What facilitators know
Meg Bolger put a single question into a LinkedIn thread: what's one random-but-impactful piece of advice you'd give a new facilitator? One hundred and fifty-seven people answered. So I saved the whole thing.
In late 2023, Meg Bolger — Head of Facilitator Cards — posted an ask on LinkedIn:
What is a random-but-impactful piece of advice that you would give a new facilitator?
One hundred and fifty-seven people replied. Coaches, OD consultants, service designers, L&D professionals, workshop facilitators from Kenya, New Zealand, Germany, the US. Meg jumped into the replies, asked follow-up questions, pushed people to say more. The thread ran for days.
I contributed one piece of advice: Bring enough pens?
Meg said it was one of her favourites in the thread. Which tells you something about what this community thinks good facilitation is actually made of.
I saved the whole thread. Here’s what I found when I read it properly.
The physical environment is a design decision
A surprising amount of the wisdom in this thread is about the room itself — and it’s worth taking seriously, because new facilitators often treat the room as a given.
Room setup tells participants what kind of conversation they’re in. Margaret Stacy-Duffy put it plainly: don’t set up a room for a lecture and expect vulnerable discussion to happen. The arrangement of chairs communicates what’s expected before anyone opens their mouth. Lisa Taylor adds: if you’re stuck with theatre-style seating, at least angle the two sides toward each other — a shallow V keeps people from staring at the back of each other’s heads.
The physical logistics are not beneath you. Yes, bring enough pens. Check that your flipchart markers actually work. Know where the bathrooms are relative to the room. Know how long the coffee queue takes. Know whether lunch arrives in the room (Meg: “you have five minutes before you totally lose the group’s attention”) or somewhere else. Know whether it’s hybrid. Catherine Simpson adds: check participants’ sensory and mobility requirements, not just dietary ones — and remember that sound, temperature, and smell all affect what’s possible in the room.
Arrive early. Rachna Verma: arrive early if onsite, set up the space and familiarise with amenities. This is boring advice and it is correct:-)
Time is a design material
The most reliably bad thing a facilitator can do is pack too much in and then run out of time.
Sulu LeoNimm: Don’t fill the time available and stuff everything in with rigid time constraints. Plan that things will take longer — then have things in your back pocket in case you get extra time. Robin Gissing adds a useful heuristic: for every item on your agenda, ask ‘if this were dropped, what would we lose?’ Things that can be dropped without losing substance become your bonus material.
Ben Brearley: if I’m talking for more than five minutes straight, it’s a sign that I need to get participants doing something. This is a reasonable forcing function.
Take the break. Dan Manning: You’ll feel the temptation to press through. If you ask, they’ll tell you to keep going. But, more times than not, you’ll regret not taking the break. Meg replied: The amount of times I used to be like ‘we can do just one more thing’ and then half way through that think been internally kicking myself because it wasn’t going well… Marcus Crow goes further: bladders last 90–100 minutes, and the further down Maslow’s triangle you get, the more you lose the group. Plan around biology.
Don’t end on logistics. Sarah Willcox: find a time to cover housekeeping before the closing, then close with something that lets participants reflect on what they’ve achieved. Leave them on a more energetic note than if you were talking about parking spaces.
The first five minutes
Lauren Sowers: create an opening that lets everyone find their voice within the first five minutes. The earlier each voice is heard, the more invited folks feel to speak from that point on.
This is also why Jacob Chromy’s advice — don’t skip the check-in — landed so well that Meg pushed him to say more. The check-in is not warm-up fluff. It’s how you signal that this is a participatory room, not a presentation. It’s how you establish the norm of speaking before the stakes are high.
Katerina Kupenga: no one knows what’s on the runsheet. Don’t freak. Move with the moment and the group.
Your ego is not the tool
The advice that recurred most often, in different forms, was about the facilitator’s relationship to their own need to perform.
Emanuele Mazzanti: Check your ego at the door. It is about letting their wisdom emerge, not your need to impress. Fran Cormack: Let go of the need to be good. When Meg asked what she’d replace it with: a desire to be useful.
Mike Cardus offered two connected observations:
- You don’t need to see learning for it to happen.
- When you are working harder than the team to solve their problem, you are now a part of the problem.
Josh Cox: Fight the temptation to be anything else but yourself. Katerina Kupenga: Don’t think you have to impersonate a great facilitator — find your own natural talent and stand in it.
And Lana Kristine Jelenjev, perhaps most usefully: Settled bodies settle bodies. When you’re regulated, you help others regulate. Your nervous system is part of the room.
Silence and questions
Célynne Shipley: Don’t fear the silent gaps. Someone will fill it and ideally it isn’t you.
Teresa Bassma: Ask one question at a time. I hear so many people ask questions like ‘should we have this event and if so when and what theme.’ It makes for pretty confusing conversations.
Robin Funsten: Talk less and ask more questions. If the questions aren’t being answered in the big group — make small groups. Meg highlighted this one too: so simple, so helpful.
David Warren: Be comfortable being a mirror back to the group, even when the mirror sees things that might not be pretty.
Plan, but run loose
The most-repeated structural tension in the thread was between preparation and adaptability. Several people landed on variants of the same idea.
Whitney Thoren: Design right, run loose. Be prepared for it all, but be willing to ditch it along the way if that’s what the group needs.
Jodie Rogers: Have a rough plan for sessions — but don’t be a slave to the plan.
Martina Gobec: Be understructured and overprepared. Be willing to change the agenda on the fly, if the process requires it. I called this the best advice in the thread, and I stand by it.
Shani W: They haven’t attended this before, and don’t know what your facilitation plan was. If things go wrong, breathe, improvise and remember that nobody will know this isn’t what was supposed to happen.
How you get better
Chad Littlefield: Want to run or swim better? Run and swim more. Same logic applies. Meg agreed: she spent her early years doing free sessions, which lowered the stakes for herself and got her reps in.
Kerri Price: Go watch other facilitators in action. Participate in lots of workshops, even if you’re not particularly interested in the topic. Find a facilitator you admire and ask to shadow them for a day. Jes Smith adds the harder version: watch yourself. Force yourself to watch those Zoom recordings. Ask someone to record your face-to-face sessions.
Kate Horton: If you suck at first (which you will) identify areas that you WANT to enhance and learn more about. Stay curious and committed to being a life-long learner.
What the thread itself is
I asked Meg at the time if she’d collate and share the thread. She said she hoped to but wasn’t sure she’d find the time. She hasn’t yet — but the thread itself is still there, and it’s worth reading in full if you do this work.
What struck me, looking at it properly, is that almost none of the advice is about techniques or methods. Nobody said try the 1-2-4-all or use dot voting. The advice is almost entirely about the facilitator’s relationship to the room, to the group, and to their own ego.
The things that experienced practitioners converge on, apparently, are: the physical basics matter more than you think; ego is your main obstacle; questions beat talking; silence is productive; plans are for abandoning gracefully; and — yes — bring enough pens.
Meg Bolger is Head of Facilitator Cards, which is exactly what it sounds like and worth a look.
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