Service designers are quite dynamic. Depending on the team and project they’re working on, a service designer’s typical day can vary greatly. They engage in a lot of problem-solving activities, including facilitating workshops, and designing end-to-end services.
As a service designer, the discipline of design workshop facilitation particularly interests me. It involves active listening, an invaluable life skill that connects us to others. According to Ted Speaker Julian Treasure in “The Importance of Listening in Everyday Life”, connectedness has been shown to be the key to human happiness.
Recently, I facilitated a service design workshop where various customer challenges were tackled by multidisciplinary teams made up of government professionals from 30+ entities. The challenges were addressed to encourage participants to build new service bundles based on their shared subject matter expertise. The program provided a hands-on experience for the participants to use their newly acquired methods and tools. The learnings and feedback received from this workshop led me to take a deeper dive through the basics of facilitation.
In simple terms, facilitation is making things easier, creating a container for collaboration, listening actively and attentively, and drawing the right balance between leading and hosting. To me, it is an art to master, and here’s how:
- Read the room and understand the participants (Create personas, if needed, i.e., Who is most senior? Most knowledgeable? Creating a groupthink effect?) and accordingly encourage participation, advocate the quieter ones and be alert enough to sense the positive and negative energy (you may need to go for a coffee break or even play an ice breaker game!).
- Establish a common framework or understanding of the problem. According to Hannah Jump, a Senior Service Designer at GOV.UK, “A Day in the life of a service designer at GDS”, she devotes a lot of her time to assisting her team in understanding the challenge they’re working to resolve. Our natural tendency is to want to solve things right away, but if we don’t know what we’re trying to fix, we won’t be able to improve anything. A good practice would be to hear out any solutions that come up and park them away before formulating the problem at hand.
- Communicate what you’re doing by giving precise instructions for a sequence of actions designed to achieve a predetermined outcome. Help the team to see things by creating basic prototypes and diagrams. This makes it simpler for them and the other people you collaborate with to understand their thoughts. In my presentations, I describe what we’ve accomplished to make it obvious where we’ve been and where we’re headed (a live representation of the workshop’s proceedings can be placed somewhere where everyone can view it). This will assist the team in maintaining their focus by connecting our work to our objectives as we go.
- Adhere to a conversation pattern that allows for divergent perspectives, explores those opinions while imposing real limits, and ultimately forces these ideas to converge. We tend to encourage quick decision making and skip the emergence so try to listen to and exhaust all ideas and possibilities, before applying judgement. This is also the key to innovation! (Divergence -> emergence -> convergence)
- According to the Co-Create Handbook, you should look for inclusive solutions that benefit all parties having an interest in the result. To do so, the facilitator’s ability to take on a role that is entirely neutral is the most crucial quality. As opposed to evaluation, neutrality builds a foundation of trust, thus facilitators must try to establish this trust from day one, through perhaps spending more time openly listening than speaking.
- Design solutions based on shared responsibility. To ensure the responsibility is theirs, allow for the content creation to happen. You may need to ask challenging questions (e.g., What if? What next? What else?) Either way, do not contribute with your own content!
- Sometimes, less is more! Participants seem to prefer more time for work, reflection, and discussion, as opposed to more information, more “lessons,” more exercises, and more guest speakers. According to Nick Scott in “Tips for Innovative Workshop and Program Design” crammed workshops can indeed produce poorer results. The value of having concentrated, collaborative work time can easily be diminished by the jam-packed schedule. Our aim as facilitators is to create the smallest framework possible to bring about the most change.
As you have seen above, almost every aspect about the role of a facilitator revolves around their ability to listen. Listening is also the key to communication. If you want to make a difference in the world, lead and inspire people, and change the way they think, listening is the most important skill!