5 valuable tips from Quentin Lebel, Senior Facilitator | Strategic & Organisational Design | Founder émancipio & Behind The Crux
The profession of facilitator as such is going to be divided between those who accompany in-depth transformations to help a company and its business model evolve, and those who offer short services, responding to an ad hoc problem
You’ve been a designer of collaborative approaches for nearly 10 years. What mistakes have you seen newbie facilitators make?
Thinking for the group
New facilitators tend to put themselves in the place of the group, they even find it hard not to influence it. Even with years of experience, we can be tempted to steer a group’s thinking in one direction or another, usually on the basis of our own experience. However, it is essential to let the group make its own way, to learn to surpass itself.
Producing a deliverable without recommendations
As I’ve learnt, some facilitators often deliver a « raw » product to their clients, but I don’t think that’s enough. In addition to the experience gained and the progress made by the group, the real value of the intervention lies in the facilitator’s work of summarising and deciphering the ways in which the group operates (interactions, blockages). It is essential to debrief the sponsors on what happened during the collaborative sessions, and then work with them to develop recommendations for the organisation. This enables us to bring out the issues and identify the levers available to the client. This is undoubtedly the real added value of the work of a facilitator.
Forgetting to empower the group
Our job as facilitators is to develop the skills of teams and promote a design culture within organisations. The key to solving a problem is to involve the individual at every stage of the process.
Each person is a stakeholder in the construction of the solution, and must absolutely take part in it. This requires a profound change in our current ways of thinking and in the culture we have inherited.
Underestimating preparation time
Junior facilitators tend to underestimate the time needed to prepare for assignments, which guarantee that collaborative sessions are a success.
Firstly, in the framing and codesign phase with the sponsors, who themselves underestimate the intensity of this phase. Then in the design and preparation of the collaborative experience, because every detail can have a positive – or negative – impact on the group.
Lack of foresight
Sponsors and facilitators are often so preoccupied with preparing for the big day that they forget that the real work begins immediately after the workshop: What can we do with all this material? How can it be turned into concrete action? What are the consequences of this time spent together producing material?
I encourage facilitators to encourage their clients to answer these kinds of questions at the design stage.
Indeed, they sometimes find it difficult to assess the richness and positive applications of working in collaborative mode. It’s up to us, as facilitators, to keep the sponsor in a certain frame of mind: taking a step back and finding the time needed to be two or three steps ahead of their organisation.
What trends are you currently seeing among your customers?
Our customers need meaning. They need to recreate a connection. Post Covid, we need to continue emphasising relationships between people, the place of each individual and the experiential aspect of our business.
AI is going to have a decisive impact on organisations, as it will develop our ability to dissect issues (data visualisation, simulation, faster exploration, etc.). It will help us to grasp the complexity of a subject. This is a real challenge for small companies, as it will require know-how that they don’t have in-house.
The real added value in our business is to get the people involved to develop solutions that meet the challenges of an organisation, an ecosystem or even our planet. On the other hand, these approaches are demanding because they mobilise a large number of stakeholders long term: sponsors will need to become extremely tenacious.
As a result, the profession of facilitator will be divided between those who accompany in-depth transformations to help an organisation and its business model evolve, and those who offer short services, responding to an ad hoc problem.