This document provides an overview of facilitation basics. It discusses what facilitation is, the role of the facilitator, and why facilitation is important. It outlines the skills needed for facilitation and various techniques a facilitator can use, including setting social contracts, decision making approaches, and managing the flow of a session. The summary discusses key aspects of an effective facilitation process, including empowering participants, creating clarity, inviting collaboration to maximize productivity and achieve group solutions.

1. FACILITATION(BASICS)
Balaji Sathram, Agile Coach,
IBM CIO Agile Academy.

2. Group sharing
Safety
Confidential

3. § Take a sticky note
§ Write your input for social contract and Paste it under
“Social Contract”

5. § Yes: I actively support this decision
§ Veto: I understand the proposal, but I do not support it. I can
explain my concerns. (The group can’t decide)
§ I need more discussion before I can support this decision

6. To help you become a
significantly better facilitator in
the work you do

7. § What is Facilitation?
§ Facilitator
§ Why Facilitation?
§ How is facilitation done?
§ Facilitation skills
§ Facilitation Techniques
§ Summary: Self-Reflection
§ Let’s Play Facilitation

8. § Rigid/Inflexible
§ Forcing or manipulating
§ Talking more than 20% of the time
§ Taking sides or deciding who is right
§ Only engaging those who think/act
like you or talks the loudest
§ Controlling the conversation topics
§ One big group conversation
§ Without form

9. Facilitation is a fluid process using a variety of tools,
techniques, and activities to….
Empower participants, Create clarity, invite
collaboration and ….
Increase commitment to the solutions created
by the group in order to ….
Maximize Productivity.

10. § A way of providing leadership to
others through process
§ Can be a process or framework
§ Bridge between teams &
Organizations
§ Guides groups of people toward a
common goal
§ Is structured, yet flexible
§ Involves various types of listening
§ Involves many different techniques

11. Deals Throughout with Dysfunction
§ Think about all those dysfunctional things that make you NUTS in sessions you
facilitate
§ Behaviors that limit productivity
§ Attitudes that affect the team
§ Personalities that are hard to deal with
§ Things that disrupt your meetings
“What are those dysfunctions you want to know how to deal with ? “

12. § Good listening and communication skills
§ Understands the aim of the meeting and long term
goals of the group
§ Confidence that the group can find a solution
§ Neutrality
§ Respect for all
§ Knows when to intervene and provide guidance
§ Clear thinking and observation
§ Ability to ask powerful questions

13. § The highest type of ruler is one of
whose existence the people are barely
aware
§ He/She doesn’t bring attention to
himself/herself
§ He/She speaks few words
§ When his/her task is accomplished and
things have been completed, all the
people say “We ourselves have
achieved it”

14. SOURCE: https://www.slideshare.net/SvetlanaMukhinaICAgi/webinar1-online-icagileagileteamsfacilitation
How you feel, see,
hear about the
situation
I
(self)
You
(other)
He/She
(observer)
We
How other person’s reality
looks, sounds and feels, if
you were this person
How the situation
appears to someone who
is not involved
How the situation
appears to all of us as
a single unit

15. SOURCE: https://www.slideshare.net/SvetlanaMukhinaICAgi/webinar1-online-icagileagileteamsfacilitation
Teaching
how to fish
OVER giving
fish every time
Staying
curious and
seeing the
best in people
OVER judging
or
manipulating
Focusing on
the leverage
in the present
moment
OVER
speculating
on past or
future
Responding
to change
OVER
following
a
facilitation
plan

16. § Which is Harder for you to do?
§ Why is it Harder?
§ How to Overcome these difficulties?

17. § Concentrates on value-driven
results over following a plan
§ Embodies the Agile values
Encourages organization wide
collaboration
§ Encourages teams to be self-
managing and empowered
§ Facilitates Agile practices
§ Focuses on the entire team or
organization, not just a few people
§ Guardian of the Agile process,
principles, and practices

18. § Active Engagement
§ Attainable results reached by consensus
§ Clarity on the objectives and goals
§ Empowerment of teams/people
§ Enthusiastic participants
§ Open Collaboration
§ Participant buy-in

19. § Before the session
§ Pre-meeting (preparation questions)
§ Pre-meeting Logistics
§ Use separate techniques for F2F and Virtual sessions
§ Pre-meeting room setup
§ Session Design
§ Opening the Session
§ During the Session
§ Closing the Session

20. § Collaborative setup
§ Deep “U”
§ Horseshoe
§ PODS
§ Round tables
§ Semi-Circle
§ Avoid
§ Conference style tables
§ Classroom seating
§ Theatre seating

21. What tools could you use for
Remote/Virtual sessions?

22. § Purpose
§ Outcomes and Deliverables
§ Wii-FM (What’s in it for me)
§ Inspire
§ Excite
§ Motivate
§ Engage participants
§ Roles and Responsibilities
§ What are they empowered to do?

23. § Container
§ Tools for Success
§ Mood Wall
§ Parking Lot
§ Issues
§ Social Contracts

24. DURING THE
SESSION

25. § Flipcharts can be labeled and positioned
ahead of time. Information should include
§ Session objectives
§ Action Items
§ Decisions
§ Parking Lots
§ Social Contract

26. § Listing
§ Brainstorming
§ Grouping
§ Prioritization

27. § Probe for Clarifications:
§ Powerful Questions
§ What...?
§ How…?
§ CanYou…?
§ Tell me more
Powerful Questions is a
technique that is commonly
used in Professional Coaching.
§ Get Untapped Ideas:
§ What else?
§ If you couldn’t fail,What would you do?
§ Have you thought of…?

28. LISTING, BRAINSTORMING, GROUPING
LISTING
§ Gathering
§ existing data
§ Low level details
§ Steps in a process
§ Problems with a
process
§ Defining the problem
§ Use follow-up
questions to probe
for information
BRAINSTORMING
§ Requires unique
ground rules
§ Used for
§ New ideas
§ Answers that doesn’t
exist yet
§ Where to apply
§ Identify potential
solutions
§ Potential growth
markets
§ Use follow-up
questions to engage
untapped ideas
GROUPING
§ Convergent Activity
§ Use after Listing or
Brainstorming
§ Creates Manageable
Chunks
§ Allow the group to
name the categories

29. § MoSCoW
§ Must have
§ Should have
§ Could have
§ Won’t have this time
§ Ranking
§ Voting
§ Impact analysis

30. § Sticky DotVoting:
Used to prioritize from high to low
based on individual preference
§ Each person gets “dots” equal to 20-
25% of the number of Ideas (i.e. 20
Ideas = 4-5 dots)

31. § Decision making is the
process of examining your
possibilities, options,
comparing them, and
choosing a right course of
action

32. § Fist of Five for Building consensus

33. § Review the work done, session objectives, outstanding issues
§ Conduct a retrospective
§ Recognize everyone’s hard work
§ Each person talks about what was gained from this session
§ Celebrate your achievements
End of the meeting Evaluations:
What to Evaluate?
• Results
• Techniques
• Communication
• Responsiveness
Evaluation Techniques:
• Plus/Minus (+/-)
• Start-Stop-Continue
• Exit Survey
• ROTI –Return on time invested

34. § Action Items

35. As a Squad
§ Identify session activities
§ Open
§ During
§ Closing
§ At least 2 activities for each of the
above sections

36. § Final words (from the host/executive sponsor)
§ Next session information

37. § Document and Debrief
§ Document
§ Action items
§ Key work completed
§ Who to debrief
§ Session sponsor
§ Consult/inform people not in the
session (As needed)
§ Anyone affected by the session
outcomes
§ Monitor Action Items
§ Prepare agenda for next session

38. Take 5 minutes and summarize what you have learnt for past 80 minutes

39. Who wants to be a great
facilitator?

41. § Facilitating with ease by Ingrid Bens
§ http://www.facilitationtutor.com/facilitation-resources/
§ Workshop conducted by Steven Crago and Matt
§ Workshop conducted by Lyssa Adkins