Co-facilitators
Updated July 29, 2020
If the facilitator is like the figurehead who can't leave the front of the room, the co-facilitator is the special forces that can go anywhere and do anything. Need more stickies? Does a group need help? The co-facilitator keeps the machine running.
You might think of a co-facilitator as like a teacher's aide. The teacher is at the front of the room. The teacher's aide provides assistance to the teacher and help people in the room who miss an instruction or need help with an activity.
Where every workshop requires a facilitator and collector, a workshop needs co-facilitators when the number of attendees grows too large for one facilitator to manage on their own.
When you do have co-facilitators, it's important that they never lead facilitation of the overall workshop on their own. They should only support the facilitator. The facilitator is only a figurehead, but they're authority to own the clock and manage participation requires that they are ever the only facilitator.
Do these things
Ask follow-up questions
Assist participants with activities
Generate participation
Don't do these things
Collect workshop outputs
Participate
Demonstrate activities
How each role compares to the others
To achieve the good, collaborative environments that workshops provide, each role must play their part. There are five responsibilities each role can be accountable for (table 1).
Learn more about workshops and collaboration
Collaborative Product Design collects 11 practical tools and hundreds of tips from the trenches that help teams collaborate on strategy, user research, and UX, ideally suited for agile teams and lean organizations.
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