Facilitators
Updated July 29, 2020
The facilitator frames the conversation, guides activities, follows rabbit holes, and brings everyone back on track. The Facilitator owns the clock and runs the workshop.
Because owning the clock and managing participation take all of your time, you cannot both facilitate a workshop and collect findings. You will always need to designate a second person to collect findings.
If you do not designate a separate collector, you will manage the workshop and discussions poorly, or you will collect findings poorly. Either way, you waste valuable workshop time.
Facilitators can shift from workshop to workshop and activity to activity. Where I work, our workshops will cover a range of user experience, strategy, and technical topics. As the workshop changes from a UX activity to a strategy activity, it's natural for the facilitator to change. What the facilitator does remains the same, but a different person now fills that role.
Changing facilitators can also give you a much-needed break. Managing a room full of competing egos requires a lot of energy and focus. To keep yourself energized and focused, plan to have someone else facilitate an activity every so often.
Do these things
Introduce each workshop module
Frame discussion
Ask follow-up questions
Demonstrate activities
Move discussions to "parking lot"
Close discussions
Generate participation
Manage participation
Don't do these things
Collect workshop outputs
Participate
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.
Visit the book website to learn more or buy on Amazon.