Welcome to “5 Minute Facilitation Tips”

Hey everyone, it's yours truly, Sloan Leo, the founder, CEO, and lead facilitator over at FLOX Studio. I'm excited to start doing these weekly tips to help you become a stronger facilitator. Whether you're a CEO running an all staff meeting, the head of HR running a training, or an everyday person at your job trying to make sure that your team meetings and your one on ones are going better and even having even greater impact, this week I think I can help you.

So this week I found myself in Los Angeles. I was there for the Unity Philanthropy Summit. It's a big conference with 1,200 people who are there to talk about innovations in philanthropy. In the spring of 2020, I was contacted by the New York Women's Foundation based in New York City. They do work that impacts women and girls to get them out of economic vulnerability to a place of economic resilience.

For three years, we've been facilitating this group called the Brooklyn Economic Justice Project. It's an initiative to create more economic resilience in a very specific pocket of central Brooklyn, for women and for gender non conforming people. It's been an amazing project, and we've had over 14 different organizations participate to date.

They've done things like micro grants to the community. But they also do things like figure out what does it mean to have an economic strategy that's rooted in gender justice. So at this week's convening in LA, my job was to facilitate a panel conversation with two funders, the Women's California Foundation and the New York Women's Foundation, and two organizations based, one in Brooklyn and one in California, working on issues of domestic violence, safety and security, and economic justice and liberation.

Now, As a person running a panel, do you see yourself as a facilitator? Because the fact is, if you're interviewing folks and engaging with an audience, surprise, surprise, you're facilitating. When it came time for me to get ready for this event, I did a couple of things. I took the time to read everyone's bio.

And as I was reading the bios, I was taking notes and thinking, huh, what am I naturally curious about? This is where authenticity comes in. So I went through all the bios. And then I went through some preparatory questions that I designed in collaboration with the team over at the New York Women's Foundation.

We were asking questions to set up the context of the work they had been doing, a little bit about the work each person in the panel had accomplished, and have some space to talk about the lessons that they had learned. After doing that prep, we met in person a few weeks later. This week at the top of the conference, our session was at 1030.

So at 10 o'clock, we gathered in the room and we sat down and we made sure we made personal contact. So it's, hey, how are you doing today? Tell me your pronouns. What's your title? How are you showing up? With that warm energy established, I felt more confident that I could lead and facilitate a really engaging dialogue.

Slowly, as people came in, I put some music on my computer. Personally, right now, I'm the most fond of a Fela Kuti playlist. Really awesome world music from the 70s. And it made sure that people walking in started to feel a little bit of warmth, a little bit of that Brooklyn vibe. Once we had critical mass, which was about 25 people, it was time for the show to begin.

We started off the panel by showing a video, which you can find in the link on this post or in this article, about the Brooklyn Economic Justice Project, which served to kind of make sure that the room was on the same page as the folks on the panel. My goal in every facilitation is to create dialogue.

It's not to run the show, it's to create an effective exchange between folks who are sitting on one side of the table, and folks on the other side of the table. And in fact, to try to make the sense of table disappear, because we're just, what people talking to people. Typically I go through the questions and I would say, Hey, Cecilia.

Hey, LaShawn. Hey, Maricela. And then I would ask the question and wait for them to respond. After they respond as a facilitator, I always do a short recap to say, LaShawn, that point that you were making about resilience and how it shows up in your neighborhood was really interesting. And then I pivot to the next question.

Thinking about resilience it makes me wonder, how would you define resilience 10 years from now that would be different than the year we have today? When you're having a conversation, you're in the process of creating what's known as, in the theater world, as dramaturgy. The connection between two scenes, or two parts of a conversation.

I use this technique a lot to build momentum in the dialogue and to increase the energy in the room. After we had been talking in the panel, for a few minutes to get everyone in the room oriented to each person's area of expertise and perspective, I then did something that is a bit unusual for people facilitating a panel.

Rather than waiting until the end of the dialogue to do a five minute very rushed Q&A, we actually paused before we got into the deep conversation and said, hey you out there in the audience, what brought you to this panel? What were you hoping to learn? What questions are already brewing in your mind?

And every time you ask a question like that, the audience goes, I don't know if I have a question. I feel kind of nervous. What should I say? So you have to take an extra long beat, something like this. So I'm wondering for you out there in the audience, what questions are you coming to today with?

Hold it just a bit longer. And by then, people start raising their hands. So folks raised their hands and brought some really great questions about how to do place based cohort funding to the table. And then I had everyone in the room, and there were about eight people who had questions, say their question out loud, and I wrote it down in my notebook.

I then took some time as people were finishing their questions to think about, was there a connection or a theme that I could use in summation to ask the folks on the panel? I did that. After we got through another 20 minutes of conversation, I paused and I turned to the panelists and said, what questions do you have for the audience?

Again, slipping it, reversing it, and inverting it. Finding ways to create more dialogue in both directions. So the expertise lives in the audience and on the panel. So as you look at your week ahead, maybe you're not facilitating a panel, but at some point you're going to be in the front of the room with people who are experts and folks in the audience who are not.

So I'm going to challenge you. Next week, do your best to find a way to create that sense of expertise exchange between the folks who know and the folks who also know, but are sitting on the other side of the table. Thanks so much. See you next week.