4 Skills For Workshop Facilitation

As well as managing creative uncertainty, there are also times when you need to ‘ground’ ideas and make them tangible to move a project or discussion forward. As a facilitator and objective observer, so you’re in a perfect position to spot connections between ideas, in a way that participants are not able to because they’re too close to the content.

You may not be involved in generating ideas directly, but don’t be mistaken that you don’t have a creative part to play. As Steve Jobs famously said, “creativity is just connecting things”, and this is an important role that you’ll have in a workshop. Maria Popova, curator of the brilliant resource Brainpickings, champions combinatorial creativity, explaining that new ideas take shape from building blocks of content, insight and knowledge and the key skill is being able to combine them and see patterns where others are unable to.

This means that you’ll start to hone your ability to synthesise content, both on-the-spot in workshops, and afterwards when you’re reviewing the content that was created. You’ll identify key themes and pick up on interesting points of conflict that could serve the basis for further problem-solving.

A way to practice this is to develop your “integrative thinking”, a skill that Roger Martin wrote about in The Opposable Mind. The idea of integrative thinking is to get used to holding opposite viewpoints at the same time, without feeling the need to quickly decide between them. Instead, you use this creative tension to develop something even better.

Good synthesis can only be as good as the content, so asking excellent questions, listening well and being able to handle ambiguity are important in the lead up.

What other skills can you practice regularly to help you improve your workshop facilitation?