The Consensus Workshop Method

The Consensus Workshop Method is the second most important facilitation process for any facilitator.

The method taps into the wisdom of the group and creates common ground among participants against a backdrop of diverse opinions, values and perspectives. The consensus reached at the workshop enables the group to forward its conversation.

The workshop embeds the question that seeks multiple, agreed-upon answers. For example, “What are the challenges you faced when dealing with customers?” At the end of the process, the facilitated group will have generated and considered a number of possible answers to the question and come to an agreement on several of them.

The five-step process begins by:

Creating the Question where Answers are Needed – This is a relatively complex process which may involve the person who activated you to facilitate the workshop. In the discussions with your ‘client’, you determine the purpose of the workshop and the expected outcome.

After the discussion, I discovered my ‘client’ wants to know the top three challenges his staff is facing when interacting with its customers. He wants to use this knowledge to acquire the most appropriate customer service training programme for his company of about 100 staff.

So, the question that needs answers is “What are the challenges you faced when dealing with customers?”.

Generating Answers for the Question – Here, the staff is invited to dig into their individual knowledge pool to provide answers for the question. There are many techniques that could be deployed to increase the efficiency of answer generation among the staff.

There are also rules of engagement for this step:

• This is an individual exercise
• Enter a answer on a slip of paper
• No debating or evaluating of answers
• Quantity is more important than quality

Gallery Walk – Next, the facilitator invites the workshop participants to look at the answers that are pasted on the wall. The objective of this step is to encourage them to create more answers by building on the answers of others. So, it is a good idea to ask them to bring along with them writing instruments and slips of papers when they begin on their gallery walk.Grouping Answers into Clusters – The facilitator lead the facilitated into the next step of the process by organising the participants into small teams and inviting them to group similar answers into clusters. Depending on the available time, two teams could be formed to do this part of the exercise.

Naming the Clusters – A third team is organised and tasked to analyse the groupings to create an agreed-upon header for each of the cluster. All the clusters have been named.

Voting to Reach a Consensus – voting is a decision-making tool that enables a group to sort through a long list of answers to identify priorities. This is an individual exercise and no discussion between participants about their vote is encouraged to ensure it takes on democratic and participative path. Because the delicate nature of this final step, the facilitator needs to identify some criteria to guide the vote so that people don't vote at cross purposes. The criteria used for deciding on the vote could include one or two (no more than two to avoid making the exercise complex):

• easiest items to complete
• lowest cost items
• first items in a logical sequence
• most important items
• most innovative items
• most important to the customer

The participants could vote more than once. This is a decision of the facilitator based on the number of clusters already identified.

At the end of the process, the facilitator leads the group into a conversation on the resolve of executing the next appropriate step.

Practice makes perfect. Good luck.

This article was written by Anthony Mok on 14 Aug 2008.
Copyright 2008. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.

The Focused Conversation Method

The Focused Conversation Method is one of the most important facilitation processes for any facilitators. The process allows the facilitator maintain a conversational focus on a topic with the facilitated while personally remaining content-neutral throughout the facilitated session.

The method, which has four stages, progressively leads the facilitated into a new space of awareness, realisation, learning, and for commitment to action through participation. The method is most useful for causing the facilitated to commit to action without the facilitator coming across as being preachy or instructional to the facilitated.

The Focused Conversation Method has been introduced to many learning communities in many different forms, stages and jargons. However, the root to all these variations can be traced to one of the Institute of Cultural Affairs’ technologies for participation called ORID. ORID stands for:

• Objective Recall



• Reflective Consideration



• Interpretive Analysis



• Decisional Intent

The facilitator begins the session by asking questions to elicit data and information on what is known about the topic. The questions invite the facilitated to participate and share their initial reactions, past experiences, and associations linking other issues to the topic. Usually, the topic is embedded in a stimulus, like a video clip, role play, sound bite, newspaper cutting, or case study, which points the facilitated towards the topic to be discussed.

Following this, the facilitated are encouraged, again through questioning, to considerate the alternative ways to interpret all the information shared and heard, experiences collected, and associations uncovered to form some kind of personal or collective conclusion about the topic. In the process, they gain awareness, realisation and learning. Towards the end, the individual or group makes a decision about how they will respond to the topic.

Let me demonstrate the use of ORID

This is a training video I usually use when I talked about the source of creativity and innovation. Let’s us begin by taking some time watching this short video chip.

Objective Recall – The facilitator asks questions to help the facilitated recall information and details observed and heard from the video clip to re-create and form a collective memory about the event.

• What words or phrases do you recall from the video clip?



• What visual images do you remember?



• What did you observe?



• What did you heard?

Reflective Consideration – Here, the facilitator encourage the facilitated to share their emotional responses and thought associations about the experience they have with the video clip.

• What really frustrated you?



• What was the high-point for you?



• Which part of the video clip makes you excited?



• What do you remember about the reaction from the other participants?



• What past experiences do you recall as you watch the clip?

Interpretive Analysis – The facilitated now thinks about the meaning, value and impact of the issues presented in the event. The purpose is to allow them to put these into perspective.

• What message the video chip attempts to send to you?



• What was the greatest learning for you?



• What was the key insight for you?



• How would you acted differently with this information?

Decisional Intent – In this final step, group or individual conceives a response, in the forms of decisions and actions that are required, and their resolve to see to their implementation.

• What could you do tomorrow to demonstrate that you have internalised the learning gained today?



• What change is needed?



• With whom will you work with to demonstrate your learning?



• With whom will you share the learning gained today?

Preparations for executing ORID are important. Time is usually needed to identify a stimulus that is workable with the topic to be discussed.

In addition, the questions need be developed in advance. I normally create a template to store these questions, which I use to prompt me through the session.

Practice makes perfect. Good luck.

This article was written by Anthony Mok on 14 Aug 2008.

Copyright 2008. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.

Facilitation Practice Opportunties

Harris Interactive, a market rearch company, needs qualified female facilitators to moderate a series of Focus Group Discussions on beauty and skincare products.

The details are as follows:

Date 26th and 27th of August 2008.
Time: 6pm to 10pm.

Please email Venu Reddy directly at vreddy@harrisinteractive.com if you are keen.

Good luck!

Action Learning Coach Workshop

Date: 12 & 13 August 2008 (Tue & Wed)

Time: 8:30am to 5:30pm

For People Who Want to:

• Understand the basic concepts of Coaching and Action Learning session
• Gain competence to be an Action Learning Coach
• Coach highly functioning Action Learning teams

A customized participant booklet will be provided.

Each participant will also receive "The Power of Action Learning" written by Dr Michael Marquardt.

Register on line at: http://www.fns.sg

Facilitating with Confidence

Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong.

The best way to learn about facilitation is to do it.

Have you had a taste of facilitation?

Do you want to facilitate with confidence, or do you want people in your organisation to facilitate with confidence?

Do you want to work more effectively with teams, groups, or stakeholders?

If so Facilitating with Confidence is for you.

This is a rare opportunity to develop your facilitation leadership skills with Australasia's finest facilitators Anne Pattillo and VivMcWaters. They bring together the best approaches and techniques infacilitation. Facilitation is no longer an added extra, it is nowpart of every one's professional kit bag.

This very successful course has hit Melbourne by storm and is now being offered for the first time in Singapore from October 2008. We invite you to consider booking into one of the limited places on our Singapore program.

We believe that good facilitation is transformational - enabling individuals to work together for growth, development and change.

Facilitating with Confidence is an opportunity to invest in a set ofskills for modern working.

For a complete programme outline refer to: http://www.facilitatingwithconfidence.com/. We will provide a comprehensive web-based set of resources to complement the three 2-day interactive workshops.

To register, or if you have any questions, email Anne or Viv on info@facilitatingwithconfidence.com.

You may want to visit Viv's blog at http://www.vivmcwaters.com.au/ and podcast website at http://www.winkipod.com.au/

Defining Facilitation - Facilitation is Unlike Others

It is important that we understand the true nature of facilitation and the characteristics of a facilitator in order to differentiate this role from those of teachers, trainers, coaches, advisors, and consultants.

Only when we could define what facilitation is could we then be able to avoid doing things that could hurt the facilitated event and the final outcome arising from the event.

So, what is facilitation?

Bens (2005: Facilitating with Ease) suggests that 'facilitation is a way of providing leadership without taking reins'.

This is different from leadership. According to Smirich and Morgan (1982: Leadership - Management of Meaning) ‘leadership is about the 'management of meaning’, and that leaders emerge because of their role in framing experience in a way that provides the basis for action; that is, by mobilizing meaning, articulating and defining what has previously remained implicit or unsaid, by inventing images and meanings that provide a focus for new attention and by consolidating, confronting or changing prevailing wisdom.’

So, the leader gets involved in the conversation to lead the team while the facilitator stays out of the conversation all together but lead the team in another way.

And who is a facilitator?

A facilitator is someone who skillfully helps a group of people understand their common objectives and assists them to plan to achieve them without taking a particular position in the discussion.

The facilitator will try to assist the group in achieving a consensus on any disagreements that pre-exist or emerge in the discussion so that it has a strong basis for future action.

There is a discription of faciliation in Chinese.

Source: China Facilitation Network

A Reflection on Facilitation

Hock Meng, the IAF Singapore Country Representative (2009), FNS Forum Manager(2009) and IAF Certified Professional Facilitator has these to share about faciliation:

A chance meeting with a friend in Nov '08 led me to an opportunity to do some sharing on what I’ve been doing for the past year. Being open and receptive to facilitation, he invited me to conduct a 1 day facilitative training workshop for his fellow mates in his community.

I thought about it for over a week and decided to let the participants do a short exercise of Tai Chi as an opener. When asked about what the team has learnt, the participants responded with, “Fluid, Co-ordination, etc...”. I reflected on the experience and drew many similarities between Tai Chi and the skills of facilitation. Here are a few of them.

One, the root of the two skill sets is derived from “Ease”. Facilitate came from the Latin word “Facillis”, which means ‘make easier’. My experience with practicing Tai Chi Chuan tells me that the execution of the moves is to be completed using energy derived from the core muscles. When facilitation is well executed, the result is one where the group feels that they had cleared the obstacles of working together with ease and that they did it all by themselves. When Tai Chi Chuan is well executed, the master uses the ease of tapping the power of his opponent to defeat him.

Two, both art forms are fluid and they flow with nature. A master facilitator reads the situation as it develops and makes adjustments to the process agilely to adapt to the changing nature of the discourse found in facilitated session. The Tai Chi master transits seamlessly and effortless between moves. Both masters are equipped with a big inventory of “moves” and ability to improvise to extract the necessary response from those they interact with.

Three, coordination is a must for both. Facilitation is planned in such a way that the atmosphere generated by the set-up of the venue, encompassing nature of the facilitation methodology used, and expanding capability of the equipment deployed are coordinated to deliver the desired outcome. Tai Chi Chuan involves a lot of hand and leg movements that can be coordinated to deliver that killer strike at a moment of notice.

Lastly, both skills seek balance. Facilitation, in totality, involves two general processes - divergence and convergence. These processes provide the participants the space to hear the viewpoints from others before arriving at a consensus on a particular course of action. One flows into the other. Tai Chi has two interrelated parts - “Yin” and “Yang”. The moves, in general, are stable; the left-hand movement is balanced with the right leg movement and the right hand movement follows after the left leg movement. All moves are executed with balance in mind.

In summary, when a facilitated session is well executed, the group is at ease in handling issues together. The session is smooth, seamlessly coordinated and balanced.

So, what is the belief system of a facilitator? Here is an attempt by my trainees trying to answer this fundamental question:

This article was written by Anthony Mok on 28 Jul and Updated on 23 Oct 2008 and 5 Jan 2009.

The portion entitled 'A Reflection on Facilitation' was written by Hock Meng and edited by Anthony Mok.

Copyright 2008. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.

The Art of Questioning

The Genres of Questions

In the course of our training career, we could have gotten our course participants to play an experiential game, do a workbook exercise, watch a training film, and act in a role play.

The purpose of these activities is to create opportunities for the trainer to debrief his participants. So, after watching a training video, the trainer makes an attempt to question his participants on what they had seen and heard, and though questioning, participants are encouraged to recall, think, and share their insights with others. In the process, they get inspired and learn new concepts.

What differentiate a facilitator from a trainer is that he uses questions more frequently and extensively in the course of his career. A facilitator needs to avoid boring his audience with the same ‘genre’ of questions and more importantly, uses different questions to ‘lead’ the interaction without taking the reins. This means his line of work calls for a greater range of questions to be used and a higher dexterity in applying these questions. For the facilitator, these needs have elevated questioning into an art.

There are many ‘genres’ of questions. Personally, I know of six. One of these, which we are very familiar with, is the ‘Fact-finding’ genre of questions. They come in the form of ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘where’ and ‘how’.

Here are some examples:

‘What kind of roles each of these actors played in the video?’

‘Amongst the actors, who is the one that comes across as most defensive?’

‘When did John say ‘You are the source of our difficulties’?’

‘Where had this conversation taken place?’

‘How did Jamie resolves the conflict between John and Mary?’

You can see that this type of questions is very direct and is designed to verify data and to gather information about the current situation.

A lesser known genre of questions is the ‘Third-party’ questions. These questions are created by the facilitator to help his workshop participants express their personal thoughts and other sensitive information through projection.

Here are some examples:

Conrad Raj, in a recent article in Today, commented that the Government should take control of the bus and train services from the commercial entities. Otherwise we cannot have a world-class transportation system. What are your thoughts about his comment?’

‘Some people feel that the government should lower GST to boost retail sale in the country. How does that sound to you?’

There is some concern about the recent decision by the government to delay building projects. Can you relate to that concern?

You will notice that there are two parts in the structure of a ‘Third Party’ question. The 1st part is the quotation and this is followed by a question seeking the participant’s opinion.

Usually, facilitators use this genre of questions to avoid putting their participants in a corner because they may be sensitive about expressing their inner thoughts about a sensitive topic. By using an already expressed opinion from another person or taking a quotation from a published article, we could uncover the participant’s thoughts in an indirect manner and non threatening way.

So, instead of asking 'what you think about lowering GST to boost retail sale?', which is direct and threatening, we use ‘some people feel that the government should lower GST to boost retail sale in the country. How does that sound to you?’, which is indirect and non threatening since someone else has already expressed this need and any additional opinions on this subject would not identify the participant as being the 1st to raise it. His opinion is nothing more than a projection of a public opinion.

The design and implementation of this kind of questions needs a bit more finesse on the part of the facilitator. Thus, it is always good to create your 'third party' questions ahead of the facilitated workshop, and practice always makes perfect.

This article is written by Anthony Mok on 26 Jul 2008.
Copyright 2008. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.