If You Don’t Know the Outcome, Don’t Start the Session | Facilitation

Ultimize. Here's a standard I use, and it's one most people don't meet. If you can't clearly state what the group will produce, you shouldn't start the facilitation session. Not, we'll discuss. Not, we'll review. Not, we'll go over. No, no. What do you want to produce from this facilitation session? Is it a decision? A list, a direction. I've seen this problem repeatedly in organizations at every level. Smart people, capable teams, and they start sessions with something like, let's talk about strategy. That's not a facilitation plan. That's an invitation to drift all over the place. What happens next is predictable. One person starts talking about marketing. Another shifts to hiring. Someone else brings up something operational. 40 minutes later, although it may seem like 4 hours later, everyone feels like they've been productive. But if you ask, so what did you decide? You get vague, fuzzy answers, or worse, well, uh, we covered a lot of territory. But that's not output, that's activity. Now compare that to a session where the outcome is clear. From the start. By the end of this session, we will identify our top 2 priorities. Now everything tightens up. When someone drifts, it's easy to redirect. When ideas expand too much, it's easy to narrow it down again because you have a reference point. So here's the practical move. Before every session, force yourself to complete this sentence. By the end of the session, we will fill in the blank. If you struggle to finish that sentence clearly, that's a signal you're not ready to facilitate anything yet, because facilitation is not about just more conversation. It's about producing something useful from that conversation.