Facilitating, fast and slow
Covid changed everyone’s work, including mine. What changes will stick?
For several years, my work has centered on facilitating collaborative processes. Some engagements are limited to workshops, while most use facilitation in the context of broader changes in organizational strategy, campaign strategy, coalition building, or organizational development.
That work has continued under Covid, with notable changes. The first and obvious change was spatial: we distanced, stopped traveling, threw virtual post-its on virtual whiteboards. We all experienced that shift in similar ways (though anyone in a suburban homes with extra square footage was perhaps more comfortable than those of us squeezing desks in the corners of city apartments).
The temporal change was more varied. At the personal level, those with children or other caregiving responsibilities felt a crunch, as schools or institutional support shut down; but many without caregiving responsibilities felt the opposite, as they replaced commuting time and in-person socializing with overworking (or just binge-watching the latest TV series). At the broader level, social life seemed to slow down while the possibilities for social change accelerated.
In parts of the United States, vaccine access and uptake have lessened both the spatial and temporal effects. Last month, I facilitated my first in-person session in over a year, while the re-opening of both schools and bars is mending our social lives. Much can be written about how the world needs to change in response to the ongoing pandemic—including resisting the dangerous illusion of a return to “normal”—but let’s focus for a moment on the continuing shifts in our ways of working.
Even as I’m able to bring in-person sessions back into my toolbox, I think the pandemic has taught me (as a facilitator) and my clients (as organizations that hire facilitators) how much we can accomplish virtually.
A few thoughts from fifteen months (and counting) of facilitating virtually:
#1 Facilitating virtually feels like a time crunch.
I thought I’d be in Miami in April 2020 to facilitate an in-person retreat for Development Gateway’s management team. But in March, it became clear we’d have to switch to a virtual format. One major complication: several of us were working parents, suddenly trading off caregiving hours with our partners/co-parents between working sprints.
Even if you didn’t have caregiving responsibilities, the proliferation of video calls early in Covid meant everyone wanted to limit the length of each. Every minute on a zoom was precious.
That dynamic multiplied as Covid continued. It pushed me to speed up: to talk faster, to hold less time for silent reflection before asking who wanted to share, to move more quickly to the next conversation.
That runs counter to my practice facilitating in person. Okay, I always talk too fast. But generally I want to hold space for people to be humans in their work, to process challenging ideas—to slow down. That’s often why an organization hires facilitator: like a personal trainer at the gym, who helps them resist the pressure for a quick decision in favor of deeper reflection.
In that paradigm, participants are less likely to watch the clock, counting the minutes to their next call or trying to squeeze in a few emails in the background.
Where’s the balance? Fast facilitation, with a sense of urgency and rapid creativity, has its place in both virtual and IRL settings. But where hybrid processes make it possible, I see an opening to design not just around where people are but around the pacing needed at various points in a process.
#2 Making it a shared experience is twice as hard.
Part of how I think about facilitated events is that I want to leave an indelible impression of the conversation in people’s minds. I want the physicality of being together to serve as a reminder of the discussions, the hand-wringing, the decisions, so that it becomes a reference point for keeping themselves and one another on track. Accountability is created in the phrase: “Remember how we talked about doing/not doing X when we were together last year?”
Being together (even in a bland conference room but especially in someplace unique, off-site) made that moment a shared experience, different from all the other daily work conversations. Everyone recalls where they were sitting during a significant discussion.
But now, we have those conversations in the same space where we have all our other conversations. And that space is no longer shared — we’re each at our separate kitchen tables, living room couches, home offices, or other spaces. My memory of the event is blurred with my memories of every other call I had that day, and no longer a memory shared with others who were in the shared spaced. This difference diminishes the formal workshop sessions and eliminates the informal connections over coffee breaks and in the hallways (often where the thorny issues get resolved).
I’ve tried to counter this challenge by being more intentional about the branding and framing of a workshop, ensuring each session feels different enough to make a mark. Often just having an outside facilitator can help with that. But I never realized how much I previously relied on the physical space to do that for me.
#3 Reading the room is ten times as hard.
Facing a dozen or more faces in boxes, I might spot when someone leans forward with a look of concern on their face, or when someone comes off mute briefly like they have a thought to share. But I might as easily miss those cues.
In a physical room, reading body language across a group of 20 while also listening to someone speak is easy. It’s instinctual at this point in my practice. But in a virtual session, it’s harder and more cognitively taxing. It’s also impossible when folks go off video (which I sometimes encourage for their own well-being).
In response, I build space for more deliberate check-ins with a group throughout a session. This takes time that I don’t feel like I have (see #1, above) but also serves as a useful check against the biases I bring when interpreting nonverbal cues. It’s another practice I should bring from the virtual back into the physical facilitation.
#4 Lowest-viable tech: a commonality between virtual and IRL.
I have a facilitation “go bag” with post-its, voting dots, and lots of sharpies. Grab a flip chart or white board and I’m ready. For most in-person sessions, I try to keep everyone away from their laptops except for capturing final details. I think about this as “lowest-viable tech”: bring just enough tools to support the conversation, but no more.
“I never realized you could do a three-day workshop without a single PowerPoint slide.” - closing comment from a participant several years ago, which I wear as a badge of honor
With the shift online, I’ve occasionally used virtual whiteboard tools like Mural and Miro. These are great tools—sometimes. But a few conditions have to hold. They’re great if everyone: knows how to use it (or you’re working together long enough to get them over the learning curve); has good connectivity; is tech-savvy/confident enough to navigate themselves around a large virtual space; and has a large screen to navigate the virtual whiteboard plus a conferencing app.
If one of those conditions doesn’t hold, you might be fine. If two or more don’t hold, then you may be better off bringing everyone down a technological notch, rather than allow the inequity to skew the conversation.
Instead, I mostly use Google Slides as a virtual whiteboard space (which I first tried at the suggestion of Jacqui Howard). Sessions can be broken up into separate slides, with agenda and overview slides followed by slides of blank “sticky notes”, and even separate slides for each breakout group to use. A full, multi-session workshop might have all the inputs provided and all the outputs captured in a single Slides doc.
If someone has never used Slides before, it has the advantage of feeling similar to GoogleDocs and PowerPoint, which may shorten the learning curve. For folks who use Slides often in their work, using it in this different way (as a collaboration space rather than a presentation tool) contributes to making the session feel different from the rest of their work (as described in #2, above).
One big advantage of the virtual flipchart is making it easier for everyone to contribute simultaneously. Whereas in-person we might have gathered a small group around a flipchart with markers and post-its, virtual whiteboards can draw a larger group into more detailed brainstorming or planning. This allows for and encourages a greater level of detail and depth. Of course, there are times when you don’t want that: I’ve found participants copy/pasting in from other documents, cluttering the shared space with content that no one else will have time to digest or process during the session, rather than distilling out the most critical pieces for the discussion.
#5 Preparation time doubles.
There’s no question at this point that virtual facilitation requires more preparation time than in-person facilitation of a similar length/depth.
This is partly driven by the time crunch (#1, above) as I want to avoid lags between sessions and be ready to pivot to multiple options when a session needs to shift. Designing the overall flow takes more careful planning and leaves less margin for error.
The increased need for preparation time is also driven by the need to prepare virtual spaces in advance. Facilitators often need to create templates for visualizing and documenting conversations (e.g. a 2x2 matrix, list of notes, diagram, or other structure). While templates drawn with sharpies on flipcharts can be easily created, edited, or re-drawn as the workshop progresses, virtual templates (whether on Google Slides or another tool) are harder to create or adjust on-the-fly.
Other facilitators may be quicker, but I often find myself endlessly tweaking the blank template to ensure the font, margins, colors, and borders maximize everyone’s screenspace and support their own contributions during the session. That needs to happen before we get together. I haven’t found a way around this.
Finally, relationships need to be more thoughtfully built in advance. Without the pre-session milling about, the coffee breaks, and the camaraderie of being in a shared (physical) space, I’ve found I need to do more to build relationships with and among participants before we’re ready to have a joint conversation.
#6 Breakout space becomes more critical, but harder to manage.
If the group is bigger than seven, there’s a good chance I’ll use breakouts at some point in a session. They add rhythm to the flow, and make it possible for more voices to contribute on more issues. Managed well, they allow a group to cover more ground and get better decisions out at the end.
Due to time crunches, breakouts are even more critical in virtual spaces. They’re also harder to manage. Zoom and similar platforms now have virtual breakout rooms, and they even let facilitators move between the rooms to see how each is going.
For in-person sessions, I’ll often sit between two breakout groups — literally in a chair placed where I can overhear both conversations, tracking how well they’re progressing. If some groups are in another room, I can wander in but hang back, interjecting only the minimal amount needed. The physicality even helps me track which groups are doing what.
For virtual, I lose a bit of the tacit tracking I can do in-person, in the same way that reading the room is harder. And it’s harder to connect with the facilitators of each breakout, giving them support or nudging them along, as they’re facing the same challenges around reading the room and time crunches.
One positive for virtual breakout facilitation: using a tool like Slides, I can set up separate slides for each group that let me quickly see how each is progressing. At a glance, I know which group hasn’t started putting notes down and which is almost done, so I can join the group that may need more help. Report-backs are also quick, as everyone immediately sees the other groups’ slides.
And of course, the major benefit of virtual facilitation: with one click, I can close the breakout rooms! Rather than cajoling participants to wrap-up their breakouts and herding them back together, I can magically summon them to the plenary. Oh, the power!
Toward a blended future
For much of the world, virtual and remote engagement will remain the norm for a while longer. But even when travel restrictions lift, this period should leave us all more thoughtful about when and how we gather, whether physically, virtually, or in combinations.
As I wrote in the most recent Open CoLab newsletter:
I miss seeing my collaborators in person. I miss side conversations during the coffee break, team dinners where the thorny issues get hashed out, the mood shifts in the room when the group realizes the problem is bigger (or maybe smaller) than they thought. I miss flipchart paper and apologizing for my bad handwriting.
If this year has taught us we can do more virtually than we realized, it’s also highlighted the value of what can’t happen behind a screen. Hoping to see you all together again, soon.
Until then, stay safe and take care of each other.
