sound like the manager has no role in creating accountability in an agile approach, but that’s just not true. Instead the manager’s focus shifts to creating the structures that create shared accountability. Managers have an important role in modelling behaviour – for example, sharing when they are stuck and need help; or committing to work and sticking to those commitments. They can also use a coaching style to increase accountability, either by making observations (‘I notice we haven’t made any progress with this task for a while now’), or by asking questions (‘What’s realistic here?’, ‘What would you need to finish this by our next meeting?’).

Working in an agile way doesn’t abdicate responsibility for managers. It just helps them shift from a top-down model to a more shared approach to accountability. And ultimately, that’s more effective.

How do you create accountability? Have you found ways to do this collectively?

This is the first in a series looking at the agile approach to areas of our work we often don’t think about enough. Next week, project planning!

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 the other letters?

Most people find “consulted” the trickiest bit – involving everyone who needs to input into a decision, without a massive, unwieldy process. How can agile help with this?

Reduce how much input you need

Perhaps unexpectedly, I’m going to advocate for involving fewer people than you think in making decisions. This is despite what I say about the importance of empowering people through collective decision making. The critical distinction here is that decisions should be made by the people doing the work, rather than a long list of senior stakeholders or others who are peripherally involved.

If there are a dozen people you need to consult every time you make a minor decision, nothing will get done. But you can avoid this by spending more time upstream.

Invest time in collectively agreeing some bigger picture outcomes you want to achieve together. Then use these as the basis for your individual bits of work. Most people prefer to be consulted this way, as it allows them meaningful input without commenting on endless drafts. It also means you can move much more quickly once you’ve got started.

How do you do this in practice? It could be as simple as spending some time in a project kick-off meeting individually capturing what outcomes you would each like to see. Theme the answers and use these to set your overall goals for the work.

You can reduce other consultation needed further by giving people tools to help empower them to work independently. Perhaps you want everyone to draw on similar messaging, reference some key facts or use certain layouts in the design of their work. If so, give them a toolkit explaining all that.

Get feedback efficiently

Of course, there will still be times when you need to get feedback. How can you make the process as smooth as possible?

Perhaps you can get all the input you need in a single meeting discussing a concrete proposal, using the silent meeting format I’ve talked about before. Or maybe you just need to make a collective decision and some agile decision making tools might help you.

Where you do need to lots of people to comment on something, give then a clear and transparent process. This could be a live document where everyone can see other people’s comments, accompanied by some clear deadlines. Make it clear that if you don’t receive feedback by a certain date, you aren’t able to include it.

One person should own the process and resolve any competing feedback. Approach this with the mindset of being an informed captain – you are ultimately responsible for the decision, but you will take time to listen to input along the way. Netflix use this approach and says it allows them to be ‘highly aligned and loosely coupled’, which is a great way of putting it!

What about you – how do you manage who gets to input into decisions?