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Taking on Virtual
Facilitation, One Screen at a Time
Scenario
Imagine this: you’re facilitating a group of 10 people, each
from a different organization. The conversation is flowing,
ideas are jumping out, and you feel thoroughly engaged both with
the group and the process as a whole. Sounds like an ideal
facilitation session, right? But here’s the catch: you’re not
actually in the same room as any of the group members whose
ideas are pouring out. Instead, this facilitation is taking
place online, through virtual conferencing technology that lets
you hear, see, and speak to one another, despite physical
distances of hundreds of miles or more. In this age of extended
travel and virtual networking, online meetings – and hence
online facilitation – are becoming a norm of everyday life. In
this article we’ll take a look at some ways in which this form
of facilitation can provide opportunities that face-to-face
meetings cannot, as well as some of the challenges of online
facilitation.
Advantages
Online facilitation has several advantages that make it a
good option for meetings in today’s world. The most obvious
advantage – and in truth, really the greatest one – is the
opportunity online meetings provide for getting together a wide
range of people. Online meetings allow for groups from different
towns, states, and even countries to communicate in real-time
and participate in brainstorming and creative planning. For
facilitators and participants, this is a chance to tap into a
breadth of knowledge often unavailable elsewhere.
Another advantage of online facilitation is the absence of
multiple conversations occurring at once. In face-to-face
groups, meetings can be derailed by “sidebars” – conversations
taking place privately between two or more meeting participants.
The technology used for virtual meetings, however, makes it
nearly impossible for more than one person to speak at a time -
- minimizing interruptions and allowing for higher output among
group participants.
More
Information.... |
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Situation Room:
How would you handle this?
You are facilitating a group that clearly does not want to be
part of the meeting at hand. The group is loud, uninterested in
participating in the group process, and unhappy to have someone
with whom they are not familiar standing in front of the room
providing direction. When you try to direct the group’s
attention to the work of the day and to establishing ground
rules, groans are audible and you see several group members
continuing their individual conversations. Furthermore, when you
ask the group to come up with their own ground rules for the
day, you’re met with dead silence.
Leave your response here!
How would you handle this situation? We’ll publish the
responses we receive in the next edition of our newsletter…
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