Hello, everybody. Um So happy to be here with all of you. And um yeah, my name is Lisa. I'm, I'm a senior product manager. I work in Fintech. Um And I think facilitation is basically a superpower.So um this is why I wanna talk to you about it today. Um What is facilitation? What does it mean? Um How can we become good facilitators? Um And just literally give you a bunch of little tools you can use starting well, maybe not today cause you're here at the conference. Uh But starting at the next time you're in the office or working with clients or anything like that. Um Yeah. All right. Let's see if my screen share, if everything works here. Perfect. Cool. So what is facilitation? The um definition that you can find online is that it is um the designing and running of successful meetings and workshops in organizational settings. Um OK, I mean, that already gives you a bit of an idea, right? I hope um So what, what does that really mean? Like what is your role as a facilitator then? Um So the idea is that as a facilitator, we're trying to help people to work together in a better way, um to understand common objectives and help people get there or plan how to get to those goals um, during any kind of meeting and discussion.

So, have you ever felt like this woman here in this picture? Especially when you start your work day and you see 12 meetings on your calendar, maybe just five and it's already kind of probably going to be boring. Um And you don't really, um, yeah, you don't really look forward to your day because you already know, well, these meetings are gonna be um draining not very interesting and they keep you from doing actual work. Um So basically, if a meeting is facilitated, well, this should not happen. You should hopefully not make this face. Um One of the things that you can start doing right now is basically ask yourself before you send out a meeting invite. Could this meeting be an email? And often the answer is yes. If you have a status update, for example, you really don't, don't need a meeting for that, just write an email with the status update. What you want meetings for is decision making and to make good decisions. These are a few questions that you could ask yourself. Um How can I help people work better together? How can I understand the common goal? How can I create alignment? How can I move discussions forward? Um And how can I set up people for success. Um Because every time you run a meeting, you are the facilitator. If you know, like if you think about it and, and actively facilitate or not, you are the facilitator and I think we all have meetings.

If you work with a team, um you might have meetings with them. If you work freelance with clients, you'll have meetings with them. Um So there's, there's a lot of opportunities to be a good facilitator and also try things out. Um My, my personal view on facilitation is that it is applied empathy and conversation. So what do I mean with that? Um It sounds a bit esoteric, I guess. Um But the idea is that if you're a good facilitator, you bring two things to the table. One is you have empathy and try to understand the people in the room. Um Sometimes it's referred to as reading the room to really understand where everyone's at. Um And conversation is a specific type of communication. Um And it's important that we have conversations and meetings because that's two sided or multi sided conversation and only that really gives us what we need to um make great decisions. So, and this was like a bunch of like kind of high level things. Um So let's try to get a bit more into the applicable stuff for you. Um And before we do that, I would just like uh to let you know that you can ask um questions anytime and I have prepared a tool called mural. Maybe some of you already know it. Um I have a link that I will drop in the chat now. Um And basically what you can do in there is write down the questions, you can put little sticky notes on this online whiteboard.

Um Because it is a great tool for online facilitation. So I thought maybe we can just try it out together. Um So there is a section at the top of this specific mural um that is called networking. If you want to, you can just drop your linkedin profile in there. Um And then connect with other participants from the specific session if you're interested. Um And then there's a second section that is titled questions. So feel free to write down your questions and there you can, if you cannot access um the mural or you don't want to put your questions there, feel free to use the chat. Um But what we wanna do later is I'll add some um notes about the answers so that that link will just be there for you forever. So you can actually um look back at the notes of the questions later on if you're interested. Cool. Let me see if like at least a few people. Yeah, I see a bunch of people coming in there moving around as anonymous animals. Um So yeah, feel free to just drop, drop a bit of information about yourself in there, your linkedin profile. If you copy the link just directly on the canvas, it'll just automatically load a preview. And so you can get to know each other a little bit.

And because we have a bit of a longer session, we will have some time to then um kind of have more of a conversational style um part um in the second half. Cool. And then we'll, we'll answer the questions then. All right. So let's get back into a bit more facilitation. Uh What can you or what, what should be things you should keep in mind um to be a good facilitator. One of them is to stay neutral. And if you work with a team um that you usually work with and you facilitate a session for them that can be really hard um to stay neutral because you are most likely also involved in the topics they talk about. You're likely to um have opinions on the things that they talk about um in my team at the moment, for example, um then facilitating retrospectives, we take turns because nobody can stay neutral and should always be the one facilitating. But by taking turns, we give everyone the chance to participate fully and um be the facilitator once every two weeks. So that, that's a cool way. Um You can also prepare for this. So I'm, I'm more the person that likes to kind of wing it. I've done, I've done a lot of facilitation, I've run a lot of workshops and design sprints. So I feel quite comfortable doing that if you don't feel that confident yet, um you can prepare responses for certain things as well.

Like when you know, oh if someone says this or that thing or something along those lines, this will trigger me in a way, um learn to manage your own responses and yeah, even prepare answers. Um If that helps you, it makes you feel more secure, then you also want to show confidence. Um And that is probably one of the few times where I'd say fake it till you make it. Um If you don't feel fully confident, that is totally OK. Um It's exciting to stand in front of a room full of people and kind of guide them and tell them what to do in a way. Um But your team will look to you for trust in the process, um for, for confidence and that uh the right goals will be worked on for um energy as well. So by just being like positive and confident, um you can affect everyone in the group and it shows when you have someone who's very negative about everything, it will also affect the whole group. So just be confident and like, let people know, hey, this is, this is ok if I feel uncomfortable, certain things, if it's like a very new way of working that you're not used to, you can't feel uncomfortable and that's ok.

But be kind of the, the rock for the people to show them. Hey, it might be uncomfortable but it's ok. This will work. This is, this is a good way to approach this problem. And one of those things where you, I don't know, maybe this is a given for some people. Um, I had to learn this. Be yourself. I have gotten feedback in the past where people told me, ah, you're a bit too girly. That doesn't really come across as professional enough. And personally I like to be, um, well, I don't know if I'm funny but I like to try to make jokes. Let's leave it at that. Um, that's my personal style. This does not mean that making jokes makes you a better or worse facilitator. It just means this is me, this is something that I like to do and that helps me connect with the people I talk to, um, in the conversations I have. So just, um, yeah, don't try to be overly professional if that's not your usual demeanor. Um, don't, don't worry about like, being the best entertainer out there, um, and doing stand up comedy while facilitating that's not necessary either. Um, you, you do want to be a bit of a, of an entertainer though.

Um, since you're the one standing in front of telling people what to do, um, it doesn't have to be funny but you have, you should try to be a bit captivating which comes as well. Like this feeds into showing confidence or showing confidence, feeds into um, yeah, kind of motivated people. Cool. And then nobody is perfect. So we learn and we iterate and um everything that I know about facilitation, I didn't just learn a one go. And then I was a master facilitator. I, I'm still not, there's still a lot of things to learn and also to try out. So if you have the chance to work with a group that you may already know, try something new with them, either ask them if they're willing to try something new with them or just try it out it. Um If you want specific feedback on how the session itself went, it's sometimes good to let the people know and ask them for feedback about specific new activity you wanted to try out, for example. Um And yeah, make it better. Next time I always ask for feedback. Um Get like have a little retrospective if you have maybe a multiple day workshop like a design sprint, for example.

Um And try to understand what worked well, what are things you would want to continue to do and what are things that didn't go so well that you might want to stop doing and what was possibly missing um that you could add to be a better facilitator. I'm gonna tell you about my biggest learning moment. Um When facilitating that was a couple of years ago, um I facilitated a design sprint in a big organization, lots of stakeholders, lots of things went wrong. I um it was my first time facilitating a whole design sprint for those of you who don't know what that is. Um It's, it's a design thinking based fiveday workshop process um where you start off with a problem space, you come up with a bunch of ideas, you create a prototype and then you test it with users. So it was, it was a big thing. It was my first time doing a full complete design sprint. I was quite nervous. I had prepared everything meticulously and then it was the first day of the sprint and everything was ok. I felt a little lost at times and not like that confident even though I have prepared a lot.

Um And the people in the room could kind of tell that I wasn't really sure about all the steps and the activities I had prepared so much that I actually missed out on explaining them well enough to the rest of the team who had also not done design sprints before. So for them, it was just sometimes like, ok, but why are we doing this right now? Um And then on the second day, it turned out we had the wrong people in the room, so we weren't like that well prepared. Um After all, then we had um some new stakeholders that kind of popped up out of, I mean, a big, big corporation that kind of happens. Um They came in and asked questions and weren't very happy with what we were doing. Then I had a participant who basically took over a whole activity just took it away from me. And at that, that point, I was just like, ok, maybe he actually knows better. I'll just let him do that thing which derailed part of the process. Um And we managed to build a prototype, but instead of a six hour workday, um we, I think we spent 11 hours or so um on the prototype. Um One of our uh testers actually um canceled last minute. So we didn't have enough testers at the end of the week. I was just so done with everything um that I actually thought maybe if I just don't go back to work on Monday, nobody will be sad. I'll be OK. Um That is not the answer.

Um And yeah, it was an amazing learning opportunity. Um It, it felt really terrible um Because like, I love facilitation, I love workshops. I like collaborating. I like working with people and just having this feeling of, I don't think I did this well and this is not how this is supposed to be. Um The first thing I had to learn was it's OK. It's OK to not be perfect. It's OK to make mistakes as long as you learn from them, like don't repeat the same things over and over. That wouldn't be great either. Um But overall, it's, it's ok to make mistakes. Um So I wanna now share a few things with you that I have learned um that have helped me in other workshops and design sprints that I did after that terrible one. And one of them is to be prepared but also flexible. At the same time, I will always write down outlines for my workshops like the activities we want to do, how much time will take for all of those. Um And uh it never works. Uh Humans are well, first of all, humans are terrible at planning and estimating things. Um And secondly, if humans are involved on foreseeable things will happen, always, um I don't know how many times I had this really nice workshop outline. I had already planned extra time.

Um I had made sure I had extra time for um explaining the activities and making sure that voting would have enough time because you also, if you, if you do it in a room with people, you have to think about how they walk around the room like that takes more time than maybe if you sit at a computer and just click on the vote.

Um But yeah, I think most of my outlines have not worked out and I would have to kind of be like, all right, so how much time is left? What is left in, in the, from the activities, how do I change things up now so that we can still reach our goal and, um, have ideas on how, how to get to the bigger goal. Um, I, I've had people in conversations derail them totally. But it's been like, yeah, but this person asked me and then they keep talking, what do you do? Then I'll let you know in a moment. Um, it's also very, very helpful to check in with your group in the beginning. Um to understand where they're, where they're at. Where's the head at? Especially at the moment, like there's so much crazy going on in this world right now that you wanna make sure you ask people how they're doing and actually listen and get a feeling for what's happening in the room. Sometimes everyone's just excited about what's gonna, what's about to happen and, and you can feel that energy in the check in and that's great. But sometimes people are also saying, well, everything is so uncertain. I don't feel really good about this. I don't really feel good in general right now. Um And it will affect them within the workshop. So it's not really like you, you solve the mood, but you can be mindful of it. Um You always want to gently guide the conversation. That's your job as the facilitator.

It can be a little hard at times. Um Just know that everyone encounters those challengers. Um There might be people in there. Um I have a resource section at the end of, of the presentation that I'll happily share with you and um sometimes you have challenges. Um So I had this person that just took over from me, right? Um You, you can have those people um When, when that happens, those are usually people that are not happy to hand over power and, and feel uncomfortable. So try to give them something where they can still feel in charge, for example, make them a subject matter expert if that's, if that's possible. Um You can have people that are know it all. They kind of want to show off all their knowledge in any meeting. So they will contribute to the conversations but not in, in a constructive way, but more to show off how much they know. Again, you can, you can get those people to be um a subject matter expert, for example. Um and just make sure you hear them but you also push back gently. Um So that you, yeah, but they don't just take over from you and um derail your meeting. Um Also things that happen a lot were at the women in tech conference. Um I see a lot of women in, in the in the audience right now. Um Who here you don't have to answer in the chat or anything, just think about it and who here has been interrupted by a man in a meeting.

I have, women are twice as likely, um, to get interrupted by men and women of color are even three times as likely to get interrupted by men in meetings. If you're the facilitator, this is something you can look out for. Um, and, and you can be an ally. Um, there's also these men that interrupt you and then they will just say exactly what you just said and present it as their own idea. So annoying, I if you're, if there's any guys in here right now, take this away to become a better ally. Um These are things as a facilitator that can happen to you as well. So like the, the challenges I just talked, talked to you about um I don't have like empirical data on it, but in my personal experience, it happens to me more than um male colleagues. Um So yeah, try, try to make sure you have an ally in the room if you can and be an ally to other people as well. It's just as simple, like if someone interrupts somebody else, you can just kind of jump in and be like, hey, I don't think she was finished yet. Can we just hear her, finish her thought and then you're next? And that's totally OK because you're in your facilitator role. It, it's even a little easier to do than it is. Um If you're just a participant, um then you wanna create an information balance now that um basically means you wanna make sure everyone's on the same page.

Um This can happen through different kind of activities, um having demos of things, sharing out information, um just getting everyone on the same page. It also means um you have to make sure that you explain all activities really well um to your participants and connect them to the big picture as well. It's usually not enough just to tell them well. And then we write sticky notes and we write the sticky notes about this topic and then you put them over here. People have to understand why they're supposed to write sticky notes about that topic or that question. And now we're going even a bit more into the practical side of things. Um, here's a bunch of tools. Please do not use an ax or a hammer in a meeting that usually doesn't go over well. But these things can help you. Um, have a timer. Um, the best thing is if you have a big timer that everybody can see that makes things a lot easier and time box, everything. This can also help you to stop people from like going on tangents and going totally off the rails. Um, topic wise, if you time box it, you kind of have to stop it and it's easier to refer back to it and be mindful of the time.

Um This is just an example for a check in that, that I've used a couple of times where you just use emojis and, and we had some, some moods connected to those where it's like, do you feel lost? Do you feel me? You're not sure you feel great, you feel perfect. Um You can either have people um just post emojis. We've also done this with just pictures, gifts, which is super fun if you find a bunch of gift reactions of like how you feel right now. Um It's also just like a fun icebreaker. Um, note and vote is the basic idea of this is everyone writes things down because people are a lot better at thinking on their own and then making decisions together. So you write everything down on sticky notes and then you vote on what's most important connected to whatever your um meeting topic is your um goal and then you just vote on it. This also helps to remove bias and groupthink. So it's not who gets paid most that counts the most, but everyone gets their fair share. This one is a favorite of mine, the parking lot. Um really, really helps if people get out, go off track to, to get them back so that they feel heard. Um But you don't spend time on a topic that is not actually bringing you closer to your goal.

So you can just basically tell a person, hey, um this is a really great point, but since the goal of the meeting is this and that, let's just take it and put it on the parking lot. So we don't forget about it and we will get back to it. Um, either later in this meeting or in a different meeting. Uh, but it doesn't get lost and that usually calms people down quite a bit cause cause, yeah, one of the problems they have is that they feel they don't get hurt if you don't talk about whatever they bring up, even though it might not really matter in that context in that moment.

And yeah, and then, then some special assignments, um, it can help to engage people that are kind of checked out if you maybe make them the keeper of the time. Um, so they will always, uh ha have an eye on the clock and make sure we don't go over time or you can have, um, I don't know, someone help with sorting sticky notes if you're, if you're in a room together or even online, um, assign someone to kind of sort them through real quickly.

Um, this works really well if you have those challengers. Um, and, and they kind of get in your way and this way you can kind of occupy them with something that's helpful for the meeting. Um, and kind of maybe takes their attention a bit away from whatever the challenging and like underlying motives. Um, after writing the meeting. All right. And the last little bit is working from anywhere remote work. We're all doing it right now, we're having a remote conference where everybody is online, which is awesome. Um But that also has some challenges, be mindful of people's situations, especially right now. Um You don't really know where they're at. That's why the check in is so helpful.

Um I've heard a lot of people say that everybody should always turn on the cameras in a meeting and while I get that because we communicate a lot through um like our faces or hands, you can probably see me, see my hands here and like the aspects of the frame. Um And it's a lot easier for us humans to communicate with each other if we can see those things and get those clues, but he didn't know the person's situation. So don't, don't force anyone to turn on the camera explain why it's important, but don't force them. Um And just be, yeah, mindful of general right now. Um I don't know how many pets and kids I've seen in meetings lately. I personally, I think it's, it's adorable. I love it. Um I like seeing other people's pets or kids and I don't think it's a distraction. Um But for some people, they get stressed out because they feel like they're less professional if you can see their pet running around in the background. Um So just all these things um or things to be mindful of, you'll definitely need more preparation, everything that you do online has to be fully prepared in advance. Like it's not enough to know that you have a room that has a whiteboard, you'll probably have to prepare a whiteboard tool template, for example.

Um Maybe people have to do stuff beforehand, um uh to, to prepare like read something that kind of stuff, um use icebreakers and energizers. So, um just little things that take your mind off of what you're working on in that moment or in the beginning if, if you work with a group that doesn't know each other and it can be very helpful. My, my team and I, we've once um shared with each other what our favorite TV shows are, but we use only emojis to explain um what they are. So maybe you can guess the movies in the slide, feel free to drop them in the chat. Um If you recognize anything, um this, this can be a fun way um to, yeah, to kind of engage with each other. So I ce t there's two more. Can you guess them? Yes. Finding Nemo and Sharknado. Cool. Um Yeah, so we actually ended up using the same idea from the Icebreaker in our slack. And we had this thread where we basically said if you get the movie, you can um put the next movie in there and we had, I think 100 and 50 messages of people guessing and posting movies and emojis, it's really, really fun.

Um This is something that's not necessarily facilitation that was just fun at work. Um But since everyone's working from home, I can definitely recommend it. Um Yeah, combine online and offline work, take breaks and have fun because um anything like all kinds of remote and like zoom meetings or just generally video chat meetings that are more exhausting than real meetings. So also be mindful of that if you would have a two hour workshop in real real life, um maybe, maybe you can have some activities be done offline and then have only an hour workshop online where everyone is them there at the same time and make sure to take breaks. I actually literally do that with my team where we're like, OK, now everyone like stand up like stretch your arms do do a thing. Um because it's, it's helpful because it's, yeah, there's such a thing as zoom fatigue and that is the stuff I wanted to talk about. So let's see if you have things you wanted to talk about. Um I saw some questions in the chat and I will look at the mural board if we have some questions there as well. Cool. So um should the facilitator be different from the major decision maker? Uh The example here is if you're the head of the committee, should you be the one facilitating the meeting? Generally? I would say no. Um Because how are you gonna stay neutral if you're the main decision maker that's probably not gonna work.

Um If I have things with my team, um that I directly work with about the product that I work on. Um It's, it depends a little bit on what it is, but I sometimes get other people external people to help facilitate so that I can fully participate as well. Does that answer your question? Great. Um Cool. Then we also have the question about the note and vote. Um I'll try to go over it really quickly. I have um at the end of the slide deck that um I shared on the slack already, I can share it in here in a moment as well. Um Basically, you, let's say, OK, we have a goal. I don't know. I'm happy brainstorm ideas for a new product. Just very high level. Um brainstorming doesn't really work because usually the loudest or the most charismatic or the highest paid person in the room will kind of say something. And then everyone's like, yeah, that's a great idea.

So you lose out on a lot of ideas. If you use node and vote, you ask everyone to write down their ideas on a sticky note um or online and in a tool like um like mural on a sticky node, one idea per sticky node. Um And you just write down as many as you can. And then afterwards you, you put those up for everyone to see and then you can cluster them sometimes two people will have the same idea. Um, and then you vote which of the ideas you, you should pursue or use for your next step. If you have, um, like a bunch of different activities, follow each other. And by that, um, you have a decision made by the group through the voting without discussing it too much. Um, and having voices drowned out. Um, or like, I don't know, more introverted people, not actually be heard and those kinds of things. And that's why it's really helpful.

If you look for a note and vote um on Google, you'll find a bunch of articles about it. It was originally um invented by Google Ventures. Um And Jake Knapp, he's the inventor of the design sprint, um which, which uses um Yeah, this methodology a lot. Um very, very helpful. I've, I've used, I use this in most of my meetings and it's so helpful. All right, we got five minutes left. Uh Are there any different principles for online meetings? Yeah, I talked about a few of those. Um Maybe um one of the things is like if you, if you do something online, there's a lot more distractions. So if you do a workshop in person, you can't have a no device rule, which is obviously not possible if you are online. What I like to do is ask all the participants to just turn off all of their other apps. Um especially emails, slacks, those kinds of things because you'll, you'll see something pop up on the corner of your screen and then you get distracted. Um So that is definitely helpful at the end of the day, people will get distracted, try to try to make sure you can, you can find and like kind of see what's happening if people share their, their videos. Um And sometimes it's ok to just call someone out and be like, hey, what's up? Sometimes that doesn't really work. You kind of have to try to get a feeling for the people. Um, a private chat message might work well with someone. Um, that kind of depends.

Um, yeah, and other than that, all, all of your communication has to be like 10 times more, um, intentional. Like you have to be very sure to explain everything really, really well, um, say the same things over and over again. Um, even though you think, pretty sure everyone heard me but you know, that last person did actually just read their email and they didn't hear you so they don't know what's happening next. Um And that's ok, but kind of plan for it. And I think in the chat I saw a question about my favorite energizer. Um, my favorite energize was pretty silly and, um, I wasn't sure if it would work online but it kind of did, um, which is basically, um, paper scissors rug. Um, I think, I don't know, in German, the, um, in German the, the order of the things is different than in English. But anyways, but you do it um, with your full body, um, which obviously when you're online, full body doesn't work. It's great for being in a room because if you have to, I don't know, crouch down on the floor to be a rock, um, or make like a gigantic scissors. Um, it um helps you because you have to move around and you have a bit of competition in there and, and people have to um play in groups. So they kind of get to interact with each other. So it has a lot of components.

Um And yeah, you can do it online. You don't use that much of your body because you only have like that little frame that you're in, but it's really fun. Cool. All right, we got two minutes left. Um Feel free to drop your link in into the chat here if you want to um or also in the mirror board that I had shared and I will share all the slides. Um Maybe let me just stop my screen share and then I can quickly grab the Oh yeah, I can quickly grab the um URL for you. And at the end there's three slides that um have additional options for check ins, for example, um for Icebreakers for Energizers. Um So there's a bunch of links at the end of that um where you can find more ideas and also feel free to reach out to me on linkedin, connect with me there. Um Message me if you want to. If you have other questions, if you need some ideas and inspiration, I'm happy to help. Cool. Well, thanks everybody and enjoy your lunch if you're in the same time zone as me.