The importance of facilitating meetings

Although most projects start enthusiastically, optimism fades quickly unless an analysis and design team gets traction and learns where it is going.

Working from a project charter, the team’s next step is defining typically, “What does success look like?”

These high-level requirements help clarify the project’s vision and give the team a focus. Many business analysts employ group facilitation to elicit these requirements. This blog post summarizes some of the steps you might follow in facilitating such a meeting.


The importance of “group think”
Long a mainstay of business analysis, one-on-one interviews with stakeholders is a standard business analysis tool. Typically, each stakeholder represents to you the interests of his or her own business unit and measures the project by what the unit may gain or lose. Accumulated, these one-on-one interviews make me think of the ancient Indian story of “The Elephant and the Seven Blind Men.”

Perhaps you remember the story. One blind man judged the elephant to be a large snake because of its trunk. Another claimed the elephant was a tree because of its leg, and so on. Is there method to develop consensus among opinionated individuals? I’ve found facilitated meetings to be useful.

How important is the “group think” that comes from facilitated meetings? In the elephant story, a revelation comes to the blind men as a wise man affirms their perceptions and helps them understand each other’s perspectives.

In a facilitated meeting, you help the team members recognize their unique perspectives, reveal mutual interests, and distill common agreement.

A successful group needs a diversity of opinion, independent perspectives, decentralized governance, and a good method for aggregating opinions. Stakeholders typically arrive at the meeting armed with the first three success factors. Through facilitation, you enable the fourth.


Facilitation as a tool
Facilitated meetings generate positive outcomes in several dimensions. First, consider the axiom, “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” In my experience, a facilitated meeting routinely generates more high-quality ideas than would be revealed by one-on-one interviews.

While “designed by committee” is sometimes derided, all requirements are subject to scrutiny eventually anyway. There is significant value in distilling and refining the team’s smorgasbord of requirements early in the project.

Facilitated meetings create value beyond the requirements. Even in the first meeting, you will witness the formation of a functioning team. From the ideas suggested by individual team members, adjustments, clarifications, compromises, and consensus emerge. Although it may take three or four meetings, a working team emerges and produces valuable results.