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Facilitation - the art of asking meaningful and purposeful questions




In our roles as change and change communications professionals we’re often asked to facilitate. But when you think of facilitation what comes to mind? Is it hosting a meeting or a session at an offsite? Is it about mediating? Is it about surfacing and resolving issues? Or maybe it’s about getting ideas and input from the people you’re talking to?

 

We believe these are facilitation tactics and outputs. Facilitation is a technique to make sure that people understand the change, the impact of the change and what they will need to do differently to get to the end goal. And the key method to being a great facilitator is to ask meaningful and purposeful questions.

 

We’ve all heard the statistics that circa 70% of change programmes fail. Poor planning and communication is often cited as reason for this but in our opinion it is also about not asking the right questions at the right time or not airing challenges, feelings or thoughts.

 

Facilitating the key moments in a programme can overcome all these challenges and help to establish and continually build trust.



Facilitation starts when a change has been identified

Let’s start at the beginning. Leaders have identified that a change needs to happen, whether that’s cultural or behavioural, a new process or new technology, or it could be the need to reorganise the company or help a newly-formed team to become a high-performing one.

 

The first facilitation step is to help leaders align their thinking to help them navigate the challenge at hand and help create the story to move to the desired state. It’s not uncommon that the leaders around the table have different opinions, different personalities and different ways of approaching a task. Trust between them is vital and that comes from feeling confident and comfortable to ask difficult questions.

 

Our role as change professionals is to enable them to do this by creating the right conversational agendas and giving everyone the opportunity to speak and contribute, and importantly making sure that everyone listens.



Time to engage the change team

Once leaders are aligned it’s time to bring the change implementors into the conversation. It’s vital the change team get on board as they’ll be running the programme day-to-day.

 

Workshops are an ideal way to facilitate this level of discussion and delve deeper into the impact of the change. These stakeholders need to get to know each other’s styles and know what they want to be as a team and how they operate together.

 

At the same time they need to be feel confident to constructively challenge any previous decisions made and understand the desired outcomes.

 

In our experience conversations can become heated but it’s important to keep those levels of trust and ensure psychological safety. The need to be able to raise things in the room without repercussion is important.  Too often we’ve seen people walk out of a meeting and immediately say they don’t agree with a decision that was made in it – a fundamental sign that trust isn’t there.



Bring in the voice of the impacted people

It’s now time to communicate the change to the impacted teams and individuals. For transformation to be successful people need to be engaged, even if they don’t immediately agree with the change. They need to feel that they’re listened to; that they’ve had their opportunity to speak and surface any issues.

 

And if they don’t, there’s a perpetuating cycle; the issue keeps going without ever moving forward and that’s where a change programme can get into trouble.

 

The change communication’s team play a vital facilitation role here. They’re the eyes and ears of the business and have the channels to support a speaking and listening strategy to all stakeholders. This includes using a range of qualitative and quantitative approaches such as focus groups and pulse surveys which gives the opportunity to gather insight and aid further decisions around communications and the programme itself.

 

In addition, running sessions at team meetings or offsites are a valuable facilitation tool. They’re a super opportunity to get people’s ideas on how they can contribute to the change and suggest ideas to make it a success.



The problem with not surfacing issues

Decision makers in a programme need to rely on receiving accurate and truthful information. If there is a risk to psychological safety or information is being hidden or held back that can only increase the risk of the programme not succeeding. Issues need to be surfaced and talked through properly.

 

In our experience almost every organisation we've worked with has problems in that space. So facilitating these discussions become important. There has to be a culture where risks and issues can be raised and talked about, and on the flip side of that is what leaders do about it.

 

In recent months we’ve seen the coverage about the Post Office’s Horizon IT system. One of the key issues raised was people didn’t feel they could talk up when they knew there was a problem – and many years later it’s still unresolved (at huge cost to the taxpayer and businesses involved).

 

Leaders must hear those problems, debate them and make the decision that addresses them. This takes us back to our first facilitation tactic – making sure that even if not everyone agrees with each other they are heard and can move forward.



A final thought…

We know that not every change initiative will run smoothly – sponsors may change, budgets and timelines may be altered, and other priorities may take over. But ultimately, if leaders can treat the whole company as a team by listening to different voices and perspectives the programme has the highest chance of being successful. And the way to do that, is to facilitate the right questions to get the right outcomes.



 

About Marlowe


At Marlowe we partner with organisations to deliver large scale, complex transformation and change. We deliver business change solutions, change capability, assurance, training, leadership effectiveness and cultural change.


Our focus is on your people to ensure your change is delivered practically, successfully and sustainably. Please contact us if you would like to know more about delivering exceptional business change.



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