Frame-Facilitate-Finish: the secret structure to better collaboration
Improve collaboration for better team outcomes
Published November 1, 2020
A favorite story of mine:
One nice day, three craftsmen laid brick for a wall. A priest on a stroll stops to appreciate their work and asks what they’re doing. Says one bricklayer, “we’re building a school”.
The next day, only two bricklayers worked at the wall. Say one to the other: “why isn’t the third bricklayer here?”
“He was fired.”
“But he was one of the finest bricklayers I’ve ever seen. Why was he fired?”
“Because we’re building a cathedral.”
Most collaboration focuses on how you will facilitate and manage the discussion. However, when you focus on facilitation, you ignore the most important parts of any collaboration: a frame for how you will collaborate and how you will finish.
Collaboration has a structure, and when you take advantage of that structure, you can improve how well you collaborate with your team. Collaboration has three stages:
Frame
Facilitate
Finish
Good collaboration has a repeatable structure: Frame the conversation, Facilitate the discussion, and Finish with a decision
Collaboration always follows this structure. You see this structure in conversations. In a store, you say to the salesperson, “I have a question about these shirts.” That frames the question.
Then, you facilitate your discussion. “Do you have any red ones in medium?”
“No”
“How about blue?”
“We sure do.”
The conversation finishes when you make a decision: “I’ll buy a blue shirt.”
To optimize how you collaborate, to begin, you imagine the end.
Collaboration starts at the finish
Collaboration means the team works together to arrive at a consensus on some issue. The team makes a collective decision you can capture as an explicit outcome.
To make sure collaboration ends well, identify the explicit outcome you want to capture. Is it a single thing or a list of things? In what format will you capture the outcome:
Words
Diagrams
Sketches
Worksheets or canvases
Once you can describe the type of outcome you want, your ready to set the stage for successful collaboration.
Good frames summarize the collaboration
When you properly frame a discussion, you let participants know what you will talk about and why they should bother. Good frames include four parts:
What you're doing
What you'll end up with when you're done, the outcome
Why it's important
How you will get to the outcome
For example, if you sketch interfaces, set a strong foundation by saying:
We will sketch the screen together (what you're doing)
When we're done, we'll have a wireframe we've all agreed on (what you'll end up with)
Sketching the screen together will make sure we all agree on what we're building and why (why it's important)
To get started, we will sketch individually on paper and then share our sketches with each other
The answers to these four questions set the foundation for good collaboration. You don’t need to provide the frame in a list format. During casual conversations and working sessions, use your own words, and make it natural. for example:
“While we work on the new system, we want to make sure we don’t end up with the same problems we have today, so let’s make a list of all the things we would like to change.”
Good frames enable good collaboration
A four-part frame seems like a lot of build-up to sketch a screen. However, when you tell everyone what the collaboration will look like, you set three, important expectations.
First, you explain they will participate to shift their thinking from observer to collaborator. Participants imagine themselves contributing to the discussion.
Second, when participants know the outcome and why it's important, they understand why they should care. This encourages them to invest in the discussion and provides an incentive to pay attention.
Lastly, when you explain how you will collaborate, participants know what to expect. For example, if they expect to answer questions before you sketch, they won't wonder why you're talking about user needs before you sketch the screen. When the team knows what will happen, they can trust you while you work toward the end goal.
More important, you seed a psychologically safe place where everyone can collaborate. When you frame the question, it answers the nagging questions echoing in your participants’s heads. Why am I here? Why should I care? How will this work? Will I look foolish? Soothe those nagging worries, or participants won’t have the mental energy to collaborate.
For any conversation, meeting, working session, or workshop, Frame-Facilitate-Finish, and you’ll end up with better participation and investment and walk out with more intended outcomes.
Anyway…
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