Facilitation: How To Optimize Collaboration Through Giving Clear Instructions
Have you ever given clear instructions in your collaboration session only to realize that your participants just didn’t get it? No worries. We’ve all been there at some point.
What really happened was, we fell victim to the Curse of Knowledge. We knew how the exercise is to be done so we left out details that are obvious to us but not so obvious to whoever is brand new to this type of collaboration.
Though it can be easier said than done, giving simple, clear directions is a basic tool that every facilitator should have in their tool belt to optimize collaboration. So with that in mind, when we give instructions they need to be truly clear to the learner. The attendees have to know what we’re going to do, why we’re going to do it and how we’re going to carry it out in order to do it effectively. And with a little bit of practice before long they’ll be pros.
To help give you a push in the right direction here is what I was taught to say as a newbie as I learned facilitation in the Facilitations Fundamentals course to explain how to provide directions for a ‘How Might We’ activity:
What
We’re going to do an exercise called How Might We. It’s a very simple exercise that is going to allow us to reframe challenges into actionable statements that we’re going to be able to use to generate solutions.
Why
We’re doing this because a properly framed How Might We allows us to find non obvious solutions to the problem and gives the perfect frame for innovative thinking.
How
Here’s how we’ll do it: Write ‘HMW’ which stands for ‘How Might We’ in the top left corner of your sticky note, and when you hear a negative challenge, rephrase it into a HMW Statement. For example if our Expert mentions that ‘we’re not getting enough customers…”, you can write down HMW get more customers into our checkout..
You might want to stick to the script for a while at first until you feel comfortable and confidence that you won’t omit anything important for accurate comprehension of the exercise. Once you have mastered it, work from an outline that highlights the WHAT, WHY and HOW of each activity. In the next article I’ll share another tip for being clear while giving directions. So until next time, happy collaboration!