NEWSLETTER: December 2008

In This Issue:

» 25 Years of Facilitation
» Stop Unnecessary Meetings

» Why Request Session Expectations

» FEATURED ARTICLE: Creating Alignment To The Strategic Plan

25 YEARS OF FACILITATION, "Opening Remarks" – 3rd IAF Africa Conference
23 – 24 July, 2008 – Johannesburg, South Africa

Welcome to the 3rd IAF Africa conference. I am very honored to be here today and thrilled to see all of you here as well. I would first like to thank Jerome and the crew for the work they’ve done in setting up the conference – they have done a wonderful job. I would like to thank South Africa for hosting the conference, and finally, thank Misty Hills for the excellent conference facilities.

I want to spend a few minutes talking about our profession. First, I’d like to share some trends that I’ve seen over the past 25 years that I’ve been a Facilitator.

• In the 1970’s, few people called themselves facilitators and fewer still knew what a facilitator did. I still remember my father introducing me saying, “Here is my son, he is successful, and I think that what he does is legal.” At a conference in Portland last year, one session had 225 attendees and the speaker asked how many attendees would have considered themselves a “facilitator” before 1970. Five people raised their hands. He asked how many would have considered themselves a “facilitator” before 1980. Fifteen people raised their hands. Finally, he asked how many would consider themselves a “facilitator” after 2000. One hundred and seventy five people raised their hands. So the growth of Facilitators has risen remarkably in the past 10 years.
• 25 years ago, few knew what a facilitator did. Even Hollywood used the word “facilitator” to designate a “hit man”. Now thousands call themselves facilitators and millions know what we do even in regions where the language doesn’t have a word for “facilitator” – although in some parts of the world, the word for facilitator has been “unemployed”. Luckily, that too is changing.
• Facilitation began in community activities and social psychology in the 1930’s in a small part of the world. Now we see facilitation used around the world in areas ranging from communities to business to government and society in general. And facilitation skills have spilled over to other jobs such as teachers, leaders, and project managers.

Along with this growth, I’ve seen:

• The growing use of Facilitators.
• Increased recognition of the value of Facilitators as evidence by requests from government agencies and corporations for Facilitators – specifically CPFs.
• Finally, I hear words like “consensus” and “collaboration” used in political dialogs – something that bodes well for both our profession and our world.
  

Now, as a profession – and the IAF especially – we need to be at the forefront of these trends. We all have a responsibility to promote the profession – and I want to emphasize the word “profession”. Where the IAF comes in, is to support you, our members by:

• Creating professionalism and promoting facilitation as a profession to communities, corporations, and governments.
• Creating opportunities for you through increased awareness, networking, and education opportunities – by getting your clients to value your work.
• Finally, by promoting the CPF and other certifications we create so that our “profession” gains credibility.

We have to remember that what we do takes skill and learning. What we do adds value. Our association is here to support that. To that end, I would like to introduce the board members who are present at the conference... There are challenges and opportunities facing us as we move forward. These we will be discussing at this conference in the next session. Challenges that I see are:

• We live in a complex world – complex because we humans are a diverse species. I visited the “Cradle of Humanity” yesterday. What I learned is that we are 99% alike in our DNA. It’s that 1% difference that we have to deal with. There are no easy answers and no single “right” way. Therefore collaboration and consensus are the tools needed to find solutions to the problems we’ve created on this planet.
• The United Nations even writes that, “collaboration, consensus, and facilitation are critical to achieving a just and stable society”.
• Conflicts today – in business, communities, and society in general – are increasingly ideological, with each side believing it is “right”. As Facilitators, we know that there is no “one right” answer.
• Our challenge, and our contribution, is helping people listen so that they can begin to move towards consensus and collaboration.

I believe that being a “Facilitator” at this time in history is exciting. We are a critical profession. The world needs us now more than ever...

By Gary Rush, IAF Chair visit www.iaf-world.org

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Business meetings utilise a value business resource – time, but more so they lock-in a more valuable resource, people. Therefore, if a quality outcome or meeting result can be achieved without holding a meeting, surely this is should be the preferred option.

The most important aspect to meeting management is the understanding that in essence there are two basic meeting types: status meetings and working meetings. The meeting type is determined by whether the key focus of the participants will be reviewing information and as a result take a decision, or whether they are required to create an outcome that will be used for future decision making.

Figure 1. Meeting Management Framework

I always ask the following questions before agreeing to call a meeting.

1. Firstly, be clear on what is your purpose for calling the meeting? Related to this question is, knowing what you want to walk away from the meeting having created? (i.e., a tangible outcome) If you cannot determine the purpose or a clear product, DEFER the need to meet!
2. Secondly, you need to ask whether or not it is possible to achieve your purpose and create your outcome without a meeting structure? If the likely answer is yes, DEFER the need to meet! Sometimes, we err on the side of wanting to collaborate too much, and meet for the sake of meeting!
3. Thirdly, does the cost of holding the meeting outweigh the benefits. In order words, is the purpose worth the time and resources that the meeting will use? If you're unsure, DEFER the need to meet!

How To Avoid Unnecessary Status Meetings

1. If the meeting's purpose is primarily to "share or give information", without getting feedback, updates, changes or comments to be incorporated, consider distributing that information in a written format (via email) or even telephonically (if not too detailed).
2. If very little progress or action has taken place between the status meetings, consider making these meeting less frequent. Sometimes, when meetings are originally scheduled, the tendency is to schedule meetings with the same frequency pattern over the life of the meetings (this is typically in project status meetings). However, the meeting frequency may change over the life of the projects. For example, there would be less status meetings required when the project enters into the closeout stage as compared with the control and monitoring stage.

How To Avoid Unnecessary Working Meetings

1. If the working meeting requires analysis of information to be completed, consider doing this outside of the meeting. Never do analysis work in a meeting. For example, in strategic planning meetings, having an understanding of performance trends will assist the management team to make identify areas of the business to be addressed in the strategic plan. It would not be helpful to the group as a whole if this analysis work was undertaken in the meeting. What would be helpful to the group as a whole is having the information beforehand so that decisions could be taken in response to it.
2. The results of working meetings often end with preliminary decisions taken, that are subject to a written document that is required to be circulated for comment to the meeting participants. If after circulating the document, and there is no additional changes or if the changes made are tracked and accepted by all, don't go and hold another meeting if you have agreement.

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Click here if you are keen to learn more on facilitation techniques that will make a difference to your facilitation skills.

WHY REQUEST SESSION EXPECTATIONS | Best Practice Tip

In essence, most facilitators understand that having participants state their expectations early in the session involves everyone immediately, lets participants know their needs and desires are being considered, and provides an opportunity to adjust the agenda if necessary.

However, rather than simply asking each participant to state their expectations or personal objectives, consider asking a more engaging or provocative question such as:

• "What is one question you would like to have answered by the end of the session today?” (tip – record and post participants questions so that you can check them off as they are answered during the session) or
• “What are the key issues we need to make sure are covered today?" or
• "Imagine that the session is over and you are thrilled because we covered the very topics you came here to talk about. What are those topics?"
• “What excites you about this _______? What causes you concern?”
• “Where do you like to some leadership on ________ like this one?”
• “Given the purpose of this meeting, what needs to happen to make it a successful event for you?”
• “If you were facilitating this session, what is the one thing you would make sure happened?”
• In a single, brief sentence, in your own words, and from your perspective, answer the question, “why are we here?”
• “What is a burning (key; important) question that we must address to be successful?”
  

For a more complete guide to an array of questions types, for opening a session, get hold of Dorothy Strachan's “Making questions work” (2007, Strachan, Jossey-Bass).

To increase ownership of your agenda, consider returning to the participants' expectations after you have reviewed the agenda. When you do so, indicate when and how each expectation will be covered in the agenda. Likewise, highlight items that will not be discussed (for example they may fall outside of the scope of the session), but then let the participants suggest how these highlighted items should be dealt with.

If the participants' expectations are significantly different from the agenda, it may be appropriate to break and discuss alternatives with the meeting sponsor.

Learn more about techniques to get a session started right from the start in our Masterful Facilitator programme.

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CREATING ALIGNMENT TO THE STRATEGIC PLAN, By Jerome Passmore, CPF, PMP

Typically organisations send their top team off to do strategic planning and then bring in management to develop the annual tactical plans to accomplish the strategic direction chosen. Sadly too often, however, these tactical plans are not at all aligned with the priorities of the strategic plan. The result? A concept known as “strategic drift”, where great plans and strategies get no traction as the organisation is busy focusing on tactical, day-to-day issues. This gap, can be avoided, if there is alignment of resources, albeit divisions, business units, and departments to the priorities in the strategic plan. The question is more a matter of how? At MasterPLAN we use a simple approach, yet one that is fully scalable and has been applied to leading listed companies on the JSE, as well as non-profit organisations, individual departments, and even project teams. We call it the Imperative's Model. Here is how this model can help align an organisation with the priorities of the plan!

Through using our Imperatives Model, we are able to help organisations identify broad imperatives (goals), supported by measurable objectives, and executed through specific strategies and priorities. Below is an example of one business imperative and the relevant objectives and strategies from a corporate strategic plan.

Let's assume a business imperative example in the area of Financial Sustainability.

Note how the imperatives represents a broad aim, the objectives are specific, measurable targets that begin with a quantity verb (e.g., increase, decrease, reduce), and the strategies are definable actions to be taken, not outcomes to be achieved. We find that this approach is essential to developing a plan that is implementable.

However having a well-developed plan isn’t enough to achieve alignment. Strategy without accountability is not worth the paper it is written on! Through this simple example, it is not clear what business unit or department is responsible for achieving these targets or how these responsibilities fit into their overall resource plans.

To help begin the process of aligning the organisation with the plan, we suggest that each of the objectives and each of the priority strategies must be assigned to the business unit or department principally responsible for serving as the strategy sponsor to ensure each objective and it's supporting strategies are met.

Many organisations benefit simply from going through this process of creating alignment to strategy. At this point, everyone is clear on where we are going and how we plan to get there. However, the key value to strategy development comes in the implementation of the plan. To prevent this occurrence, we recommend additional steps of getting alignment.

Get each business unit or department to create their detailed strategy project plans (including budgets and resource allocations), being sure to include the objectives and strategies assigned to it from the strategic plan. Adopting a project management approach based to execution and control will ensure that the priorities are executed within the time frames laid out in the strategic plans. Project Management techniques such as developing a strategy network diagram, key deliverable schedule, and communication plan, as well as approving a structured monitoring process every three-to-six months will ensure efficient traction to delivering a well aligned organisation to the strategic plan.

In summary
By assigning responsibilities to objectives and priority strategies and then developing detailed project plans to support execution, organisations are able to drive the strategic plan down through the organisation and ensure that the organisation aligns to achieve the strategic priorities of the plan.

Is your organisation aligned with your strategic plan? We can help. Contact us at 0860 AGENDA (243632), or 011 678-5433 for assistance with your strategic plan.

Jerome Passmore is the Managing Director of MasterPLAN Consulting (Pty) Ltd. He is an IAF Certified Professional Facilitator and certified Project Management Professional, and a much sought after strategic planning facilitator and trainer in facilitation skills development.

Thanks for Reading!

We hope you have enjoyed this newsletter and found it useful. Please forward it to any friends or colleagues who might be interested. If you have any feedback, or if you have a tip you would like to share in a future issue, please email us.

Jerome

IAF Certified™ Professional Facilitator

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