Our Approach to Meeting Facilitation

 Good meeting facilitation is not about a better meeting. It is about producing better results.

• • You want a better strategic plan.
  • You want more insights from your advisory board.
  • You want issues resolved
  • You want action plans committed to.

Our customers are Senior Executives and Boards of Directors. We design meetings for them. No icebreakers or games for us.

Every Meeting Deserves Personal Attention

Understanding what you want to achieve is the key to our success. If you review our proposal, and you aren’t convinced that we can help, then we don’t deserve your business.

 To make sure that we can give you what you want we follow a six-step approach to meeting facilitation.

 Step 1: The Initial Consultation

The process begins with an initial consultation. We start with a dialogue to make sure that we really understand what you want to accomplish. Many clients find that this discussion helps them clarify their thinking.

We believe that it is also important to understand what you don’t want.

• • Are there facilitation techniques that you don’t like?
  • Are there things that other facilitators have done that didn’t work for you?

Only after we are clear about “what you want” do we start to talk about “how we can do it”. We can now float a series of “trial balloons” describing different facilitation approaches. We use your feedback to build a proposal outline of what is the best approach for you.

 Step 2: Meeting Facilitation Proposal

In the second step, we prepare a detailed facilitation proposal. The proposal includes.

• • Table of Contents
  • Background: Where we demonstrate our understanding of your organization.
  • Goals for the Session: A succinct description of what you want to accomplish.
  • Pre-Work: A description of any pre-work including pre-reads, interviews, and pre-session surveys. May also include other individual tasks like preparing a list of major competitors.
  • Session Design: A step-by-step description of everything to be done from session opening to session close.  Includes a description of what will be captured for the meeting report.
  • Professional Fees: We quote a per diem rate and the number of days billable as “not to exceed.” We also describe how expenses will be handled.

Step 3: Pre-Work

Effective pre-work is essential for a successful meeting.

• • Surveys and Interviews: Interviews or surveys provide a weath of information. They not only provide better quality input, they also save time.
  • The facilitator will sort and summarize all of this data. He or she will then publish an Interview Report or Survey Report as appropriate.
  • Business Articles:  We sometimes use a business article or book to organize the meeting. This is often at the client’s request.
  • Briefing Book: If there will be a lot of presentations we recommend creating a briefing book. We strip back the presentations by including most of the details in the book. The book is to be reviewed in advance of the meeting.
  • Other Pre-Work: As described in the proposal.

Step 4: On-site Facilitation

 “No plan ever survives first contact with the enemy.” Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke. There is however much that can be done to succeed.

• • We will follow the agenda and keep the group focused, on time, and on task.
  • If lists of ideas get too long, we priority rank them.
  • If something important comes up that is not on the agenda, we capture it and put it in the parking lot.
  • The techniques we use have been used many times before. We know which techniques work with Senior Executives and we know how to make them work.
  • However, when we facilitate your meeting, we will work closely with you to adapt as events unfold. 
  • At the end of the session, we like to collect feedback in terms of Last Thoughts.

 Step 5: The Meeting Report and Action Plan

A well-crafted meeting report is worth its weight in gold. It should be well structured and well written to make the information more valuable and accessible. It needs to capture.

• • What we did,
  • What we decided,
  • And what we have committed to do.

What we committed to do becomes your Action Plan. It describes who, will do what, by when. It also captures the rationale for the action, and how you will measure success.

 On Note Taking.

• • We abandoned flip charts for note taking long ago.
  • We now record meeting notes with a laptop computer hooked up to a data projectoror digital display.
  • These notes are the basis of your meeting report and action plan.

Step 6: Follow up

After all of our hard work together we want to ensure that everything is as it should be. We believe a follow-up call is the right way to end our engagement with you. It is also a great time to discuss what worked well, and what we might want to do differently next time.

Our approach constantly evolves based on this feedback.

 How to pick the right meeting facilitator

 Some things to think about.

• • We tailor our approach to fit the client. We do not use a cookie-cutter approach, and we will not respond to blind RFPs.
  • We are always willing to talk to prospective clients and do not charge for this consultation.
  • If you ask for a proposal, we will prepare a thoughtful and detailed proposal so that you can make the right choice. If we are not the right choice, now is the time to find out. It will be better for us all.
  • We are always happy to provide referrals to help you make your best choice.
  • We have meeting facilitators in both the United States and Canada and have  worked in fourteen countries.

  To pick the right facilitator, you need to critically review what they are proposing to do. Experience shows, you should have a feeling of confidence that they have done it before and can do it again.

 Contact Us

Do you have an important meeting coming up?

Please Contact Us The initial consultation is always free.