 One of the main roles of a facilitator running a workshop is to take a massive amount of information and to visualize this for the people in the group. That's honestly one of the biggest benefits you can bring to a group as a facilitator, because when people are talking, when people have ideas, if they can't see them, they really can't get a good grasp on how to make decisions, how to prioritize things. But when you're a facilitator, whether you're doing it remotely or in person, what you're trying to do is essentially visualize conversations, visualize data so that people can more simply see the clusters, see the topics, make decisions, prioritize things, brainstorm, et cetera, et cetera. Data visualization is really a core part of the role of a facilitator. What I wanted to show you here today, it's something we haven't tried on a YouTube channel before, but I want to show you inside my private community, Workshop or Master, where I run weekly two to three hour Zoom calls with our community members and answer their questions. What you're about to see is me answering the question of one of our community members who works for an NGO, and she was telling me, okay, I've got all of this data from the client, they've sent me all of these documents, what am I supposed to do with it? What can I do with all of this information before the workshop? And the answer you're about to see is me explaining to her how I would approach this, how I approach receiving a lot of data from clients and then visualizing it. And I hope a glimpse inside one of these private coaching calls is useful for you. So let's jump into it and watch me coaching someone on visualizing data in a workshop. Hey, hi, Jonathan. I've been in the community for about three weeks and loving it. Hey, you're fresh. I'm very fresh and so much help in the Facebook community. Thanks to everyone. I plugged a few urgent questions in and got an overwhelming response. So it's been fantastic. My question is probably a broader approach that you may take. So I work as a consultant, my area predominantly is healthcare sector, public government, and often I'm faced with the request to facilitate a half day workshop. We've got either piles of data to go through where key stakeholders in the room need to align. So I ran a workshop a couple of weeks ago. There were 60 action items that went to consultation broadly and 25 stakeholders from very different lens approach. Some were hospital, GM, some were policy, controlled policy within the government, some controlled funding. So the lenses in the room have very different individuals, sometimes conflicting perspectives. So we had this pile of data with lots of 25 stakeholders and they wanted us to first of all align that everyone was happy with the 60 actions and then come up with the top 10 priorities. So it's either that kind of workshop or I'm going into a workshop in a couple of weeks where again, 25 stakeholders from different lenses in government where the data is kind of a little bit more piecemeal. But again, the outcome is half a day workshop. We want alignment and a way forward in terms of how do we bring a position that we can bargain at the table. So my question is more around, do you have a general approach to these kind of requests in terms of it's not blue-skinned thinking and creating and building and kind of thinking about ideas and solutions. You've kind of got hard data already and it's more about getting that alignment. Yeah, so for us at A.Jane Smart, the types of workshops that would fall into would be kind of like strategy or leadership retreats or things like this where maybe it's not about coming up with anything new, it's about getting everyone on the same page with a lot of stuff that's already accumulated. And I just see my job in that case as someone who can visualize the mess and help them understand, basically take what is very hard for a human to parse and understand and turn it into something that's easier for a human to parse and understand. And that's a big part of visualizing the data and that's the first thing. So usually what I would do is, so would a lot of these be in person or online? At the moment, they're in person. Okay, so generally when the clients walk into the room with me, I've already visualized a couple of things for them because I have taken the time to try, I usually get the data a little bit before the workshop, I assume you'll also get it a little bit before the workshop and I'll look at that and based on the different visualization models that I understand, I start to essentially literally draw those up on the walls. And so a really common thing is that I'll draw a map, classic design sprint map and try to draw out like the systems that are happening in this situation that we're talking about. What I'll also try to do is create a cluster of challenges. So if there's potentially, you said there's 60 topics. Well, one very simple thing I'll do is write them all up and visualize them and make it clear, not in any prioritized order, but simply visualize that for them versus having that all in different slides and stuff, which is hard for humans to really parse. If I can also cluster, so with those 60 things, the first thing I would try to do is also think about, can those 60 things also be clustered into smaller groups? So is one of these clusters around healthcare, is one of these clusters around whatever, depends on your topic. And even just the act of them walking into the room and seeing that I've done that almost informational hierarchy clustering is a really good start because they already have the feeling, holy shit, this person has taken the mess that's kind of in all of these documents and visualize it in a way that me as a normal human can just scan and understand. And I think my job in this case is not necessarily to make any decisions for them, but to make it just easier for them to be able to make decisions by being able to see all of the options. So you mentioned like, is there something that I would do every time? The answer is no, because it really depends on what they want out of it. But the first thing, like if I can think about something that I would do every time in terms of prep work, it would be trying to visualize everything that is visualizable even before knowing necessarily what it is we wanna get out of this. And just the first like 15 minutes presenting to them, here's your data. It just looks a bit easier to understand now. And then often, you know, it will kick off into, so if your goal is to come out with a smaller amount, like I like to be really simplistic about things, I'll say something like, here are, and this is really common in the product spaces while you'll have a product team coming together, like a Twitter or something, and they'll say, here's like the next five years of things we could be doing. There's like a hundred features here, and they're in all different spaces. This is the B2B stuff. This is the B2C stuff. This is like all of this other stuff. Here it all is. I'll say to them, here's everything. What we wanna leave with today is less stuff on this wall. Like maybe there's even two spaces. It's like, here's the everything pile. Here's the priority pile. You can see it's empty over here. What we wanna leave here today with, if we leave here today with like some post-its from here over there, I'll be happy and you can be happy because what we've done is just gotten some things in order. See, I just try to keep it very, very, very basic. And I really, with a challenge like this, people also always wanna be heard. And the cool thing is if you walk in, if you manage to give them the feeling that you've looked at their data and presented it to them, they also feel heard. They also feel like this person listens to me, even if you haven't talked to them yet. And then it's just down to the very specific exercises you need to do. So if you're trying to prioritize things, I guess effort impact scale action board is always a classic good old McKinsey exercise to get things in order. So you could just do a massive one of those. But yeah, then it just depends on the specific challenge. Hopefully that video was useful for you. If it was, it was from the program Workshop or Master. This is our highest tier program for facilitators. We have a course, we've got private coaching calls, we've got a community, it's really amazing. But if you're a facilitator, if you're interested in growing your career as a facilitator, forget about that for a moment. I've created a free one hour training that will teach you how the top 1% of facilitators in the world facilitate workshops, build workshops and find clients so that they can get a high day rate. That link is below, it says free training, just click on it, watch the free training, there's no catch. And if you like that, you'll also see a preview of the program, you can check it out, everything is down there below. Now, I'd love to know if you're watching this video, if you got this far into the video, was seeing something like this useful was seeing inside the program useful for you? Are these types of discussions? Are they too nerdy or are they fun? Let us know in the comments so we know whether to do more of them or less of them. Thank you so much, bye-bye.