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!