Belgium, Turnhout October 5th, 2007.
Dear moderator, are you a facilitator?
Can you moderate any meeting without any preparation? Do you consider that as your key quality? Do you see yourself as a word generator, a speaking machine? Doing in-and-out jobs, going from one meeting or event to another?Well, maybe it is time to reconsider your workload. I have not seen too many moderators, or facilitators yet, but it is clear to me that there are many different ones. Only recently at MPI's World Conference in Montreal, two speakers talked about facilitation in educational sessions. One facilitator presented it almost as a military discipline where the facilitator controls the room, directs the discussion and protects the organizers and the leadership. The other facilitation took place in Open Space and there, absolute democracy, sharing and learning from each other are the central soft components. More recently I was able to experience the work of a word machine: A facilitator that is really more an MC. He walks in unprepared and measures his own value by the number of words spoken. Some of the prepared text are read with a unintended interpretation because they were not looked at before, other were even publicly undermined because the 'facilitator' thinks out loud, from the stage what alternative interpretation of this sentence is possible, confusing the audience and embarrassing the organizers. Whatever and whoever, the point is that selecting a facilitator is not a job to be taken lightly.
Get the right person for the job.
One should work with a Meeting Architect to select a facilitator, or at least someone that knows a lot of facilitators or spend a good amount of time to find the right person for the job. Facilitators should also position themselves on a higher level. They need to prepare, dry run and invest the time it takes to understand the matter and case at hand. What kind of meeting is this? What are the objectives, What is the product or topic? Who is organizing and who is in the room? In short: Why are we here? A moderator in front of an intelligent audience of clients or other professionals, simply undermines the value of the meeting if he or she turns up unprepared. Word-machine can be embarrassing, annoying, frustrating and deadly for the energy level if they just spit words. being an MC at a wedding is quit different from facilitating a meeting. Preparing for a meeting takes at least as much time as the job itself. If clients are not prepared to pay for that, they should do their own facilitation, much better still than using a word machine.
Change is gonna come
Lets look at meta-plans, voting technology, the wiki workshops , open space, LEGO serious play and many other forms and shapes and meeting formats and technology where facilitation is often needed. A good facilitator must be a chameleon. A facilitator is to rare to be a specialist in one or the other and refuse work because" this is not what I do"... We need many more facilitators in the meetings industry and good facilitators, meaning professionals. Professional facilitators are rare in my part of the world. In Europe, there is the additional language issue for local meetings where the local language is spoken. We need facilitators that guide brainstorms and voting sessions, that can be military control freaks or open space gurus as well as a Lego Serious Play coaches.
The wiki case
For the wiki workshop from Holiday Inn Brussels Airport, four techniques were used to gather a maximum of information with a minimum of intrusion in the 3 hour time slot available to us, including a four course dinner. The facilitator that was booked for the "brainstorm" advised the organizer not to have him involved because he was a brainstorm specialist and with all these pre set topics and questions, the evening did not meet his definition of a brainstorm. This is sad, because with the presence of a real pro in brainstorming, the value of the evening would have improved in many ways, not the least in the preparation phase. I agree that a real brainstorm would have been different, but how could this organizer get a group of 21 clients in a room for just a 4 hour brainstorm? A nice dinner in a special location was chosen as a format because that would work in the calendars of these people and so this format is a given. How about doing the best possible in that situation? Should a professional not be open to different formats of facilitation? Or is the Open space facilitator stuck to that one format? Like a priest to a religion? I would hope not, for the simple reason mentioned above, we need more facilitation in meetings.
If you are looking for a facilitator, make sure you check IAF; the International Association of Facilitators or at least ask if your candidates are IAF members. The least your candidate facilitator should have done is study the IAF handbook of Group Facilitation. And if you are a facilitator, I hope you are willing and able to join the meetings industry into an adventure of change and evolution. Technology enables us to do things that were unthinkable 10 years ago and the number of varied meeting formats increases at a high rate. I look forward to see many more facilitators in action because they are the best thing that can happen to meetings and conferences to increase their value.Also have a look at "http://www.iaf-world.org/".
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