Terrence Metz

Scope Creep Kills Projects – It Begins in Poorly Facilitated Meetings

Have you ever heard someone say in a meeting “I don’t know why we’re doing this project in the first place?” Odds are, the meeting is being held to advance the project, not re-validate it. The person asking the question has now imposed their agenda on the group. They have forced scope creep [1].

Whenever meeting participants ask questions, they have shifted from the role of subject matter expert…

Make Your Meetings Meaningful – Follow These Four Tips

Jennifer Ledet Back in the day, when I was in school, I must’ve heard it several times a week: “Stop talking and get to work!”

Being a natural extrovert/Chatty Cathy, I was often in trouble for, well, talking too much. Maybe I’ve come full circle. Now I’m the one at the front of the room. It happened just last week when I was facilitating a meeting with an executive leadership team in Houston.…

Welcome To The Facilitation Forum

Questions, Answers, and Conversations About Meeting Challenges

Welcome To The Facilitation Forum  

You asked and we responded. Now you can ask questions, get answers, and join in peer-to-peer conversations about meeting challenges and experiences.  Some of you may just want to hover… that’s okay too. 

Some of the ‘socialware’ platforms we tried in the past were either not moderator-friendly…

The Agile mindset demands frequent interaction among its project stakeholders. Perhaps more so with Scrum, than other frameworks. From Daily Stand-up meetings to Sprint Retrospective meetings held every one to four weeks, having a formal facilitator or being a facilitative participant adds tremendously to successful Sprints. So, more importantly, who facilitates Scrum facilitation and when? The…

You probably don’t believe that silence is one of my favorite tools. Certainly, when I taught a presentation skills class to Johns Hopkins graduate students, they did not expect me to talk about silence! But I did. And at the end of the week, their final presentations showed how silence can be so effective.

When Mariah began her program, we all saw how powerful silence can be. She paused. She…

In an earlier article (see: Risk Analysis – Method and Questions to Facilitate a Portfolio of Projects) we defined “best” by projects that scored favorably in an Innovation test by looking at the relative technology and market risks associated with new ideas (eg, process, product, etc.).  With this article (geared for experienced facilitators and methodologists, but beneficial to beginners, as…

Real, Win, Worth (RWW). Five years before George Day’s article “Is It Real? Can We Win? Is It Worth Doing? managing Risk and Reward in an Innovation Portfolio” appeared in the December 2007 edition of the Harvard Business Review, we were working with a Fortune 100 Company to build a process to manage “ideas.” Imagine a traditional scorecard or project assessment portfolio, built much like our FAST

Strong Facilitation Skills Guarantee More Successful Meetings

When you have the ability to do something well, you are skilled. What abilities or facilitation skills make you a highly-talented facilitator? How many facilitation skills exist?

There must be more than one right answer to describe facilitation skills.  Depending on what you read, there may be:

6 Essential Facilitator Skills

9 Meeting Facilitation Skills

9 Facilitation Skill Competencies

Top 11…

Risk Analysis – Method and Questions to Facilitate A Portfolio of Projects

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You know that project portfolios focused on the best opportunities accelerate innovation. So how do you build consensus around the term “best”? George Day’s article[1] provides excellent logic to help you drive a consensual view of risk analysis.

“The risk analysis matrix employs a unique scoring system and calibration of risk. It helps estimate the probability…

The Right Questions Sequenced to Build Action Plans with Shared Ownership and Accountability

To build action plans that transfer ownership and accountability to your meeting participants, begin with the right questions, in the right sequence. Be one of the few facilitators who understand that ownership transfers instantly because participants contribute to WHO does WHAT by WHEN, the primary components of any plan. Consequently, whether your planning includes strategies, initiatives,…

Meeting Killers: Eight Ways to Kill A Meeting and Your Reputation

Below are eight habits we call meeting killers that every facilitator, or meeting leader, must avoid. #1 – Neglect to prepare your participants in advance.

Have you ever been in a meeting where someone asks: “So, what’s this all about?”

People attending a meeting should know the purpose of the meeting before they accept.  Since their input is presumably valuable, provide them with a pre-read…

Why The Best Listeners Make the Best Managers

Are You Listening? The Best Listeners Make the Best Managers.

The media is quick to tell us that the fourth industrial revolution is here and every business must bow down to digital technology as its new master. While there is a degree of truth behind the rhetoric, it is important that businesses remember the human factor. Any organization’s most precious asset remains its people, and in the…

The Primer on Facilitation Certification

With facilitation today there is no common, shared body of knowledge. In part, because facilitation is a fuzzy word and widely applied, there is no single definition — making facilitation certification fuzzy as well.

In North America, there are three primary methods for certifyingprofessional skills and knowledge.  None of the methods is necessarily superior or inferior when compared with each…

How You Can Convert Requirements or Fuzzy Goals into SMART Objectives

Meeting participants do not argue about verbs and nouns because they focus on modifiers.  Modifiers include adjectives, adverbs and sometimes phrases that describe verbs and nouns. For example, participants won’t argue that “the job needs to be done”.  Rather, they will argue that the job needs to be done well and done quickly.  What qualifies as well and quicklybecomes the focus of their…

Dr Edward de Bono: Six Thinking Hats Provide Strong Stimulus for Ideation

If you haven’t read the book by Dr Edward de Bono: Six Thinking Hats, or studied his concept about lateral thinking, you should. Dr de Bono represents one of the rare authors who instructs people on HOW TO think rather than WHAT TO think. Some recognize him as one of the 250 people who have contributed most to mankind. Dr de Bono Approach Increases Decision Quality

As shared in a prior post, SCAM…

Reasons for Workshop Success: Witnessed by an MG Rush Alumna

Even the best facilitator in the world will fail miserably if they don’t show up prepared.  Anyone can succeed with enough forethought. Today’s post focuses on some recent workshop success, and the reasons why it was a success, shared with us by an MG RUSH Alumna.

“Workshop success! I’m happy to share that yesterday’s SE Asia Region planning workshop went off wonderfully.  My boss and VPs all…

Higher Quality Decisions with Focus on ‘What’ is Right, NOT ‘Who’ is Right

Decision making frequently includes fuzzy information, fuzzy implication, and fuzzy thinking.  To reduce fuzziness, and improve the quality of your decision making, drive your group to focus on What is right, NOT Who is right.  By structuring your inquiry and methodology, you help minimize the risk of decisions made that may not be more than educated gambles.

Fuzzy – Focus on What is Right, NOT…