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Thursday, July 28, 2011

Facilitation and Collaboration

I watched a “professional facilitator” absolutely waste 16 person-hours. The opportunity made me so mad, it took a while to figure out what I think.

Here’s what I think:

Unless you are working by yourself, you need enthusiastic buy-in from your team to get superior performance.

Taking time to get everyone on board is usually well worth the effort, and has often lifted my results beyond anything I understood when we started.

Facilitation is a set of tools and processes, which have little value unless the facilitator has a strong commitment to a result. Someone showing off their process is entertainment.

A facilitator who has a strong commitment to the results is an important part of the team. A facilitator who has an overriding commitment to facilitation is lost.

She who writes the agenda controls the meeting.

What do you think?

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1 comment:

Unknown said...

Dick:

Sounds like you stumbled into a room with a timeshare facilitator and a bunch of unemployed misers - the facilitator was interested in increasing the pressure to buy and the misers wanted to eat the free meal and get out of there. Both were wasting the other person's time, since there could never be a meeting of the minds.

When a 'facilitator' preaches the 'one right way' by following step 3 and process C, the listener can not easily draw value from the presentation unless they buy the book - and maybe not even then.