Facilitation - Improve Something Today

Everybody’s a facilitator, whether you know it or not. Three ways to learn the most human skill going

A line of evergreen trees and a blue summer sky with some wispy clouds. — Photo by Brian Kerr.

Facilitation is always happening. If you put even a little effort into learning facilitation, you’ll get meetings of all sorts to the best possible outcomes & help everyone around you have a better time.

Podcast episode 0047: Everybody’s a facilitator

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Have you ever met someone who calls themselves a facilitator? It’s not the most common job, but they’re out there. For every facilitator you meet, you’ll meet a dozen people who don’t use the title but treat it a skill they pay attention to and develop over time. And for every one of these, you’ll find a hundred people who have no real idea of what facilitation is. When they have to run a meeting they fall back on boring, stultifying time-wasters like presentations, open discussions, and brainstorms.

Any gathering of 3 or more people is being actively facilitated, whether the hosts realize it or not. Whenever you’ve felt bored or disengaged in a meeting and had to sit there, that meeting was poorly facilitated. For a lot of us, ‘work is just meetings,’ so this adds up to a huge, frustrating waste of time.

Poor facilitation is everywhere and it’s terrible. No amount of happy crappy from an LLM chatbot or beautiful slides from a consultant can deal with this. It is a separate, deeply human thing that has to get sorted out if we want to solve problems and act skillfully as groups in the workplace. The meeting cost calculator is running.

And for the most part, meeting or workshop facilitation is not the main thing people want to deal with. They’re focused on the people, problems and decisions at hand.

So my question is—where do people learn this stuff? I’ve noticed three ways. People learn facilitation:

informally,
formally, and
by practicing.

Let’s look at each. I’ll share my experience, some findings from an industry survey, and a few starting points or offerings.

How I got my facilitation chops

I got interested in facilitation as a grad student back in 2006, when I went to a niche web collaboration conference down in Portland. I thought I was going to hang out with pals and compare notes on nerdile web stuff on my department’s dime. But this conference was structured using open space technology and hosted by Michael Herman. After seeing how he worked, I wanted to do it myself. This is like saying you got interested in guitar after seeing Roger Waters play in a coffee shop.

I stuck with that interest. First, as a way to scoot through grad school—an environment where I saw a lot of very effective and very lousy facilitation in the classroom (teaching is a kind of facilitation). I survived many boring lectures by paying attention to what people were doing poorly, and wondering what they might do otherwise. Later, it gave me an edge in my technical consulting work. I could get people to a decision or a working consensus on what to do next.

I put together an invisible curriculum for myself, in three ways:

Informally, by going to local conferences with demos and workshops on facilitation methods to see a variety of approaches as used by different people. This was during the initial heyday of Liberating Structures and Lean Coffee in the Seattle area, so these were easy to access.
Formally, by getting training and certifications. In my experience, the best of these are the Technology of Participation series from the Institute of Cultural Affairs (more on this later).
And most importantly, by practicing. The school of hard knocks. My consulting work by this time involved planning and hosting a lot of meetings—continuous improvement workshops, human-centered design activities, public engagement sessions for government agencies, and the like. So I had opportunities to practice, and get feedback. It’s one thing to get trained in a method. Another thing to try it out during training. Still another to run it over and over in different groups solving different problems until you know what’s what.

What I notice today is this. While clients don’t tend to hire me for facilitation, that’s a big part of how we end up getting the work done. I say ‘we’ pointedly here, because spreading facilitation practices, or leaving them behind after a project is done, is one of the most durable things I do for clients. It’s something people don’t know to ask for, but they sure appreciate when they see it, and they keep using it afterwards.

How most facilitators learn

Let’s turn to SessionLab’s “State of Facilitation” report. This is a vendor of meeting planning software I’ve never used; but they commission this free annual report which is super valuable.

From this year’s report, note that only half of the respondents have a formal accreditation or training certificate related to facilitation. And of those that do, there’s a pretty wide spread:

From SessionLab’s State of Facilitation Report for 2026.

I don’t see this as a bad thing at all. Of our three ways (informal, formal, and practice), only the second is produced by training. More practice needs to be available, in addition to more training, because learning happens in the doing and teaching:

Another big opportunity people use to learn facilitation is feedback and evaluation. For the first time, this year’s “State of Facilitation” survey asked questions about evaluation. Here’s how facilitators say they’re measuring success:

Notice the weighting toward activity measures, which you could think of as ways to prove that the work got done. These are also the kinds of measures that provide quick feedback items for the facilitator to build into their future sessions. So they help with everybody getting paid, feeling good, and making improvements next time. These are all good things.

You have to get down to the 7th or 8th most common responses to get to anything related to measuring results or lasting impact for the organization.

General advice for performance measurement: you want a mix of both activity and results measures. I bet most of the evaluation shown in the chart above happens too quickly after a session to speak to impacts. And that is related to the “drive-by consulting” nature of much paid facilitation work.

Personally, I’ve only been able to tease out the impact of my facilitation work by going back to clients years or even a decade after the fact (hi Susan!) to learn what really took hold after my consulting team moved on. In some cases it was a specific habit for closing a meeting that they kept doing. In others, a way of documenting/arguing about a problem that stuck. Or in one case, a method for deciding how to schedule projects that our client’s boss liked and ended up using across her whole division. Facilitation is happening everywhere.

Three ways you can learn facilitation, starting today

(1) Informal ways

Seek out meetings, workshops, events, community gatherings, and the like. Pay attention to the facilitation as well as the content. Spend half your time looking at whoever is running the event, and half your time looking at everybody else. When are people bored? When does someone perk up? Who’s disengaged, and why? Who gets shut down early and doesn’t participate again?

(2) Formal ways

I whole-heartedly recommend the Institute of Cultural Affairs’ Technology of Participation (ToP) Facilitation Methods course as a starting point. You can take it in person around the world, or online. It is the only facilitation training I’ve taken that has not been a waste of time. And I use elements from it weekly.

(3) Ways to practice

And for practice, well, ya gotta practice. That’s not to say I can’t help you, though.

Over in the Continuous Improvement Studio, I have two items of interest:

A free set of facilitation zines. You can print these and bring ’em into your next meeting to run a group check-in or a project launch.
A fixed-price service that will make your next high-stakes meeting a delight. I love facilitating meetings, and this is where I get to spread the love by sharing the structure and confidence that helps people enjoy it as much as I do.

And here on the site, there’s plenty to browse through:

So my invitation is this. Find one activity in one of these three ways of learning and give it a shot. I’d be delighted to hear what you picked and how it went.

Two facilitation methods starting with a single line: Actions|Results & +|Δ

A square piece of paper with a single line drawn down the middle. — Photo by Brian Kerr.

Two simple facilitation methods you can start anytime by drawing a single line on a sheet of paper. What these are and when to use them.

These two methods require you to draw a single line to start, which makes them very easy and portable. You don’t need to think of yourself as a facilitator. Just draw a line and move the conversation along.

Actions|Results

Bring Actions|Results out when people are talking about what to do next in a situation and things get muddled.

First, draw a single line somewhere everybody can see it. Write ‘Actions’ as a heading to the left side, and ‘Results’ to the right.
Then, as you hear specific proposals or ideas, start placing actions to the left side of the line and results to the right.
Leave plenty of space.
At some point, you may choose to explain yourself. The relationship between these two is like this:
1. We’ll take some action → to get to this result.
2. We want this result → so let’s try this action.
In most groups, you’ll hear some proposed actions (‘let’s train everyone on the new process’) as well as results (‘everyone needs to use the new process by XY date’). Keeping these two separated allows for structured thinking to arise. Encourage new connections or filling in of blanks on this basis.

At the end, a picture emerges that you can ask questions about. For any proposed result, there are probably several actions that could lead to the result—which ones are easiest, quickest, easily reversible, etc.? And for any proposed action, there’s an end result in mind—does everyone agree with the result, and how useful do we think the action will be in getting us there?

Use this picture to start choosing feasible or necessary next steps.

And the picture is helpful when looking for performance measures. Computers are usually better at counting actions than they are results. But the relationships you’ve identified between actions and results can hint toward a larger theory of change. I’ve noticed this is typically the most durable outcome of what can seem like a simple, improvised method.

+|Δ (Plus|Delta)

The second method, +|Δ, is a great way to wrap up or check out of a gathering. It’s a very popular method—you may have used it or experienced it yourself.

First, draw a single line somewhere everybody can see it. Write ‘+’ as a heading to the left side, and ‘Δ’ to the right. Maybe write out ‘delta’ or ‘change’ as a caption next to the latter.
Then, ask people for their feedback and write down what you hear.
1. Pluses: what’d they like? what should we keep doing?
2. Deltas: what should we change next time? For this, I encourage a ‘complaints with recommendation’ format, where any complaints are welcome, but a positive recommendation should come with ’em.
Now the important part: act on what’s there. For recurring meetings, I like to briefly bring up previous +|Δ board(s) while announcing any agenda, format, or logistical changes happening as a result.

An encouragement

I hope you try one of these, especially if it seems a bit out of character for you. Facilitation might seem arcane, but it can be very simple.

What’s fun about these methods is that they are easy enough to do with no setup and no ceremony. And you get much of the benefit of more complex methods: the chance to slow down, think in a more structured, communal way, and organize ideas spatially.

Questions along the way

Looking down into a rocky beach at low tide, with a weathered wooden beam in few; a few barnacles and lichen live on this beam. — Photo by Brian Kerr.

The Periodic Table of Questions, ICA’s ORID, Liberating Structures’ W3, and more. How might we organize questions, and to what end?

Dan Klyn offers this Periodic Table of Questions. 20 genres of questions, arranged spatially from left to right as hooks (questions with bounded answers) and nets (questions with open answers), and from top to bottom on an index I sense intuitively but still can’t describe as concisely as he does:

Image of a Periodic Table of Questions, available online at https://danklyn.com/questions.html

This is immediately interesting to click around. Click on each for an example question. Dan has a talk and draft book chapter available.

Also, it’s immediately useful. You can provide a question and the thing will guess what kind of question it is. You can ‘iterate’ a question and it’ll give you restated versions of your question across all 20 genres. (Must be some ill-begotten LLM device behind the scenes; re-roll if you don’t like what you see; use the cut-up method to swipe only the results that are meaningful to you. Meaning comes from you, not the randomization device.)

I told Dan it reminded me of ORID from the Institute for Cultural Affairs:

This is how ICA teachers advise a facilitator to arrange a ‘focused conversation’—one of several basic extremely valuable facilitation methods they teach. To design a focused conversation, you write up a sequence of questions in deliberate sequence across 4 levels: objective, reflective, interpretive, and (the most unlovely word of all) decisional. The Periodic Table of Questions has helped me arrange questions for one focused conversation so far, and I look forward to more. I do a good job of figuring out what the questions should be, but never want to slow down and get the wording just right. And one feature of the focused conversation is that if you have great questions in the right order, there is very little else to do. A group then brings itself to the appropriate ending point for a meeting or activity.

A simpler version of this approach, one which trades away a lot of nuance for being easier to do, is the ‘What, So What, Now What?’ (W3) liberating structure:

W3 is based in part on the work of Chris Argyris (who I’ve written about before—

—and whose writing and ideas I rely on in my consulting practice). The ladder of inference shared in the W3 method feels like a fast-and-loose alternative to ORID.

Simpler still is to ask a single question, my own shortcut method:

When this works, it is because starting with something at the “data” level (as per the ladder of inference), or the “objective” level (per ICA’s ORID/focused conversation), or the lighter/topmost “net” questions (per the Periodic Table of Questions) is always enough to get a conversation started, and often enough to keep a conversation moving along, of its own accord, to its conclusion.

One last point. Jerry Weinberg had remarkable advice about not inflicting help—by which he meant offering known, or supposed, answers before someone is ready to ask for help. Over the last 20 years, this idea has made all the difference for me. The distinction between being (a) this dreary little (presumed) know-it-all and (b) a helpful colleague. Which is to say: people might not want the answer to the question you wish they would ask, but they might listen to your question if you ask it with kind curiosity, in the right way, and at the right time.

With paper, glue & scissors: how little zines can make a big difference

Two printed and folded mini-zines on a tabletop next to a bottle of glue, two wooden blocks, and a pair of scissors. — Photo by Brian Kerr.

Two ways to make an 8-page mini-zine using stuff you already have—and three reasons why you might do this.

Today, two ways to put together a specific type of mini-zine—an 8-page cut-fold-&-glue apparatus you can make on letter paper using any printer on hand. These are:

Method 1: a word processor, and
Method 2: whatever design-y software you like & a free web-based imposer.

But first: ↓

Why might you want to make a zine?

For ‘networking’ or other events, it is useful to have a zine on hand to give to people instead of a business card (dated) or nothing at all (the default). Share something relevant, personal, and provocative, as well as your contact info.
For in-person facilitated events, making a customized zine helps keep everyone on the same page. Laying out facilitation instructions as well as working/writing space helps guide participants through an activity. It also eases your job as facilitator by reducing explanation and grounding group work in a defined, page-by-page progression: e.g. you can ask everyone to turn to a specific page and keep things moving along. I’ve found that participants appreciate having something that encloses the entire activity. For those who want to read ahead or worry about structure or timing, the zine satisfies. It is also a signal that you take things seriously. People will notice that you created a custom zine for this specific gathering, and printed and folded the right number of them. This does not take long to do, but makes an impression.
Instead of a plain old handout for a presentation. It’s more fun to flip through a zine than flap a single sheet of paper. You also get to make some choices about structure and organization of the material. At the end of a talk, zines tend to go into pockets or bags while handouts are discreetly dropped into the trash.

Method 1: a word processor

This is a simple but annoying method. Start with a ready-made template for your word processor of choice, and then fill in the blanks to lay out your zine. Here’s an example in Apple Pages, using these wonderful templates from Jess Driscoll:

Screenshot of Apple Pages with an 8-page mini-zine laid out in a 4x2 grid for printing. Pages 5-8 are upside down across the top row, and pages 1-4 are right-side-up along the bottom row. — 8-page mini-zine for a 1-2-4-all facilitated activity. Specific topic and questions redacted.

💡

In this example: a group was dealing with an organizational change that would split their one team into three parts. The discussion was about how the team could preserve some norms and quality standards despite the re-org.

What you may detect in the screenshot is that laying out pages 5 through 8 in this method is comically irritating. The advantage is that it’s simple to do: fill in and print. Word processing upside-down is possible but not recommended. As a result, I prefer the next method instead.

Method 2: whatever design-y software you like & a free web-based imposer

📖

Lingo alert: imposition is a printing term for pre-press arrangement of material on the page so it can then be printed, cut, folded, and bound.

This method uses delphitools’ amazing online zine imposer to lay your zine out for printing. Specifically, the tool takes a set of appropriately-sized individual pages and gives you a printer-ready PDF in a layout similar to what you saw in method 1.

A full page screenshot of the Zine Imposer tool. — delphitool’s Zine Imposer.

Use this thing by first selecting your paper size and then noting the dimensions it gives you for the zine pages. Next, in your software of choice, set your page size to these dimensions, and begin. You’ll want to create 8 pages, including front and back cover, and then export them as images to pull back into the zine imposer.

Options here include Keynote or other presentation software—or pretty much anything that can lay out images and text on pages.

I use Canva, where it’s simple to create pages at the right size and adhere to whatever aspects of the style guide seem important at the time. My only advice is to get the physical size of the page onscreen to roughly match what it’ll look like in print. Given Canva and my particular combination of hardware, that ends up being a 33% zoom.

If it seems like this section is a glorified link to the zine imposer, you’re right. It’s a great tool (and part of a larger collection of web-based goodies worth investigation).

What to put in the zine

Here are a few places to look for starting points or inspiration:

I’ve zine-ified various templates, handouts, and posts from this site. You might have a similar collection to work from.
Dan Klyn and colleagues have a great zine introducing their BASIC framework. (There’s also a video where Dan shows you how he prints and folds the things.)
For facilitated gatherings, use a step-by-step approach as shown in the method 1 example above. Take the instructions you’d project or write onto a whiteboard and put them into the zine.

If you want to put your contact information on the back page, use a QR code generator. Point it to your web site, a social media profile, or newsletter sign-up page. Make sure you list the exact page it’ll take someone to and what they’ll find there.

Some examples (free to download)

...

4 favorite Liberating Structures for continuous improvement

Weird flowering moss on an very old wooden shed. — Photo by Brian Kerr.

Getting specific about facilitation methods & how to incorporate them into the work.

I’ve previously shared an introduction to Liberating Structures, the methods that filled the “facilitation gap” in my own continuous improvement practice. These 4 Liberating Structures have been most important to my continuous improvement practice.

During planning

Ecocycle Planning—an initial conversation that can help an uncertain or newly formed team figure out what to work on. Starting with a portfolio-level listing of major systems or responsibilities, people locate each of those in its overall lifecycle. The resulting ‘ecocycle’ is a big picture of things that need fixing, things that could be skillfully closed down, and things that need to be nurtured into further growth. There’s your schedule of continuous improvement projects.

During an improvement activity

TRIZ—a scavenger hunt for existing system behaviors that produce bad outcomes. Purposefully designing a broken system is fun. Then, insight comes when people look for similarities between the bad system they’ve imagined and the way things get done today. TRIZ lets groups see how their collective work is both interrelated and necessary—and where there is room for creative destruction.
25/10 Crowdsourcing—a machine for generating bravery, starting with the question: “If you were ten times bolder, what big idea would you recommend?” The activity ends with a tantalizing presentation of the weirdest ideas that were elevated or supported by the whole group. There will be a few ideas you can go do right away, ‘ten times bolder’ premise be damned.

Afterwards

What/So What/Now What—a group closing reflection and commitment. Can scale up or down, but this is the smallest possible closing that helps people make sense of what happened and to decide what’s next.

Look, they’re all good

There are dozens of Liberating Structures. Even if you are familiar with some of them, others will be new. I encourage you to seek them out. For example, I only started using Ecocycle Planning in the last year or so, but it has already gotten me out of a couple real pickles.

November 14, 2024: Edited for length.

Using Liberating Structures to facilitate continuous improvement

You’ve gathered everyone together around a problem. Now what?

“Five conventional structures guide the way we organize routine interactions and how groups work together: presentations, managed discussions, open discussions, status reports and brainstorm sessions. Liberating Structures add 33 more options to the big five conventional approaches.”

So much of continuous improvement comes down to gathering a small group of people together (ideally with snacks) and opening a space so that everybody can decide what to do next.

The Lean books and teachers I learned from taught me what needed to happen—the observations, diagrams, analysis, ideas, and plans—but couldn’t convey how to get all this to occur within groups of people who were happy, unhappy, skeptical, annoyed, burned-out, eager, curious, tired, distracted, in pain, lost in thought, worried, hungry, or optimistic.

Facilitation is its own separate skill.

Like the other so-called “soft skills,” it is hard as hell.

But eventually, Liberating Structures gave me the methods I needed.

No new thing under the sun

Each Liberating Structure is a recipe for a small, generative group interaction. Flip through the collection and you’ll find short definitions and plenty of examples, along with detailed, insightful facilitation guides.

As you explore, many of the formats and activities might seem familiar—and for good reason. Very little of this work is original, which is why nearly all of it is useful. For example, the What, So What, Now What? Liberating Structure is one particular expression of a device you might have seen in academic or business writing (as Chris Argyris’ ladder of inference) or in community development (my teachers at the Institute of Cultural Affairs call it ORID, an unlovely contraction of “objective, reflective, interpretive, and decisional”). The point of this particular Liberating Structure isn’t to be innovative, but instead to give just enough structure to help a group to listen and reflect on its shared experience. And it, like all the others, is offered with attribution and links to further reading to satisfy the eggheads.

Most of the Liberating Structures are small, with time commitments beginning at around 15 minutes. As you practice them, you may find yourself planning events by chaining a sequence of Liberating Structures together. There’s even a Liberating Structure for having group plan its own event—what my friend Dan calls choreography, but the Liberating Structure is called Design Storyboards.

And Liberating Structures are a great boost to continuous improvement efforts because they loosen up hierarchies and create new ways for people to learn from one another. This is an important part of Lean, and it’ll happen eventually—but some carefully deployed Liberating Structures can help things along. Some of the structures, like Ecocycle Planning, fit directly into the portfolio planning and management systems that sustain continuous improvement over time.

Getting started

The stuff is available online and is free to use. Read up on the Liberating Structures web site, starting with the LS Menu.

I recommend the excellent, free LiSA app for your phone or iPad. (LiSA also runs on recent Macs.) LiSA is great for quick reference, as well as for working out an agenda using a chain of Liberating Structures.

Beyond that, the very best way to learn Liberating Structures is to watch, do, and teach. (It’s also the best way to learn anything.) For this purpose, my friend Alyssa recommends this monthly international, online meetup.

Big changes, small changes

It’s only fair to let the Liberating Structures folks have the last word. Because what they want is what I want, too:

“We want everyone to learn to foster big changes by inviting people to make small structural changes in how they work together.”

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