The Science and Art of Facilitation

Article Revised: September 16, 2021

Featuring Larry W. Dyer, Master Black Belt, and Thomas Pyzdek, President, The Pyzdek Institute LLC.

This presentations answers the questions

• • What is facilitation?
  • Why is it needed?
  • What are common meeting problems?
  • What is a good facilitator?
  • How do groups develop?
  • How do we keep meetings on track?
  • What are some of the pitfalls and time savers?
  • Diffusing destructive dialog
  • Other common problems and remedial action

“The broadcast is now starting all attendees are in listen-only mode.

Good morning everyone, this is Tom Pyzdek of the Pyzdek Institute. I’d like to welcome you to today’s webinar conducted by Larry Dyer, a Pyzdek Institute master black belt. Larry’s going to talk to us about the science and art of facilitation. So Larry I’m turning it over to you. Okay, can you see my screen Tom? I think we will in just a second, there it is. Okay, alright, so we’re going to talk about facilitation. For myself I’ve probably done somewhere between 40 and 50 Kaizens. What we typically have to do when we do these Kaizen’s, our organization is spread all over the United States, so we typically have to pull the people pull a group of people together in a single location. Try to make as much progress as we can in three to three and a half days and then everybody goes home. You have to manage things remotely to get the projects completed. So I’ve done a lot of reading over the years and kind of refined this technique that I use to facilitate these kinds of meetings to get things done quickly. So hopefully you’ll enjoy it.

So we’re going to talk about: what is facilitation and why it’s needed, some of the common meeting problems that people have, what are the characteristics of a good facilitator, a little bit about the group dynamics, how groups develop, how do we keep the meetings on track and then there’s some pitfalls and time savers I just threw those in at the end I probably won’t go into a lot of detail on those. But they’re just there for your reference material. People are always asking me what happens when this situation occurs or this situation, so I tried to put some of those at the end so that you guys could use that as reference material.

So facilitate; to make easier or less difficult. Or, I like to assist the progress of. Facilitation; lowering the resistance in a neural pathway to an impulse. I like that, I thought that was good. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about is facilitate and facilitation as we go through this.

So the facilitator is the person who is moving the group along and identify some solves problems and makes decisions. Now Roger Schwartz wrote a book called the skilled facilitator and if you don’t have that I would recommend that you add that to your reading list. It’s a real good book about facilitation. It also has strong components of project management into that, which turn out to be some of the things you need as a skilled facilitator anyway.

So why is facilitation needed? Well look at the top scenario. This represents the old way of interacting with teams. You come together, then you go your separate ways. Sometimes people don’t understand what they need to do. There’s no complete understanding really. Eventually they come back together, reset expectations, then you go gather data. Then the data must be organized and usually reorganized. Then the teams have to review and analyze the data in order to reach some sort of agreement. Then they go back to their organization and the project manager is pressing them to get their things done and in the end no one’s really sure exactly what’s collected. Oh, by the way it took a long time. So the facilitated approach, brings everybody together early to develop operational definitions. So we want to make sure that everybody that pulls together has a complete understanding of what it is we’re trying to do. This is really the only way to ensure understanding across the group. Next, they can go gather data and do any required analysis. But, when the team gets back together there’s a shared understanding of the result. This is a much faster process.

But why is it needed? Well, the tangible benefits are; we need to reduce scope creep. Typically what happens when you pull these groups and meetings together, most of you that have done Six Sigma projects understand, that scope creep is something we deal with all the time. Oh, while you’re fixing this can you fix this? And so you really need to you need to have boundaries around what it is you’re trying to solve, so that you can keep that scope creep to a minimum. Accelerates early learning. That’s what the operational definitions bring to it. We’re getting everybody up to speed early in the process so that they can be productive very quickly and reduces the overall time of the project. The intangible benefits; so you are developing these working relationships as you pull this team together and what you want to do is you want the team to gel quickly so that you can get to a result quickly. Plus, the team has ownership of the results. You don’t have to sell the results, the team it becomes the sales staff for the results. So they’ve got ownership of it and it improves the implementation, speeds the implementation. They’re the ones that will go back, they become like your super users that go back and spread the news of the results of what you solved here.

So here’s a quote from Mary Bush you can do a project without facilitation, but you can also cut your own hair and do your own dentistry. It just takes longer, it’s more painful and you probably won’t get the best results. Project managers can get results without facilitation, but they’re taking a risk that it will take longer and will involve a learning curve they may not have time for. So that’s, I thought that was a great quote about why she needs facilitation.

So what are some of the common meeting problems that you see? Now I’ve listed some on here that I see. If any of you have comments you’d like to share, you know you can send those to Tom and he’ll read those off for us. But keeping people on topic is one of the big challenges that you have to deal with. Violent agreement is another one that I’ve seen, where you have people that are very vocal in speaking what it is they want to say and then when they get finished you realized they were in agreement and here they were in argumentative mode but they were and they’re the results are in agreement. I mean it’s amazing so I usually try to laugh that often. No you’re just in violent agreement and then move on from there. Too much talk, to little deciding. Agree with different definitions that’s where the operational definitions come into play, because I’ve had people that are arguing about a particular point and what they have is they have a different definition of one word and that causes them to not agree. So what you have to do as a facilitator is you have to kind of understand that and take that apart and find out which of those words they’re having difficulty or they don’t have agreement on.

Larry? Yeah. Can I give you an example of that I think it applies. This is Tom Pyzdek. I was once working with a hospital and they were trying to reduce the cesarean section rate. We had a team that had been working on it for several months and no progress had been made. So we brought in a facilitator and it happen to be that he was also a senior leader in the company. So he had a lot of influence with the group. I noticed we were in a u-shaped seating arrangement, with the physicians had arranged themselves on one side of the table and the nurses and staff had arranged themselves on the others. The administrator was standing up and he wrote down the mission of the team. The mission of the team as written was; to reduce the rate of cesarean sections in our hospital. He said, “Do you agree on this definition?” All of the physicians shook their head no and all the others shook their head yes. After about 15 minutes of discussion they inserted one additional word that brought everybody into an agreement and instead of reduced the rate of cesarean sections it was reduced the rate of unnecessary cesarean sections. That word had really kept that team from making progress for months.

That’s a good example Tom. I’ve seen similar examples in in my experience, where you have the team, actually when you’re just looking at the problem statement. A lot of times we’ll just open this by looking at the problem statement and the goal statement the way we define it in our Charter. We will not have agreement on the problem statement and we’ll have to work through that first before we can make progress. So it’s really important though that you get through that operational definition part and make sure that you’ve got everybody in agreement.

So what is a good facilitator? Well you can’t take anything personally. You have to disconnect from the group, from that point of view. But, you’ve got to remain objective throughout the life of the meeting. You ask questions to foster clarity. So a lot of times what I’ll do when I’m in one of these meetings is, just for my own understanding, I’ll ask questions to try to understand exactly what it is they’re talking about. What I find out later is that there are other people in that session that didn’t know that information either. But I was the one that asked the question, they didn’t speak up. So ask questions to foster clarity. Don’t suggest solutions. The only time that I would go against that is if you have a project and you’ve worked with the sponsor and the sponsor has said I want to make sure that they evaluate this as one of the possible solutions. From that point of view I have inserted suggestions for solutions. But typically you don’t. Guide the group instead of dictating. Remain objective, I think I said that. I guess I really wanted to make that point. Allow the group to make the decisions contrary to your opinion. So you have to be careful when you’re leading a group to make sure that your body language stays objective too. For example; when someone makes a comment and you raise your eyebrows, that can be construed as you’re feeling contrary to that decision. So you have to be very careful of that. Then manage the group politics without fear of reprisal. So you have to manage the politics of the group and you have to make sure that people have an opportunity to speak. But remember the facilitator is there to focus on the meeting process, not contributing directly to the results of the meetings.

So how did groups develop? Well I’m sure most of you have seen this. This is right out of Tom’s book about forming storming norming and performing. The thing about pulling a team together and making progress quickly is you have to get through these stages quickly. You’re going to go through the stages unless you’ve had this team together on a previous project and they’ve already figured out how to perform. But when you’re pulling a new group together you’re going to go through some parts of this so you just need to be aware of it and to manage it as it’s happening and move the group through to performing as quickly as you can.

Could I comment on this Larry? Yep. This was something that I did some research on and there’s two different kinds of groups they call them: effective groups and ineffective groups. This actually has a scientific definition. An effective group is a group where if they conducted tests and determined the best performing individual in that group the group will outperform that individual. If the group is ineffective, it will actually do worse than the best performing individual in the group. They did this with puzzles and other things that you know they use to establish best versus the other performance levels. So if you don’t do this process correctly, you can actually make the group performance worse than that of an individual.

Good point. You will go through these steps, so just become familiar with the different aspects of this and just be ready for it and know that oh we’re in storming now okay. You just move on from there.

When you do a Kaizen Larry, which is generally what five days? It’s generally three days, we travel Monday and Friday. Yeah, how much time can you do a like an estimate of how much time you spend in each of these phases? Just a guess or is it very too much? I’d say the first day we’re in storming and by the second day we’re usually into performing. So we get through most of the forming and storming the first day sometimes the first half of the day. Then typically by the second day we’re starting into norming and performing. Thank you. Yeah.

So how do we keep the meeting on track. Okay well you got to have the objectives. Goal and purpose, we do the Charter, we put our Charter up there. Here’s our problem statement, here’s our goal statement, so that everyone knows what it is we’re trying to solve. When we get off track I’ll go back to that problem statement and goal statement and say; Does that relate directly to what we’re trying to solve here? If not, then it needs to go on the parking lot. We use the parking lot extensively to keep people focused in these meetings. I also capture action items. I’ll have a separate piece of paper up there just to capture action items right next to the parking lot. You want to, if it’s pertinent, go ahead and capture it and then you can stop talking about it. One of the things that we do is, before we let everybody go at the end of the third day we always go back through all the action items, make sure they’re still pertinent and make sure that they all get assigned. But to capture them and then cut off discussion on that topic so that you can continue to move on. The parking lot is your friend and once people get used to using that they will start making suggestions about what you should put on the parking lot. A lot of times these can end up being additional projects or additional recommendations for management. A lot of good things can come out of the parking lot. So other things to keep the meeting on track; using an agenda. I always have an agenda for my Kaizen’s. I send that out before time. Then I continue to use the agenda when we do our follow-up meetings, because the way we do these is we will meet, we’ll pick a place in the country everybody will fly there and we’ll meet for three days. Then it’s very intensive and by the end of the three days we’ve developed our action items and hopefully we’ve gotten into improve and perhaps have a new process drafted out. We have a whole series of action items. The way that you manage those action items after that is, we’re just doing that with virtual meetings. You can’t manage those action items effectively without an agenda. So you need an agenda for your meetings. You need an agenda for your Kaizen. Defining the ground rules. I always go through the ground rules of here’s how we want to interact over the next few days, we’re going to take regular breaks, if I don’t give you a break soon enough raise your hand. You tell everybody where the bathroom is, all of the computers are closed, all the phones are put on stun, all of that basic stuff. Then you need to sometimes, in particular groups, you need to have what I call guardrails when the group loses focus. So one of the thing would be; anybody can raise their hand when they think the group has lost focus, to bring that group back into focus. So that gets people focusing on the process that we’re going through also. So I find that works pretty well. Timeboxing works when you’re trying to get some decisions and you can’t you can’t get them to reach a decision quickly. You put a time box around it and say we’ve got X number of minutes to reach a decision, then you take a vote at the end of that to see if they’re in agreement. If they’re not, if they can’t decide at that point then it just becomes an action item and throw in on your action item list and you move on. A lot of times these meetings have a group of people in the room, but we also have people on the phone. So you have to make sure that you include the people on the phone by having the people in the room mention their name before they speak, making sure that you’re not getting visual signals that are just in the room like people nodding their heads and things like that. You need to make sure that people are giving auditory signals so it can be heard on the phone. Make sure that you use the language of the business. One of the things, I’m training a bunch of greenbelts right now, and one of the things that we’re concentrating on is when you go in and you’re working with these people they can easily be intimidated by the words that you use. So you need to be careful about that and instead of going in and say okay we’re going to do a force field analysis say well let’s look at how this might happen. Let’s look at the things that are positive and let’s look the things that are negative that would keep this from happening. So you want to make sure that you’re using terms that they’re comfortable with and that’s why I mean language of the business. Confirm the meeting results in next steps. We always go through at the end, go through the action items what are the next steps going to be who’s going to be responsible for that. Make sure that everybody agrees before you let them go.

So these are some particular things. I got these off of I think it’s Roy Cray Bill’s website. These were just some specific things about specific kinds of dialogue and how to deal with that. One of the things that I’ve done in my career is; I’ve probably read 200 books on: attitudes, self-image, how to deal with people, human behavior or all those kinds of categories. Whenever I would read one of those books, I would always want to get one item out of that book that I could incorporate into my facilitation to improve my techniques over time. So I would suggest you do the same thing. Reading books, behavior books and self-improvement books and looking to get one thing that will improve your facilitation. So here are some specific things about generalization, blame statements. I’ve had this happen; where people say wouldn’t you agree with this trying to drive a conversation in a particular area and you just need to be aware of that and drive it back to the group in particular and not supplying your opinion. Some of these that I did a session recently, where I did it was with what we call account management team. The account managers are like sales people and they’re very competitive. They’re competitive and everything that they do. Even when I tell them it’s not a competitive activity, they’re competitive. They’re very, what is the word, they really ride each other hard. So there’s a lot of heavy teasing going on in that group. So I was kind of taken back by this when it first started, but I realized that in order to get this group to perform I’m going to have to step to their level and do the same kind of teasing or they’re not going to take me seriously. So I just jumped right in there with them on that and that worked pretty well.

Larry? Yeah. I’m wanted to add something here. A tool I use called LCS, which I’ve put down as part of the rules at the beginning ,that you use this LCS approach. Which is anytime you’re going to say something about something that somebody says in a group. You first have to say what you liked about what they said. That tends to bring that defensive barrier down. That they understood that they see that you understood what they were trying to say. Then speak of your concern with what they had said. Then always have a suggestion. If you don’t have a suggestion for the concern, don’t bring up the concern. So it’s kind of tell much you like, tell them your concern and your suggestion for resolving that concern. It kind of helps move through this thing. That is an excellent idea and these kind of tools are always helpful when you can get it. Something like that and that’s something that you can easily remember. You can just put LCS up on the board and then talk to the team about that. Then just remind them, you know to go to that technique. That’s a really good idea.

So let me go to the next slide here and there we go. Speaking for others. You got to make sure that people get an opportunity to speak for themselves. So somebody could say something like; I happen to know a lot of other people in the group feel this way. I would say who feels this way? Let’s get all of them to speak. Another thing, number six on there, where people say; I think what Mary is really trying to say, is you need to make sure that you let Mary say it. Not let somebody else say it for Mary. So those are two that I have run across quite a bit in dealing with groups. I like the phrase super parenting. Yeah. Then interrupting. Interrupting, you just have to you know you just call it as it is. Typically I would say; I’m interested in what you have to say but let’s let so-and-so finish first because I think what they’re saying is important. So you need to make sure that everybody gets an opportunity to speak and especially when you have someone who is overly compensating for the group. In other words they’re doing most of the speaking. You need to make sure that everybody doesn’t feel like they’re being bullied by that person, that they get an opportunity to speak. Because you’ve got all different kinds of personalities in the room there, so you want to make sure that that everyone gets a chance to speak. You never know where the gems of wisdom are going to come from.

Larry? Go ahead. Another thing here is; instead of speaking sometimes you bring up a discussion point, let everybody write it on a post-it note, their comment and then go around the room. That forces everybody to have an opportunity to say what they’re talking about. Yeah, I use that technique a lot when we’re doing brainstorming actually. Yeah. Where you’ll use the post-it notes and you’ll have people write down all of their ideas about how to improve this for example. The technique has been shown that people typically write six to eight things. Then once they write the six to eight things that are the normal things to think about, they start thinking outside the box. That’s where you get so more creative thinking. You typically don’t get that if you’re just having them talk as a group, so that’s a good point. Yeah. Use that too.

Then challenging the facilitator. Sometimes you get that and you just have to deal with it without getting upset. You can’t get upset about it. You just have to say; I feel uncomfortable with your comment. I kind of turn it over to the group and try to get the group to weigh in on this. I’ve had situations though where we actually had to go back to the sponsor and we’ve had to remove a person from the group because we just couldn’t get them to play nice in the sandbox so to speak. But, bringing the other people into the group and sometimes as it happens I had a group of about 40 people they were all managers. They were all managers of nurses. I had one person who was speaking quite a bit for the group. So at the break a couple of the people came up to me and they apologized for that person. I said the next time it happens, how about you speak up and they did. They basically called that person down and put that person back in their place so that we could continue to make progress. So you can use all of these techniques.

This slide. This is some additional information I pulled right out of Tom’s handbook, about just covers in general some of the other topics. So the thing that I wanted to point to here is; a lot of times when you pull groups together and you’re trying to work through a problem, you’ll have people jumping to the solution. You want to continue to drive people back to the data. What is the data telling us? We don’t want to jump to a solution, we want to continue to go back and look at the data. So that’s really the one that I wanted to point to on that, but all of these are helpful depending upon the situation that’s going on.

So the takeaways; keep it on topic, manage the process and clarify throughout the entire session. Where you’re clarifying to make sure that you have right operational definitions, you’re clarifying to make sure people understand what’s going on during the meeting and then you’re clarifying as to what’s going to happen after the meeting. I put this little formula down on the bottom; the solution is equal to, the project times the quality of the solution, times acceptance and a good facilitation really helps acceptance. If you don’t have acceptance, if acceptance is zero, then your solution is not going to work. So that’s, I think, that’s my last point.

Any questions? So if you have a question and you don’t have audio access you can go ahead and ask the question by clicking the question button. I will relay that question to Larry. If you do have audio access you can click the raise hand button and I will unmute you and you can ask the question of Larry. I do have a question Larry.

The question is from Doug. Doug asked, “Group size is typically five to seven people but you speak of groups of 40, what is more typical?” Well 40 was unusual. 5 to 7 is optimal. However, for some of the particular issues that we’ve had, we’ve had 17 in a room for three days solving a problem. That is a challenge, when you’re dealing with that many people in a room. So I would always suggest that you do keep it 6 to 8 if at all possible but sometimes it’s just not possible and you just have to deal with that.

Another question, “With large groups do you bring in more facilitators to help?” Yes. When you do a group that’s 40, there’s typically two of us. One is watching what’s going on in the group, while the other one is facilitating. Yeah, that’s a great comment. Highly recommend that.

I have a question I’d like to ask. Okay. My question is, “how do you facilitate a group of your superiors in the organization, your boss?” Well I do that all the time actually. Typically the COO is in the room, along with several, the vice-president and my boss. I don’t find it to be any different because they have made it okay for me to be the facilitator and to drive the group wherever the group needs to go. So if you’ve got an organizational structure or you’ve got bosses that don’t,  it’s got something to do with their, I’m having a little trouble with this because I’m having trouble with how to word this. It’s got something to do with their self-image, if they have a good image of themselves and you can you can work with that as a group. People don’t worry about being wrong if they realize they have a good self-image. If people have problems being wrong, if they can’t take it if they’re wrong, then it’s very difficult to facilitate them in a group. It can become very difficult to handle. Does that make sense Tom? Yeah I think it does make sense to me. Let me ask the person who asked the question. Does that make sense to you? Wait, I asked the question never mind. Yes it does make sense to me. The reason I asked is that; I’m brought in as a consultant and it’s easier for me and I do often notice that the employees, if I have co-facilitators for a large group, are always a little bit hesitant and resistant when it comes to addressing their superiors.

So I have a question from Santiago. Santiago asks, “Should the black belt be a facilitator, even though the black belt is involved with the results?” We do that here. My thought on that is, as the black belt, I tell my black belts that you’re the facilitator. You are helping the team drive the results. But the results are the results of the team. They’re not your results. You may provide some tools to help them get there, but they are identifying and providing the results. A lot of times these things will go, these projects will go a totally different direction from what I expected or what I thought my preconceived idea is before coming into the meeting. You have to let it go there and just support them in getting there because that’s what they’ll support. That’s what they will sell when they go back. They’ve created that decision, so they’ll be part of your sales team to help implement that. Ok.

We have a question from Dan. Dan asks, “Do you have tips for dealing with different cultures such as India or the UK?” I have not dealt with the UK but I’ve dealt with India. We had an organization in Bangalore. We were doing, one of the things that I found out or that I realized after doing this a couple of times was that it’s very difficult for people in India to tell you that they don’t understand. So they will say that they understand even if they don’t understand. So what we found was we conducted these sessions, they said that they understood the results, yet when it came down to actually implementing it we fell down and we had to go back and redo that. So that’s one of the tips that I have for dealing with folks from India. I think it’s just a cultural thing. I’m not quite sure exactly why it is that way, but it’s just something that I’ve noticed time and again. Ok.

I’m going to unmute Doug Pearson. Doug has a number of questions he posted and I’d like to have him ask them live, so Doug you are unmuted go ahead and ask your questions. Oh Doug says his battery just died. Yes. Doug’s question was, “If someone takes an HR emergency phone call, do you let them take group time out to bring them back. Do you take group time out to bring them back up to speed or do you just let them back into the meeting?” So I think what he’s saying is, somebody gets up, leaves the meeting, answers the phone or takes care of some emergency and then comes back into the meeting what do you do in that case. Larry it really depends. If possible I’ll just let them come back in and continue on. Then if there’s something I need to catch them up on, I’ll do it at a break so I don’t want to take the team’s time to just bring that other person up to speed. I’ll try to use the break for that. Ok.

I have a question here from Ashock. I’m not sure how to pronounce it but he asked, “What do you do when one of the team members who in a senior position starts imposing his way of thinking and decisions on the other team members?” Well there’s a couple of ways. If you can say; look at the data, let’s follow the data and let the data tell us where to go. That’s one approach. But let’s say you’re doing an improve and they’re trying to force a particular methodology on the group or a particular thing that the group is not in agreement with. What we do is, we will when we’re doing the brainstorming, we’ll have people vote on the improvement ideas. So if we develop say 50 improvement ideas, we’ll use multi voting. I’ll tell them you’ve got 15 votes and you can vote 15 votes on one item or one vote on 15 items or anything in between. What I’m trying to do is to get them to start to stratify what are the most important things that need to be included in our solution. Then, what that does is that dilutes that one individual from being overly driving the organization in a particular direction. So what I’ve done is I’ve said, “okay now we’ve got it stratified, we have a subset of our improvement ideas that we’re going to make sure that all of these are included in the solutions?” So does that answer the question. I presume, so if not we’ll ask Ashock. Ashock says yes, so there you go. Okay. Okay good.

So the next question is from Ali. Ali asks, “How do you engage the people that do not participate because of someone else in the group, but yet they will come back to you after the meeting to engage and say I did not want to mention this in the room because and so on?” Well what I try to do is, I don’t want that to go until the end of the meeting. I try to do that at the break. So as we take breaks, if I’ve got somebody who’s being overbearing and driving the content of the meeting and I’ve got other people in there I’ll either say; I want to hear from every one of you during this hour or if I take a break and I talked to those people individually that aren’t speaking and say I want you to speak up I want to hear from you during the next part of the session. You don’t want to let it go until the end of the day. Okay.

The next question is from Doug. Doug says “Black belts facilitate the first two or three Kaizen events, if they don’t go well what are the next one or two approaches to use?” If I have an event that, if I have a black belt whose events are not going, well then I would want to sit in on the next event with them to see what’s going on. Typically when we bring in a new black belt, we pair them up with another black belt for their first couple of projects anyway. We’re in the healthcare arena and we have quite a bit of knowledge that you have to gain in order to be able to move in this environment. So we found that it seems to work better if we pair them up with someone anyway for the first couple of projects. So you kind of get an idea of how they operate, how it works. But if they’ve had a couple of bad projects or the sponsor comes back to me and says this didn’t work out, then I’m going to be involved in the next one as a fly-on-the-wall and maybe more to try to understand what’s going on, what’s not working. Hope that helps. Okay.

So I have a question here from Rick. Rick says “Do you have any tips for addressing senior leadership using laptops, emails, phone calls etc during the meeting?” That’s always a challenge, always a challenge when you’re dealing with senior leadership. But what I do is I put it up on one of my first slides is; no laptops and you know phones on stun and we’ll take regular breaks. If you have people that still continue to open leave their laptops open and to work, I’ll just kind of walk around the room and I’ll just walk over there and I’ll just gently close it while I’m talking. So and they get the message. What I typically have, I’m known for that now. So they know that I’m going to publicly embarrass them by closing their laptops. So what they do is they keep them closed and then they open them at the break and they answer emails at the break and then they close them again. But you just have to be consistent about that and you have to let them know as you start the meeting that we need your full attention. We have you at this meeting because we need your brain cells to be involved in the meeting not involved in answering emails. Okay great.

So Ashock I’m going to unmute you and you can go ahead and ask your question. You’re unmuted, go ahead Ashock. Did I surprise him? Okay so I can’t hear you Ashock so I’m going to assume you’re having audio difficulties. You can go ahead and post your question in the chat window and I’ll pass it along to Larry. I’m going take just a couple more questions here. This one is from Doug. Doug says, “Wat about electronic notebooks that are becoming more popular for example; not laptops for business during the meeting?” iPads. We do have people that take notes and if they tell me I’m just taking notes with my iPad or I’m just taking notes and they don’t have their email open I have allowed that in the past. But it is easier with an iPad than it is with having the laptop open.

I have a question from Santiago. He says, “When the group is in performing phase do you think it’s also good to move emotions?” I’m not sure what he means but I’ll let you answer it Larry. To move or remove? Well it says move. Santiago do you mean move or do you mean remove emotions? Move he says. So do we know what he means Larry? Yeah I’m not quite sure what he means. Anytime you get emotions involved you have to you have to be objective about that and you have to you have to deal with it. But you have to try to take the emotion out of it. He’s clarified Larry he says, “to create enthusiasm.” That makes sense. Okay turn create enthusiasm. Yeah of course you want to enthusiasm about the results. You typically when you’re getting into the improved phase and people are starting to see that they are part of a solution and that solution can actually occur then they’re starting to get some enthusiasm about that and you do want to build on the enthusiasm. Okay.

So at this play now, I’m going to turn off the questions and I want to thank Larry for delivering a presentation. A great job Larry. I’m going to be posting the link to the recording later on today on the site all spelled out. You can stop up there and see the recording as well as the Q&A. I want to thank everybody for attending and hopefully we’ll see you at the next webinar. A special thanks to Larry and Pete, our panelists. So thank you everyone.”

Update

The webinar The Science and Art of Facilitation was a great success! Thanks to all who attended and participated. Special thanks to Larry Dyer, the presenter, and panelist Peter Bersbach.

Below find links to recordings and resources used in the webinar. The first and second session presentations are essentially the same, but the Q&A for the two sessions are different.

Here’s a link to the slides used in the webinar.

If you are interested in Six Sigma Certification and Training, contact Pyzdek Institute today!