The following an excerpt from my book "Get Engaged:  How great trainers think, and what they do to get participants to stay, play, learn & grow".  Download the introduction and free chapter from my home page.  Buy the full version of the book here.

Great trainers adapt and use effective processes and philosophies from the world of facilitation in their training environments.

Frameworks I like to use are:
• Open Space Technology
• World Café
• Appreciative Inquiry

Open Space Technology was developed by Harrison Owen in 1982. After designing and running a conference, organisers were alarmed to find that when asked to nominate the best session in feedback, the overwhelming response was ‘the coffee breaks’. 

This led Owen to ask, ‘What happens in coffee breaks and can we design conference sessions around this?’

In coffee breaks, people cluster around others they want to spend time with, or talk about things that interest them. If they are not interested they move on, without feeling like they are being rude or abandoning the conversation.

Open Space Technology (OST) works according to a number of ‘rules’:

• The group determines the agenda.
• People go where they have passion and energy for a topic and are willing to take some responsibility for it.
• If people are not giving or getting value from a discussion, they are encouraged to use the ‘rule of two feet’ and move on.
• It’s okay to sit back and not engage in a topic if that’s what is best for you at that time.

There are four key principles that come directly from OST that I find useful when managing groups:

• It will start when it starts.
• Whoever comes are the right people.
• Whatever is discussed is the right thing.
• It will end when it ends.

I do pay attention to being punctual and keeping things on track; however, I don’t get too upset if not everyone on the list doesn’t show up, if a topic of conversation goes off on a tangent, or if something takes shorter or longer because the group needs it. 

It’s a way of reminding myself that humans aren’t robots and don’t always work to my schedule.

World Café is another facilitation technique that was developed with a coffee break feel to it. It was developed by Juanita Brown and David Isaacs in 1995 when a ‘large circle’ conversation became disrupted by rain.

The process is:

1. Set the context – the reason you are bringing the group together.

2. Create a hospitable space – one that feels safe, in which people are comfortable to be themselves.

3. Explore questions that matter – those that are relevant and represent real-life concerns of the group.

4. Encourage everyone’s contribution – allowing those that want to an opportunity to listen, and share their ideas and perspectives.

5. Connect diverse perspectives – move around, contribute to other conversations, and carry the essence of conversations throughout the room.

6. Listen together for patterns and insights – listening, sharing and paying attention to themes in order to get a sense of the whole.

7. Share collective discoveries – harvesting patterns, themes and deeper questions.

Generally, participants form small groups of no more than six around tables with chequered cloths (if you have them) covered in butcher’s paper, with coloured pens provided. 

Participants are given a question or topic of discussion. They engage in this for up to 30 minutes, making notes, drawing pictures, or doodling on the butcher’s paper.

After 30 minutes, participants are asked to move to another table, leaving one person behind. Their job is to bring the next group up to speed on what was discussed, and then engage in the discussion again. 

This is repeated, usually three times, for increased depth of conversation. At the end, a harvesting activity takes place to capture key thoughts from each of the tables.

While I don’t always run a precise World Café, I like the idea of mixing people up in this way for debriefs or discussions. And the principles are sound when it comes to designing activities in workshops. 

Appreciative Inquiry (AI) was developed in 1987 by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva. They felt that overuse of ‘problem solving’ as a model often held back analysis and understanding, focusing on problems and limiting discussion of new organisational models. 

AI is exactly as it sounds. It takes an appreciative approach to a given topic, as opposed to a problemsolving approach. AI asks participants to:

1. Discover
2. Dream
3. Design
4. Deliver

For example, if the topic for discussion is ‘Improving Customer Service’, using AI we ask ourselves to discover what is working. What are our stories about great customer service and where are we doing great work that could be replicated elsewhere?

Then we ask, if we were getting it right, what would be the ideal scenario? If we were to dream big, how great could this be?

If we wanted the dream to come true, what would we need to design? And to make the design a reality, what would we need to deliver?

While these tools are largely used in a facilitation context, great trainers apply them as a mindset to support a learning environment, and also use the techniques in debriefs.

AI, for example, can also be useful if you need to shift a discussion from the negative side of the energy circle to the positive side.

Three things to keep in mind:

1. What facilitation techniques do you or could you draw from?

2. Where could you use a more facilitative style in your training?

3. How could facilitative techniques be adapted to suit your design?

This was an excerpt from my book "Get Engaged:  How great trainers think, and what they do to get participants to stay, play, learn & grow".  Download the introduction and free chapter from my home page.  Buy the full version of the book here.