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Hello again!

Thanks for coming to today’s session. As a follow up, as this is facilitation training, I thought I would share with you the thoughts that are running through my head as the person who just facilitated that session with you.
 
There are some sessions where you come out of it and know you have smashed it, and there are others where you don’t know if that hit home or not - this session falls into the latter for me.
 
Self-doubt is something that I often suffer from following workshops. For me it is closely related to point 5 on our list ‘recognising that success is that group learns rather than you getting your point across’. It is much easier to know if you have got your point across than it is to know whether the group has learnt anything or not. I think that is one reason that people often drift back to presentation rather than facilitation - it’s easier to know how you are doing!
 
Whenever I do experience doubt like this, and then get feedback from the participants, I’m often surprised to hear that the group has learnt more than I expected. What I have learnt over the years is that what you can reflect on is the process: it’s through your process that you create a space for the group to learn. 
 
So, reflecting on my process, I think the exercise gave the opportunity for everyone to think about how to combine different facilitation skills, and the opportunity for us to co-explore the three topics we had identified as priorities. What I didn’t do was build in enough time for us to reflect between each group’s contributions. Had we done so, I think we would have identified sooner that we were picking up good facilitation practice but not necessarily tackling the topics in much depth. 
 
Since 'getting the group to learn rather than getting the content across’ is one of our topics, I thought I’d share some more thoughts on it. 
 
(Interestingly, as a facilitation aside, I usually find that any session I facilitate prompts a whole series of thoughts to share afterwards. It’s interesting that in presentation, the thinking work is in the prep, but in facilitation the thinking work can be in the follow up)
 
I think there are four ingredients to getting the group to learn:
 
A list of shared learning goals - they and you need to know what it is you are setting out to achieve. Prioritising this list helps focus the conversation around the most important topics, helping to maximise the chance of the learning being relevant to the whole group.
 
Bring people back to this list - As you go through your conversations, you need to periodically come back to the list and ask what have we learnt about each of these topics. Ask is the topic still relevant. Has something new arisen and might it be more important.
 
Holding people to account to the list - as part of the contracting, establish an understanding that it’s your job to be keep the conversation on track.
 
Keep the conversation difficult - this last part takes the most courage, but in my experience it is where the facilitation becomes transformative. I work to the hypothesis that we only learn when we do difficult things. As a facilitator, if we want the group to learn then we need to make sure they are having difficult conversations; that they are trying difficult things. If it is all getting too easy then they are not learning. 
 
Interestingly, keeping the challenge up is a good way to deal with egos in the room. People might dominate a space in which they feel confident, but push them towards tackling something they find difficult and their approach can change. 
 
My intention is that in our subsequent workshops we can get into this more bumpy terrain of keeping the level of challenge up. 
 
In the mean time we will have a pause until we run the second half of this training, which means you should have time to practise facilitation in real contexts. I urge you to challenge yourselves, and to support each other in doing so, ideally in your working threes, so that you are making the most of the opportunity to learn. 
 
Good luck, and I look forward to hearing your reflections on your experiences when we re-group. 
 
Bye for now
Oli
Copyright © 2020 Oliver Broadbent, All rights reserved.


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