Exceed expectations: choose different

Welcome to the 2nd issue of (Fl)awesome Facilitator, a weekly riff about facilitation, an essential skill for work and life. Thanks for reading and watching!

How are your beautiful choices going this year?

So far, so beautiful for me.

Yes, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. And I think you’ll agree with this one.

Last time I wrote to you*, I’d finished designing a ‘big picture’ workshop for a team and said I was looking forward to facilitating it. As we drove to the venue together, I found out that my client was feeling a little differently.

‘My expectations are low,’ she said.

Challenge accepted.

At the end of the first day, she was taking pictures of the workshop canvas her team had started to create.

‘This was terrific!’ she said as she snapped a photo of what the team agreed success looked like for them.

Note she said ‘was’. That’s because she was talking about how the team reached agreement on their final set of success measures. If she’d been talking about the result, she would have said ‘is’.

It was a process that was vastly different to her original agenda which had them debating success criteria as a group.

🚩 Not the most helpful way to start a three-day workshop 🚩

Left unchanged, this is how it risked unfolding.

❌ Strong opinions doing battle.

❌ Eyes drop, quiet discomfort.

❌ Agreement by resignation.

‘Would you be open to doing this another way?’ I asked.

She made the beautiful choice to accept the process I suggested.

Her agenda and my process meant she got the results she wanted because the team was engaged.

We’d never worked together before. It was vital that the team’s first activity would help them to connect with each other, to the workshop purpose and give them a clear result – in this case, six criteria for success.

They used this success criteria regularly over the next two days to sense check their thinking, filter their ideas and inform their decisions.

Beautiful choices are worth it, even if they scare us or take us out of our comfort zone.

When we broke for lunch on day two, I asked how the workshop was meeting her expectations.

‘They’ve been exceeded!’

I wonder if your expectations could be exceeded if you chose a facilitator who does things differently to what you usually do.

It could be a beautiful choice.

Thanks for reading this far.

Stay (fl)awesome!