Business Transformation Tips

For change to be successful, it must engage those that will live the change. The number of individuals that need to be engaged varies from project to project. In all cases, this engagement requires great facilitation skills. If you asked any other consultants at organization design firm, ON THE MARK, I think they would agree that their facilitation skills are just as valuable as their organization design skills.

Here are the top five facilitation techniques consultants do well to employ during a transformation project.

1. Ask Great Questions

There are two key reasons for engaging individuals within the organization:

1. To tap into the wisdom contained within the individuals that inhabit it.
2. To allow individuals to get to the answers for themselves.

A great way of achieving both objectives is asking questions. It is easy for anyone to tell people their perspective or to give them the answer, but it is important to stay out of telling as much as possible. Instead, a question gets individuals thinking about the answer for themselves, meaning they own the answer and therefore solution. It also means you have the best chance at leaching the wisdom from them. There are many best practices in literature regarding effective question asking such as asking single questions at a time, allowing for think time, not interrupting to name a few.

2. 80% of Your Focus Should be on ‘Process’

Bringing people together, whether it be 2 or 200, requires structure to get the most valuable content out of individuals and focus them on what needs to be focused on. It is the job of the facilitator to provide this structure and keep people on task.

There are mixed views in how facilitation plans are developed, whether you involve the group in that design or take the lead on it yourself. However, in both scenarios while everyone else is pouring their knowledge and experience into the task, the facilitator should be focused on supporting the client in completing the task and thinking about what happens next.

3. Keep the Methodology in Context

Typically, large transformation initiatives use some kind of organization design methodology. Organization design is a complex thing that without a process can seem overwhelming as to what gets done first and what thing gets done next. It is the job of the facilitator to put this process in perspective to ensure that everyone involved understands where they are in the process, what they need to be focused on at that moment and what they will eventually work on later.

Despite doing this the facilitator will no doubt continue to receive questions about when we will cover something or unconsciously drifting into another conversation better suited for later. It is your job to point to where we will address the particular issue and keep the process in context.

4. Be Aware of Individual Agendas

Change creates an environment for opportunism, while in the process it is not unusual for people to exploit the process for their own gains. Some people do this more deliberately than others. In many cases this process is unconscious. It is important for the facilitator to expose this behavior. One of the best ways of doing so is to publicly discuss the issue. If you see something, there are a number of things you can do. You could use your powers of question asking to challenge the idea being put forward or you could add some other individuals with less bias to the group that will challenge the ideas.

In some cases, individuals will appeal to you as the facilitator in a private setting to try and influence the situation. The best way of dealing with this is to agree to discuss it with the group. This keeps you out of the content and impartial.

5. Transparency and Ownership of Content

Ensuring a decision is reached and recorded is vital especially during an organization design project that, by its very nature produces masses of information. There is often lots of tasks running in parallel and the length of a project can span months. This requires the facilitator to develop methods to capture this information so that it can be captured for posterity and to ensure everyone can visually see that they are on the same page about what has been decided. As the facilitator, you will often need to point back to this documentation in order to remind people of the decisions they made.

There are many facilitation techniques, styles and methods out in the world, but these are just several techniques that are handy in the tool-box of any facilitator taking on a transformation project. If you are a facilitator are there any others that feel are vital to your success?