In this booklet, our introduction of our disaster recovery support activities, we mentioned various occasions in which facilitation skills and mindset were utilized.
Here is a short list of terminologies frequently used by the members of the FAJ Disaster Recovery Support Section. We hope this will be useful to our readers.
We use "ice breaker" to indicate a short game, a quiz, or an exercise designed to give participants an opportunity to resolve their hesitation or rigidity in the beginning of the meeting, so that they feel comfortable to open up and discuss what they have to say. It is called "ice breaker" because it warms the "chilliness" they may feel early in the meeting, allowing them to more easily generate their participation.
Facilitators change the words they use in order to consider the diverse background and situations the participants are in. This is required in facilitation so that we avoid using difficult terminologies and unfamiliar foreign words so that everyone understands and can participate.
Instruction is used here to mean "to explain or give directions". Facilitators use instruction to inform participants in a formal manner about specific actions they are asked to take. Right after the opening of the meeting or event, most communication from facilitators tends to be some sort of instruction. Instruction is also used when facilitators explain to participants how to do a particular task or how to proceed with a discussion; thus, instruction is one of the most frequently used styles of communication. Facilitators need to get clear themselves beforehand on how to give understandable and clear instructions so that participants can take desired actions without confusion. Background knowledge about participants' tendencies, readiness and knowledge should be evaluated to see how detailed the instruction should be.
In most events and meetings facilitated by facilitators, they explain the entire flow of the event at the beginning of the event. They explain the purpose of the meeting, what goals are to be accomplished, how the procedure of discussion will go, what things they should keep in mind, etc., and this act is called "orientation." Usually orientation consists of "OARR": Outcome - what we are up to in this event; Agenda - how things will flow today; Roles and Rules - including explanation and confirmation.
The Facilitation Workshop held on October 14 in Minamisoma Citizens Activity Support Center was one of the cases where the facilitator started the meeting at the stage of discussing and choosing the OARR with all participants.
Facilitators use large paper sheets to show instructions or questions to participants. They show the sheets one after another while they speak. This is customarily called Kamishibai (literally a paper-play) in Japanese, a paper-board-storytelling style for children. Today A4 size paper is usually used horizontally and written on with a fat black water-based pen. Sometimes facilitators post them on the whiteboard or wall in the order of the flow of their explanation. This is easy to use and renders more flexibility compared to the use of computer monitors or projectors, although it's not easy to read if the size of the event is large.
Your event venue may not be a conventional meeting room. Sometimes it is a ballroom in a hotel, a temple, school gym, Japanese tatami room, etc. It is necessary to change the layout of the room based on number of participants, programs, number of available whiteboards and big sheets of paper, walls, window glasses, doors etc. to put the paper on, etc.
Especially when you facilitate a participatory meeting which follows lectures or a symposium, it may be necessary to conduct a layout change without hesitation because it can greatly contribute to generating necessary ambience for the meeting.
"The Group Size" is the size of the group, specifically the number of people who will talk together. If you have more than 7 or 8 people in your group to discuss something together, some people tend to speak a lot and some people don't or cannot speak much, or at all. One way to deal with it is to break the group into smaller subgroups. Sometimes you can break people into groups of two or three. The more people you have in the subgroup, the more time you need to allocate for discussion in the subgroup. The group size can be "one," meaning you are giving them time to think or reflect alone. Oftentimes this individual reflection time will be followed by discussion in the subgroup, which tends to be more active than without having individual reflection time. In case you want to change the group size in the middle of facilitation,
Facilitators focus on participants deeply so that they can fully grasp the meaning of what participants are saying. This is not a skill, rather an attitude to get whatever they say as it is.
It is desirable for facilitators in the preparatory meeting (coordination time) to get clear on the purpose of the meeting and the intended outcome (desired state after the meeting) based on the background issues that made the meeting necessary and the people who will participate in it. It is important to get that background information and the host's intention thoroughly shared, and to think together with the host of the event/meeting in the preparatory meetings. Preparation and preparatory coordination are a part of facilitation. You can see in the example of the case of Minamisoma City that facilitators started from listening to what the hosts had to say.
This is the occasion for each subgroup to share what their subgroup talked about during their discussion time, so that each subgroup can know what was discussed in other subgroups. One way to do this is to ask someone in a subgroup to share what was talked about showing the outcome of their discussion. Another way is for everyone to get together and visit each subgroup one by one. Another way is that each subgroup has one or two members who welcome visitors to their group and explain what is happening; people can visit any subgroup they choose.
This means that facilitators manage time to facilitate the meeting within the allotted timeframe. However, even though they plan the time allocation to each activity beforehand they usually facilitate flexibly, avoiding mechanical time management while accomplishing the purpose of the meeting.
Just like you "check in" at a hotel, we use the word "check in" for the meeting. This implies that each person shares their name and what they feel at this moment so that they can fully participate in the meeting. Likewise, when the meeting is over, each participant says a few words to express what they got out of the meeting, and this is called "check out."
There are questions or items facilitators want participants to think about during the program. Based on the purpose, output and outcome of the event/meeting, facilitators prepare "Questions" they are going to ask in the event. It is an important part of program production. Please refer to an example of a real case "The Local Meeting in Iwate".
A small group discussion session. As the purpose is to have each participant talk freely about whatever they have to say including impressions they've gotten so far, it is usually done in small groups with 3 to 4 people. This is not for a presentation later, but just to share freely. If you have a few minutes of buzz session after lectures or symposiums, you can expect that it will support participants to deepen their understanding, clarify what was unclear to them, and elevate their level of participation. Please look at the actual case in "The Local Meeting in Iwate".
This is a method used to help visualize what is being discussed. Some people call it "board work." It goes simultaneously with the discussion in the room: whatever being discussed right now is immediately drawn on the whiteboard or big sheet of paper on the wall. As what is discussed written in letters, it is effective to make it easy to follow the flow of the discussion and the logic of each argument, showing the relationship among different opinions and how they are related and structured. Sometimes facilitators take the role of capturing what is being expressed in words or drawings on the board, or sometimes other people are assigned as the "graphicker" (board writer).
Sometimes facilitation of the event/meeting is conducted by two roles, one to facilitate the meeting and one to graphically display what is happening in the meeting, called a graphicker. Or, sometimes the size or type of the program requires setting up both facilitators for the whole event and facilitators who work in smaller broken up groups. It is a good idea to set up facilitation teams which include the above, with a few reserved members for time management and/or any other unexpected incidents, and a recorder so that you can handle various situations.
To reflect on activities and your experiences so that you learn something you can use in the future. Reflection is sometimes called "consideration". Different from normal reflections which focus on what didn't work, reflection here also focus on what worked so that both can be our learning for the next occasion. One method is called KPT: Keep, Problem, and Try. "Keep" is for something good, "Problem" for item to be improved, and "Try" for item to be tried on newly.
In order to make it easy for participants to sort things out or think about the theme, facilitators use a "framework" which is to be shared among participants. When you have several groups discussing the same theme concurrently, you can use a shared framework of discussion so that later people can easily share results of group discussion in the room according to the format. At the meeting "Local Meeting in Miyagi", you can see the case a certain frame was provided in advance.
We usually design programs in a way that participants find easy to participate in. When the event includes lectures, which typically pull in a "teacher and student relationship," we design the program in a way that participants still experience they are the owner of the lecture. It is important to program the event/meeting in a way that participants can be present to and share their own experiences, as well as to design the flow of the event so that participants with different backgrounds and points of view, namely a situation when there are "many answers" in the room, feel it is easy to share their answers within the limited time.
Although "process" is generally understood as steps or procedures to do things, in facilitation process includes what is happening in the room where you don't see it. For example, changes in facial expressions of the participants while someone is speaking, or even their silence is seen as process.