 When to use a facilitator
Organizations use facilitators for many reasons and in many situations. Consider these examples from the Progress Consulting™ casebook:
Strategic Planning
A Board directed its organization, which had more than 100 locations and nearly 10,000 employees, to engage in strategic planning. Management was frustrated with previous strategic planning efforts, which produced thick documents that provided no helpful direction to the organization. Management also discovered that previous plans had been used primarily to promote various pet projects.
This time, management and the Board opted for a participative strategic planning process designed and led by a Progress Consulting™ facilitator. The process provided a clear and common focus on outcomes, energized the organization and ultimately placed each of its locations on a path of continuous improvement, with all components pulling in the same strategic direction.
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Task Force
A task force comprising senior financial leaders from across the country was given a two-year mandate to re-engineer a major, nation-wide education process. The task force required creativity and problem-solving techniques that went beyond traditional meeting rules and methods. Quick teambuilding was also essential.
The task force chair believed he could best contribute by participating fully in the discussion instead of concerning himself with process matters. The Task Force also required its deliberations to be captured quickly, objectively and accurately in a dynamic, superbly written report.
These objectives were achieved with a facilitator from Progress Consulting™ . The level of teamwork achieved by Task Force members is demonstrated by their annual reunion, which continues today, a decade after issuing its report.
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Board Retreat
A leading financial organization faced several complex issues requiring more thorough debate than regular monthly meetings could ever achieve. While a retreat seemed like the ideal setting, participants were sceptical. The previous year’s Board retreat had been a disappointment where participants felt overwhelmed with “process” and unfocused in discussion. They said that the previous year’s event had been a poor use of their time where management received no clear policy direction from the Board.
This year, the Chair and CEO engaged a facilitator from Progress Consulting™ , who, after a briefing of just one hour, framed the issues in a comprehensive and thought-provoking 14-page analysis of the situation and alternatives.
At the retreat, Board members and management debated the issues and reached clear conclusions after just eight hours. Although certain Board members had planned to stay behind to make sense of the results and plan next steps, the clarity of the facilitated sessions made this unnecessary and the facilitator was left to document their conclusions.
Within 24 hours, participants received an independently prepared, comprehensive, 19-page facilitator's report that documented the board’s clear direction for the year ahead.
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Consensus Without Compromise – Board Planning
A Board chair and CEO were planning a 1.5-day retreat. While a number of planning issues required the Board’s direction for the year ahead, several Board members’ terms were ending soon and the highly respected CEO of more than two decades was about to retire. With so much organizational knowledge and experience about to exit, they needed to make the most of the limited time available. They decided to engage a facilitator from Progress Consulting™ .
Because the facilitator was briefed only seven days before the retreat, the CEO and Chair said they expected that issues would merely be identified and discussed. They did not expect to reach firm conclusions.
The facilitator understood the important role that skilfully developed pre-retreat work could play. Within 36 hours of the briefing, the Chair and CEO endorsed the design and content of the facilitator’s pre-retreat package and participants were put to work.
Twenty-four hours before the retreat, participants returned their pre-retreat work to the facilitator, who converted it into workshop exercises in time for the beginning of the retreat, permitting participants to hit the ground running. Not only did they complete the work, they had time to enjoy some well-deserved fun!
Assisted by the facilitator’s organizational skills and guidance, the participants not only identified and discussed the issues, they reached concrete conclusions on all of their topics by the end of the retreat.
Less than four days later, participants received a comprehensive, 16-page guidebook, prepared by the facilitator and based on their deliberations, outlining the organization’s role, governance model and work priorities for the year ahead. This also became an ideal policy document to orient incoming Board members, recruit a new CEO and provide strategic guidance and directional stability during the transition period.
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Consensus Without Compromise – Conflict Management
Six organizations launched a joint venture to create a new and innovative post-secondary private educational organization. Expectations were high and all eyes were on the venture. The organization was up and running on time and its credibility and reputation began to build nicely.
Two years later, the joint venture was hampered by differences of opinion among its sponsoring organizations. The sponsors’ conflicting messages, differing priorities and inconsistent policy directions were distracting the educational institution’s CEO. The CEO’s Board was unable to resolve these differences and convinced the sponsors to try to sort out their own issues. The sponsors engaged a facilitator from Progress Consulting™
The assignment was to conduct an initial, one-day meeting of the sponsors’ CEOs and Chairs. Given the extent of the differences of opinion, they estimated it would take two or three additional meetings and six months to resolve all of their differences.
In telephone briefings, the facilitator’s objectivity helped identify certain patterns among the areas of disagreement and raised the possibility that the sponsors shared, not many differences, but only one disagreement that materialized in several different ways. If this was true, resolution could be achieved far more quickly than predicted.
The facilitator then met with the whole group for a day. While the agenda included seven items, the facilitator received the group’s permission to assign half the available time to one issue and then led the group to delve deeply into that issue to get it resolved.
The group then confirmed that they had resolved the root cause of the other six issues. The meeting ended early with no need to reconvene.
The educational institution’s Board and CEO were delighted with the result. Although it took some weeks for the resulting decisions to work their way through to the operational level, this one-day conflict management session returned the organization back to its very successful path.
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Managerial Log Jam
The management Board of a major multi-billion dollar government agency was in the final stages of its annual budgeting process. As one participant wryly put it, “Only the contentious issues remained”. The disagreements were due to policy, power-sharing and personality issues. With only a day or two to resolve the issues, it engaged a facilitator from Progress Consulting™ .
After a technical briefing on the issues, the facilitator conducted private interviews with the key players. The facilitator had to quickly understand their issues and gain their trust.
The next day, the facilitator led a one-day problem-solving session to address the areas of disagreement. The meeting revealed key issues that would enable the group leader to make decisions that all members of the team would eventually support.
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Shared Services/Generating Support For Changes In Computer Systems/Managing Resistance to Change
A well-known and highly regarded third party shared service bureau had landed one of the country’s largest brokerage firms as a new account. A major portion of the brokerage’s in-house computer system would be transferred to the external shared service company. Resistance to this change within the brokerage firm was frustrating both parties. Costs were escalating and deadlines were in peril. The brokerage firm was losing confidence in its decision to make the switch. With the permission of the brokerage firm, the shared services bureau engaged a facilitator from Progress Consulting™ .
In the first meeting with brokerage staff, the facilitator encountered significant resistance, even to the facilitator’s presence. Through skillful trust building, communication improved. Applying root cause analysis, the facilitator’s search for the cause of resistance began.
After two meetings with resistant brokerage staff, it became apparent that the new computer system, despite its many worthy features, would remove some significant and essential functionality that the in-house system had long provided. Unfortunately, representatives of the shared services bureau were not applying listening skills that would have revealed this. For its part, the brokerage firm had no process to capture their own users’ perspective in any organized fashion. In fact, the brokerage firm’s forums for discussing the computer conversion were held in a setting and a style that was intimidating, thus discouraging people from speaking up. When senior executives were asked about any problems, they honestly replied that they hadn’t heard of any. However, this certainly didn’t mean that problems didn’t exist.
Having revealed the root cause of resistance to the new computer system, the facilitator achieved consensus among the resistant brokerage staff, the shared services representatives and the brokerage executives that all would adopt a fresh start to their relationships. If problems arose, they would give each other the benefit of the doubt as to the others’ intentions and would voice their concerns immediately, in a non-accusatory style that they learned from the facilitator.
The facilitator taught and coached shared services representatives in active listening skills.
The brokerage executives learned from the facilitator how to separate constructive criticism from unconstructive criticism. After that, they discovered that almost all of the internal criticism was constructive!
Months later, the shared services bureau reported that it had a highly satisfied and profitable account. Its customer was pleased with the best of both worlds that had been achieved – all of the functionality they had enjoyed in the past combined with improvements they were unlikely to have achieved in-house. The formerly resistant staff boasted of their “new and improved” computer system that they could rightly take credit for shaping into its final form.
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Total Quality/Continuous Improvement/Change Management
A Professional Services Firm
A well-known service company had embarked on a program of creating Quality Improvement teams. Their dilemma? “We formed 22 Quality Improvement teams and quality hasn’t improved.” The results to date included increases in overtime, skepticism and backlogs of day-to-day work.
They engaged a facilitator from Progress Consulting™ , who immediately noticed that the teams were trying to implement changes that conflicted with one another. “It was like dropping 22 stones into a pond and then being caught by surprise to see all the turmoil caused as the waves came crashing against one another,” the facilitator observed.
The facilitator advised the company to form a steering committee of senior management and guided the steering committee to bring order and organization to the company’s improvement efforts. The steering committee set priorities to reveal the three improvements that would accomplish most of what the teams had been formed to achieve. Twenty-two teams were reduced to three, freeing most of the employees to get back to their work. Backlogs diminished and the three teams’ work was co-ordinated to ensure that any changes would complement – not conflict with – one another.
In facilitated workshops, the teams learned and applied Quality Improvement techniques, and learned how to do so on their own, after the completion of the facilitator’s mandate.
The resulting improvements:
- addressed customers’ primary frustration with the firm, and
- reduced
- overtime
- supply costs, and
- the length and complexity of the company’s most common form of documentation by 80 per cent.
A Health Care Provider
A health care provider sought to improve its process for assigning a caregiver to a client. In facilitated sessions, the organization discovered that the process from a client’s initial call for help to the moment care began involved 45 steps, as many as 20 documents and interface among six separate software systems. Each handoff or transfer presented an opportunity for error or omission, with someone’s health at stake.
The facilitator showed the organization how to simplify the process in a co-operative atmosphere, which revealed that internal rivalries had long been a primary obstacle to making improvements. Previous consultants’ studies had been rejected by staff, who felt threatened. By contrast, the Progress Consulting™ process equipped them to make the changes themselves and feel less threatened by the prospect of change. As they worked through the concepts, they could see how the changes would improve their quality of work life, improve service and cut costs. They also developed a capacity for working on their own to resolve issues.
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Co-operation and Synergy Among 14 Organizations/Achieving a Virtual Organization
Fourteen associations with a common interest, but who had also been competitors, recognized the need for better co-operation and synergy. They challenged themselves to act as a single virtual organization. To do so, the CEOs of all the organizations decided to meet for two days approximately every six weeks. Collectively, they would comprise the virtual organization’s “management team”. There were no rules or regulations to govern their deliberations. To complicate matters, these organizations were spread among a dozen different regulatory environments. Only teamwork and consensus building would ensure their success.
The CEOs engaged a facilitator from Progress Consulting™ , whose role was to design and lead the first 12 months of their deliberations. The facilitator provided them with objective leadership, creative problem-solving and consensus-building methods and effective implementation tools. Now, several years later, the group thrives as the guiding team that achieves synergy among their several organizations.
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Hiring a CEO
The Board of a leading organization needed to hire a new CEO and was concerned that “group interviewing” might not produce the best result. They engaged a facilitator from Progress Consulting™ , who designed and led a comprehensive and completely transparent process to evaluate candidates. Before the interviews, each candidate talked with the facilitator by telephone to ensure a thorough understanding of and support for the process.
During the interviews, the members of the board watched as the facilitator applied advanced questioning techniques.
Candidates and Board members became confident that the process was strategic, consistent and thorough. The facilitator’s skill enabled Board members to evaluate each candidate’s claims and identify potential contradictions. Board members appreciated the penetrating questions that clearly distinguished the relative merits of each candidate. Candidates appreciated the coherent, in-depth questioning that enabled them to clearly demonstrate and distinguish their capabilities.
Following the interviews, the facilitator negotiated terms of employment with the successful candidate. Board members and candidates appreciated how the facilitator’s role as a buffer permitted both parties to begin their post-hiring relationship on a positive basis.
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Identifying and Articulating Competitive Competencies – Developing a Competency Map/Project Management
Institutes representing Canada’s 70,000 Chartered Accountants (CAs) identified the need to adopt a competency-based approach to their professional education. Canadian CA education was already well respected by other Canadian professional bodies, Canadian regulators and international accounting bodies. The profession was particularly well known for its rigorous four-day Uniform Final Examination (UFE), which qualifies Canadian CAs to practise anywhere in the country at the same, very high standard. The UFE also facilitates mutual recognition of its members with all of the other major accounting bodies around the world.
Nonetheless, the CA profession is always seeking ways to improve, particularly in its quest to raise the correlation between how candidates perform in the CA education process and how they perform on the job. The profession also sought to ensure that its education programs were up-to-date.
The profession formed a steering committee whose mandate was to:
- Develop the profile of the CA of the future to respond to business’ rapidly changing needs, and
- Articulate that profile in the form of a CA Competency Map.
Committed to a highly consultative approach, the steering committee engaged Progress Consulting™ founder and CEO Scott Ferguson.
Reporting periodically to the steering committee, Ferguson's approach was to:
- Creatively design and organize this unique project
- Examine the experiences of other bodies internationally and recommend how the Canadian CA profession could implement the strengths of other jurisdictions’ processes, avoid their weaknesses and advance the yardsticks of the art and practice of competency articulation
- Design and execute a responsible consultation strategy to involve CAs from all regions of the country, the profession’s stakeholders and its international counterparts
- Objectively gather and capture the essence of a considerable amount of research and many varied views
- Reconcile, and to the extent possible, resolve differing views among constituents
- Document the results in a prototype Competency Profile
- Fine tune the style and content of the prototype through continued consultation
- Finalize the results in the form of a Canadian CA Competency Map, and
- Provide convincing evidence to the profession’s Board of Directors that the resulting document would meet its objectives.
Professional accounting bodies in other countries took two or three years to complete similar projects, but the Canadian profession wanted to finish within a year. Scott Ferguson presented the final product to the Board two weeks ahead of the deadline, having completed the project in just 11-1/2 months.
The Board approved the outcome and the resulting Canadian CA Competency Map replaced the UFE Syllabus as the determining and guiding document for CA professional education in Canada and the profession’s world-renowned uniform final evaluation (UFE) of CA candidates.
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Public Consultation – A Government Inquiry
A distinguished educational leader was appointed to head a provincial commission of inquiry into a major government financial policy. The Commissioner and staff were concerned that traditional town hall meetings or citizen submissions would not get to the heart of the complex issues. They engaged Progress Consulting™ to design and facilitate a series of comprehensive consultation workshops.
The facilitators’ objectivity helped to frame complex financial issues in terms that were easily understood by a variety of stakeholders, including those without formal financial training or backgrounds. The facilitators applied advanced questioning techniques and problem-solving methods in groups of 25 stakeholders at a time in a dozen consecutive all-day meetings. The Commissioner and expert advisors observed and added their own questions.
The Commissioner said the clear patterns that emerged from these meetings provided the foundation of his final report. Most participants said the facilitated sessions exceeded their expectations in terms of focus, relevance and good use of their time.
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Public Consultation – Obtaining Feedback on Proposed Government Policy
Following the collapse of Enron, U.S. Regulators instituted strict new rules for audit and accountability, particularly the rule known as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) 404. Canadian regulators followed suit with draft rules of their own, and sought comment. The challenge was how to encourage appropriate debate and consideration of such complex issues within a limited time frame.
The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario and Ontario Chamber of Commerce assembled 22 financial leaders of major Canadian corporations and five subject matter experts from major accounting firms to debate the issues in a single, day-long meeting under the leadership of a Progress Consulting™ facilitator.
The facilitator’s objectivity helped to frame complex issues in terms that encouraged debate among the participants. The facilitator applied advanced questioning techniques and problem-solving methods to draw out areas of consensus and disagreement. Clear patterns emerged.
The facilitator captured the deliberations in writing. Within six days of the event, the sponsoring organizations received the facilitator’s independently prepared, comprehensive, 18-page report that:
- Analyzed 28 issues or alternatives
- Provided seven recommendations to regulators.
Regulators received a comprehensive analysis of their draft proposals that reflected the wisdom of a wide range of business leaders. The resulting government policy reflected much of this feedback.
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Public Consultation – Developing Government Policy
A provincial government sought to develop long-term health-related goals for the province that would enjoy stakeholder support and be implemented by all key constituencies. Rather than directing bureaucrats to develop the goals behind closed doors, the government engaged facilitators from Progress Consulting™ .
Working together, the bureaucrats and facilitators framed the issues and identified the stakeholders whose knowledge and influence would be key to this venture’s success. They developed a recruiting strategy for the consultation and organized several simultaneous consultations.
Within each consultation, the facilitators’ objectivity was helpful in countering skepticism, earning stakeholders’ trust in the sponsors and engendering confidence in the process. The facilitators applied advanced questioning techniques and problem-solving methods to draw out areas of consensus, while representatives from several relevant provincial ministries observed and interjected with questions and information of their own. Clear patterns emerged.
The scope of the facilitators’ report soared far beyond a record of the flipcharts. Indeed, it was a comprehensive, draft report of the province’s five health goals with supporting logic, data and indications of stakeholder support.
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