Facilitation – the most required business skill of the early 21st century?

What is it about meetings that seem to be interminable? Wouldn’t you rather be doing something useful rather than watching the agenda being pulped? When you’re involved in a meeting that’s meandering along, how do you feel? Can’t you just hear the clock ticking?

Enter the facilitator (like enter the dragon, but less dramatic and certainly less painful). Here is the saviour of wasted time! Here is the bringer of focus. Here at last is the person who provides the method and means to deliver positive outcomes and achievement of meeting objectives. All in the allocated time!

So what is good facilitation? How do you know when a meeting has been well facilitated?

Have you ever been to a meeting where there were diverse and diverging opinions with the distinct possibility of conflict and yet everything ran smoothly? Could you put your finger on what it was that enabled success? Did you spot the person subtly guiding the meeting along with the skill and confident touch of a Venetian gondolier?

Good facilitation can make all the difference between a well-executed, robust outcome and a solution that is built on shifting sands.