Resisting the urge to do — facilitation tips for designers

I’ve trained hundreds of Sprint Leaders at Google. The most common coaching advice I give is to do less. Here’s why it might help you get more done. 

Sprints. Workshops. Brainstorms. Whatever you call them, they can be tricky to run. Not for technical reasons. It's easy to find all the templates and tools you need on the internet. Leading a sprint is difficult for the same reason designing something is difficult: it involves humans.

Humans make it messy. They have expectations, hopes, fears. As designers, it's tempting to use all that empathy and skill to solve the problem. You spend weeks defining a sprint brief, but you're also secretly thinking about the solution. But running a sprint isn't so much about designing a solution, as designing the conditions for a solution to appear. As a facilitator, you're not there to solve the problem. You're there to make it possible for the team to solve the problem.

What makes this even more frustrating, is that the more you try to solve the problem yourself, the worse the sprint gets. Your focus as the sprint leader shifts from what the group needs, to what the problem needs. You become participant-in-chief, rather than a trusted guide for the team.

Sound familiar? Here are some common coaching tips I share with new sprint leaders who are having the same problem.

Ask people to do stuff

You're running a sprint. It's going well. The most senior person in the room makes a contribution, but they don't write it down. You feel the need to pick up a marker and make a note. Don't! You need to learn how to shift responsibility back to participants:

"That's great, can you write that down and add it to the board please?"

"Brilliant, would you mind moving those ideas together and coming up with a theme that captures what you just said?"

You're not there to turn participant thinking into a post-it. You're there to guide the whole group to a solution.

You are the orchestrator. That's you. You're there to get the best out of everyone in the room, not do all the work yourself. The brilliant Daniel Stillman refers to this as Lazy Facilitation — and I've never worked with a better facilitator than Daniel.

Be specific

This helps prevent the need for you to step in and fix something. It's also the clearest indicator of experienced facilitation. It's important to get really specific about how you want people to complete a task.

Don’t ask people to: "Write some How Might We statements on Post-it notes"

Instead, try something like: "Write 10 How Might We statements, on yellow Post It notes, with a Sharpie. One HMW per post it. When you're done, place them up on this area of the wall here.”

You should also have an example prepared that you can share with the group. 

This gets particularly important when you’re running large, complex sprints, or longer sprints where you have to refer back to content over multiple days. 

But primarily it's to stop the temptation you have of stepping in and rewriting things, or transposing contributions to different working areas in the room. I see this happen a lot with early-career facilitators. Lack of specificity leads to more overhead for the facilitator later in the sprint. If you're a designer, you're making work for yourself. Be kind to your future self. Get the participants to do it right first time.

Get critics working for you

If you're leading a sprint, you'll likely have people involved who want you to change the approach. It's often for good reason, but it can feel like you've done something wrong.

In my experience, these situations are usually best handled by indulging the critic. They want to spend more time on problem definition? Let's do it. Want to review the quarterly results in an additional lightning talk? You've got ten minutes.

The trick is to guide these critics and contributors towards the overall goal of the sprint. Just like the techniques above, you need to take your hands off the wheel of the sprint. You're letting someone else in. Creating room for something unplanned or new. But in doing so, you're creating a new opportunity to steer the group towards a solution.

Let's say someone isn't happy with the ideas selected by the group. Want to do another round of voting? Sure. But let's set some guidelines. Let's stack rank or define criteria. Why don't you chart them — rate them for impact and viability? Why don't you do a secret vote? Do we need to talk about how we're voting? Should we be doing it differently?

These are all questions that experienced facilitators use to push the responsibility back onto the participants. You're using the critic in the room to shape the overall experience.

All these techniques are about finding a balance. As you refine your facilitation practice, you'll start to define your edges. Where you push back, and when you take things on. It's unique to each facilitator, but don't feel like you need to do everything. It's one of the worst things you could try to do.