#12 Managing "difficult" collaborators – part 2
Sometimes, a collaborator just doesn’t don’t understand what you’re trying to do. This article has five(ish) ways to prevent it from becoming an bigger problem.
I don’t understand what you want from me.
Have you ever sat in a room full of people who are busily working away and felt like you’re outside the loop? Like you missed the memo and don’t know what’s going on? It’s disenfranchising and disengaging. People in this situation often draw into themselves and go silent, or they take control of events and turn them into something they do understand, which can pull everything off track for you.
Here are five (and a bit) ways you can avoid falling into this trap.
1. Craft Starting Questions
I learned this approach to starting questions from a book called “Secrets of Facilitation” which goes into the technique in great depth. You can read more about it in another issue of the studio; #10 Starting a conversation off well”, but in summary:
Starting questions are the final things you say before you open up a general conversation or send collaborators off to talk about something. They set the scene and give an easy “in” to enable people to engage.
A starter question has three parts;
Explain the purpose of the conversation
Build an image linking a scenario to that purpose
Ask the question you want answered
An example might be…. We want to understand how we go from an international student applying to them arriving on campus. Think about the last time you processed a student application. When was the very first moment you were aware of the application, and what happened next?
I recommend crafting starting questions for each exercise you’re going to run to ensure you can create momentum behind group discussions quickly.
2. Keep Things Manageable
People can’t keep too many things in focus for very long, and they can’t focus on any one thing for very long.
When planning a workshop, it's essential to keep things in manageable chunks. Don't let people go for more than 20 minutes without facilitator contact and steering. If they misunderstand something, they can easily deviate from what you planned in that period of time. It’s best to course-correct quickly.
It's also best practice to keep presentations to less than 20 minutes. After that, people switch off, and they stop absorbing the information. So if you need more than 20 minutes to communicate it, you either need to reconsider how you're doing it or accept that you're in a presentation session, not a workshop session, and plan accordingly.
3. Create a Common Language
Every group develops its own insider language. For teams that have worked together for a while or are in established businesses, they’ll walk into the room with one. However, even a fresh group of people will have inside jokes and insider terms by the end of one day of collaboration. It’s part of team bonding, part of the creation of an “us”.
Sometimes that will work for you. Terms become shorthand for whole concepts; recently a group I was working with ended up talking about “The Dome” as an analogy for aligned experiences, because one collaborator was going to CenterParcs with their family and now… it’s in the official documentation!
Sometimes, it works against us, particularly when someone new enters the conversation and needs to be brought up to speed. The language can enforce that they are not yet one of “us”, or just be difficult to understand.
As the facilitator, it’s your job to judge what terms or expressions might be unknown to someone, get clear definitions, and support collaborators in finding a common language that is inclusive of everyone there; there is a balance to strike between language that creates exclusion through unification and that that establishes the inclusion of being an insider.
Using your common language will give everyone a better idea of what’s going on and bring them along on the journey with you.
4. Be flexible with the route to your destination
Sometimes, despite your best efforts, an exercise won't work because participants don't understand why you're framing it that way. In these cases, it's important to recognise when it's time to cut and run and bring in a new exercise.
A clear intent for your workshop or event will help you pivot and cope with these situations.
The destination is important. The route has to be fluid.
5. Keep the instructions on the screen
Finally, and perhaps most practically, when you ask people to complete a task, keep those instructions visible.
It’s super tempting to give instructions, flip to an example, and leave the example rather than the instructions there for people to see. If people need to see both, you’ll need to work out how that can happen; if you’re in a well-equipped space, you may have two screens or a handout. If you’re on a more ad hoc basis, you could ask one person from each group to write it down.
And, of course, keep those instructions concise, clear and comprehensible.
Bonus tip…
Since writing this piece last week, I’ve been planning a slightly complex session (complex because I’m a central collaborator and the facilitator, which is never a recommended setup), and one final tip has occurred to me. Talk someone else through your plan. Note down where you have to reach for a description or if you need to take a couple of runs to explain an activity. If you can’t explain the flow concisely the first time, you probably don’t have it nailed yet. An agenda is like a good story. It must link logically and coherently and flow until you see the reveal the whole picture.
The Facilitation Studio
The Facilitation Studio is a Sunart Works initiative that provides facilitation coaching and training. Sunart Works also offers consultation services to help your organisation co-create resilient product and service strategies that amplify intentional change. Get in touch if you want me to work with you on a challenge!
That’s it for this issue; so until next time, Happy Facilitating!