Facilitating Collaborative Conversations

"Facilitate" – a word often misunderstood, yet undeniably potent. Many believe it simply means running a meeting. However, true facilitation is a much broader, more impactful practice. 

Facilitate /fəˈsiləˌtāt/ Verb To make something easier to achieve.

To facilitate effectively, we start with these two questions:

• What am I trying to make easier...and for whom?
• How would I know if it is easier for them?

When a team needs to work together to achieve a common goal - whether working on a piece of product development, addressing a process inefficiency, or deciding where to eat lunch - effective conversation is a key component of their collaboration.

And good collaborative conversations don’t happen by accident. There’s a shape to these conversations, a lightweight structure that can give you some guidelines as you help a team navigate collaboration:

• Context - Agree on the goal and need for collaboration
• Diverge - Explore the challenges and opportunities
• Converge - Narrow down the options
• Action - Select the next actions

Each of these phases has a distinct purpose and a set of tools that we’ll explore in this post. Together, they increase the confidence and engagement of the team as they work toward their goal. Skipping or rushing any phase puts the overall goal at risk as the buy-in of team members wanes.

“Facilitation is an improvisatory act within an agreed and negotiated structure” — Dale Hunter

Remember the definition of facilitate: to make something easier to achieve. Recognizing and using these phases will help you facilitate (make it easier to achieve) the team’s next step and, ultimately, the goal.

Context

The first phase is Context. This is the foundation on which the rest of the collaborative interaction rests - it’s as critical as the wheels on a car being aligned before a road trip.

Purpose: The questions to be answered in this phase are:

• What is our goal?
• Who needs to collaborate to achieve it?

You’re aiming for agreement on the desired outcome with buy-in from the participants and a collective ownership of the process to get there.

"A goal properly set is halfway reached." - John Doerr

Tools: The tools for this phase depend on the situation:

• If these questions have already been answered previously, they may just need to be re-stated for a reminder and opportunity to refine.
• Other times, there is critical exploration here and you may need to facilitate through all four phases on these two questions before moving forward with the four phases to address the goal.

Pitfalls: The main pitfall in this phase is to assume alignment and buy-in. We can unintentionally facilitate this by not soliciting feedback, declaring the answers, or presenting the answers in a way that isn’t easily editable. This is why writing them on a whiteboard is very helpful - the medium implies that it’s editable and open for discussion.

When there are latent reservations or confusion about the goal of the collaboration, they often come out during later phases. When you observe this, you can steer the conversation back to the Context phase to explore it further before proceeding.

Once the foundation of the Context is established, we can move onto exploring the options in the Diverge phase.

Diverge

Purpose: Here, we collaboratively explore the possibilities, discovering options for “whats” and “hows” to make progress toward our shared goal. As you can imagine from the word “diverge,” the discussion can vary widely and include many options that could conflict with each other. This may feel a bit messy - it’s part of the creative process.

Tools: To diverge well, ideas need to be invited and allowed, even ones that might be unfeasible, expensive, or undesired. If ideas are discarded or eliminated in the diverge phase, the creative free flow of ideas is short-circuited, which will result in poorer options and results. (Hang on, though…we’ll reduce options in the next phase, Converge.)

"To have a great idea, have a lot of them." - Thomas Edison

Here are several practical ideas to encourage divergence:

• Brainstorming principles and practices
• The “Yes, and” practice that builds upon others’ ideas
• Mind mapping, visualizing connected ideas
• Silent sticky storming, inviting introverted thinkers’ and quieter participants’ ideas to come out
• 1-2-4-All, bringing energy to the conversation while balancing introverted and extroverted thinkers

Why do this if someone already knows the best solution? If we’re in complexity, that solution may not actually be the best; an alternative may be better, or an improvement could be offered. If we stay in either-or thinking (do this option or don’t), we will tend to make poorer decisions. (For more decision-making tactics like this, check out our newsletter Better Decisions > Perfect Decisions.)

Additionally, if we’re trying to employ the multiplying power of teams, collectively exploring (and selecting, the next phase) a solution is a strong way to build collective ownership. Diverging as a team is a tremendous way to build the team’s self-organizing muscle as they learn how to make decisions together.

Converge

Purpose: We suspended judgment of ideas in the Diverge phase; we need to bring it back in the Converge phase, narrowing down the options.

Pitfalls: If we jump into convergence too soon, we risk shutting down the free flow of creative ideas from the Diverge phase. Yet, if we never shift to Converge, we won’t make a decision, try an action, learn, and make progress. Observing and sensing the best moment to make the shift is part of your role as a facilitator.

Tools: Here are some practical ideas for facilitating the convergence phase:

• Dot voting
• Focus mapping, mapping the value and feasibility of the ideas
• 35 game
• 25/10 crowd sourcing
• Min specs

In the end, the team will often discover a simple next step is the most effective one, as it enables quick action and a short learning loop.

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." - Leonardo da Vinci

By thoughtfully applying these methods, you'll empower your team to not only choose the best path forward but also to be invested in its success.

Action

Purpose: After narrowing down the options, it’s time to select the most potent action to take. Often, this is a good time to revisit the goal from the Context phase to test whether the proposed action will make meaningful progress in that direction.

"An idea without action is merely speculation." - H. Jackson Brown Jr.

Tools: The key aspect of the Action phase is clarifying the selected action. At this point, you are facilitating the group having a collective and shared understanding of the steps that will be taken, who will do the work, and when it will happen. We strongly recommend using the Change Hypothesis to encapsulate all the critical elements of the action. If more clarity or creativity is needed, consider briefly revisiting one or more of the earlier phases (Context, Diverge, Converge). 

We wouldn’t be good agilists if we didn’t create an empirical learning loop! :) This is the time for the team to plan when and how they will revisit the selected action to identify how effective it was, learn, and plan their next steps using the same 4 phases: Context, Diverge, Converge, and Action.

So, now it's your turn! Here are a few steps you can take to start using these ideas in practice:

• In the next collaborative conversation, observe where the four phases are happening or are skipped. What are the indicators? What is the effect?

• Before diving into the next collaborative conversation, ask someone to re-state the goal or desired outcome of the conversation.

• Pick a Divergence tool and use it in your next collaborative conversation.

• Apply a Convergence tool in a future collaborative conversation.

• Use the Change Hypothesis to help a team gain clarity on an action they’re planning to take.

And that's how you can get Unstuck in your facilitation!

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