A good facilitator is like a girl scout- always prepared. It’s easy to write about how to run a successful meeting, workshop or event, to describe some golden rules of facilitation and to leave the matter there. When you work with people there are times when things are going to go wrong, because well, people are people....
So, when facilitating, sometimes things don’t go as planned. To run really effective meetings and events you need to be able to think on your feet to address challenging and unforeseen situations when they arise. Sometimes a meeting goes off at a tangent and it’s great. Some of my most creative and productive sessions have arisen when I’ve allowed the agenda and group to drift from the original plan. What’s important in this sentence is the verb- allow.
It’s a conscious decision to let things run as it was the right thing to do. At other times you can get the sense that the group is not performing as well as it could and you need to step in, your group expects it and if you don’t you’re not fulfilling your role as facilitator. Have a look at our website for more information including descriptions of group behaviour that you might encounter when working with groups, possible causes and some suggested approaches that you might try to use to bring the group back to task. There’s no right answer to any given situation, you need a number of options in your kit bag. Hopefully these approaches drawn from our experience will help.The key issues are:
Don’t be afraid to ask the group what’s going on- it’s much better to name the elephant in the room than ignore it
If in doubt, take a break, keep calm and regroup
Finally, never push on regardless, if it’s not working it’s not going to get better without intervention.
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