 In this video, I'm going to explain to you how learning to facilitate workshops really transformed my career and opened so many doors for me and how you can start to do the same as well. Hi, my name is Amar and when I first started at AJA and SMART, I joined as a UX researcher, but I've been doing so much more because I was able to pick up the skill of facilitating workshops and that allowed me to work on things like product strategy, innovation and even training in addition to product design, all because of this one skill and so in this video, I'm going to explain to you why learning to facilitate workshops might change your career as well and here's the thing, you don't need to have the same background as I did to benefit from facilitation. This is a skill that I've seen applied to so many different industries and in fact, right now I'm working to train other people across many different industries how to leverage the skill of facilitation. Industries like manufacturing, medical, pharmaceutical, tech companies, it's really applicable to any type of industry. So in this short video, I'm going to give you a broad overview of the basics that you need to know but if you have any questions along the way, make sure to drop them in the comments and if you're interested in learning more about facilitation, make sure to check the free facilitation guidebook that we have linked in the description box below because it really has all of the tips that you need to get started and I wish this resource existed when I was first starting out. When I started on my path as a UX researcher, I didn't even know that facilitation was a skill that I needed to learn that would be important for me and I didn't even know that doing UX research would involve doing so many workshops and facilitating them but when I started to read about how the most innovative companies in the world, companies like Google for example, approached their products research and design, I discovered that facilitation and workshops was a core part of it and so for the past three years, I've been solely focusing on developing my skill as a facilitator and it has allowed me to work with some of the most incredible companies in the world. So what is facilitation? Facilitation is just bringing a group of people together and helping them solve their problems through a structured workshop that has already been thought out. It's kind of the opposite of regular meetings where people come together, there's not a very strict agenda, time is wasted and you don't really accomplish anything, you just talk and talk and don't accomplish anything. So that's what you're actually trying to get away from. So your job as a facilitator is actually to help teams avoid the usual problems with meetings and that includes people talking and not doing anything, one person overpowering the group, having team dynamics or like the junior people on the team don't feel confident contributing and everyone just listens to what the boss is saying. There are so many problems with meetings that you can solve as a facilitator by having structured workshops and so that doesn't mean that you have to have all the answers or overpower others with your opinion, it's actually the opposite. You're just there to guide people and they will come up with the ideas and they have all the expertise and that's why facilitation is so applicable to so many industries and you can actually facilitate any type of group without having expertise in that domain. So what does this look like realistically for your career progression? Well you're probably going to want to start small so if you're already working at a company you could pick up a one-hour workshop or one to two hours and start to facilitate workshops for your team and then as you get more and more reps in within six to 12 months depending on how many workshops you run you'll be ready to do this full time either again as an internal consultant in a company or as a freelance consultant. So you can actually start making impact right away by picking up one of these recipes and running your first workshop. I just wouldn't recommend that you start with a big workshop that takes multiple days like the design sprint and instead start with something that's one to two hours like the lightning decision gem and you can just google that to see how that works. It's a recipe for general problem solving and then it's really up to you how you want to continue from that point. You can either decide to stay within your company and keep facilitating workshops internally and that will help you climb the career ladder as you are seen more and more as a strategic partner in the company and a general problem solver or you could go the freelance route and really make multiple thousands of dollars per workshop or per project and so that part is really up to you whether you want to go independent or stay within a company. What's true though is that workshops are going to help you level up your career no matter which way you decide to go. So how do you know if facilitation is right for you and whether it's something that you want to pursue? Well the easiest answer really is to go out and try facilitating a small workshop something that's not too intimidating not too risky so you can look at your calendar and see when you have an upcoming meeting and then just use a one-hour workshop instead of that meeting if you're the person who's controlling the agenda and try that a couple of times because you know the first time you'll naturally be a little anxious not sure how well this is going to work but after you go through it chances are it will still be a massive improvement over a traditional meeting and everyone in the room will enjoy it way more than just sitting and talking. So try it for a couple of times in a non-risky environment with your team people that you're already familiar with and you'll be able to get a feel for whether or not you enjoy doing this and I just want to point out two things that usually stop people from becoming facilitators because they think they need to have two qualities that are actually not true. So the first of these is that people think in order to be a good facilitator that you need to be an extrovert someone who enjoys talking is very social and outgoing and that's just flat out not true because I'm much more on the introverted scale and I can facilitate a group and have energy during the facilitation even though I'm usually a much more quiet and reserved person. So whether or not you're an extrovert or introvert has nothing to do with facilitation it just means that each type of person will have a different style to their facilitation and the other thing is that you really don't need to have all the answers. This is something that I mentioned earlier in the video but you shouldn't let that stop you from becoming a facilitator because actually what facilitation is about is wanting to make progress but you don't have all the answers and so you bring all the people that are needed to make that progress and help them structure the way they work so progress actually happens. So by definition you do not have all the answers you're not there to just talk at people you actually don't do a lot of the talking you're just there to facilitate the exercises. So it's really important to keep to those two things in mind one is that you don't need to be an extroverted totally hyper person all the time and the second is that you don't need to have all the answers you're the guide not the hero in the journey. Now let's talk about why these recipes these workshops that have already been built and tested by other companies so that you can deploy them and use them and help others make progress let's talk about why these work and what principles they use to actually make progress. So every solid workshop is built on some seemingly counter-intuitive principles for progress and there are four of them that we use in every single workshop. The first of these is called together alone. So in a workshop unlike in a meeting there isn't so much talking and instead everyone is actually writing their ideas on sticky notes and that has so many benefits rolled into one. For one you get time to think to yourself where everyone is just quiet we're all together in the room but you're thinking alone you're having some alone time to yourself to think about the ideas no one voice is dominant in the room because everyone's just writing ideas all the time you're capturing all of the ideas on paper so like none of them are getting lost and you also avoid the problem of having the boss's ideas dominate because all ideas are captured anonymously and it doesn't matter whose idea was it all that matters is it was a good idea and people wanted to vote on it which brings us to principle number two. So principle number two is note and vote beats discussion and what that means is when you have two people with you know very good ideas they will keep arguing with each other and it's going to be very unclear which idea the entire group would prefer to go with and test but with note and vote as we said in step one everything is getting captured on sticky notes and then you put them all on a wall whether you're doing this in person or remotely using a digital whiteboard doesn't matter but then after everyone's ideas are available somewhere what happens is instead of a discussion of which idea you should go with everyone takes a few voting dots and you use those as your voice so very quickly you're able to see where most of this team wants to go and it's very clear which ideas got traction and which ones didn't so for example you have 10 ideas on the wall that everyone generated quickly and then you give everyone two voting dots to pick two ideas out of the 10 that they want to see happen and by the end you'll have something with an idea with five votes two ideas with two votes and some ideas with one vote and so it's very clear what is the top idea that everyone would like to move with you might discuss that for a couple of minutes and you move on and so essentially within five to ten minutes you could make progress that usually takes teams half an hour or an hour of discussion which brings us to the third principle when I said in five to ten minutes you can generate ideas that's because in a solid workshop everything is time boxed so let's say you have an exercise around ideation and you tell everyone in the room as the facilitator okay everyone now we're going to generate ideas to solve this problem you say we're going to take 10 minutes to do this part and for the duration of the 10 minutes for example everyone keeps writing as many ideas as they can one idea per sticky note and when the 10 minutes are up we're all going to stop and then we're going to have a few minutes for voting then a couple minutes to discuss then we're going to move on so as the facilitator you're like the train conductor making sure that the trains run on time and that the progress is not derailed by a side discussion so if you notice that this discussion is going too long you step in as the facilitator because everyone in the room has entrusted you with the responsibility of making progress and so you might jump in and say okay everyone we've discussed this a little bit but now it's time to move on and we're going to move on based on the votes for example and as a facilitator you get better and better about keeping people on time and moving and making progress which then brings us to the fourth and last principle which is progress over perfectionism a lot of teams fall into the mindset of wanting to get something perfect before they put it out there whether it's a product or a design or a service or anything like that because they want to try to minimize the risk but the truth is you're never going to have all the information that you need to know a hundred percent whether or not something's going to work so at some point you're just going to have to take your best shot and then put it out there and hopefully balance the risk that you're taking and that's what timeboxing helps us do and as a facilitator you're there to help everyone to keep moving and give them trust in the process that you know this is a workshop that has been thought through and that by the end they will definitely have a compelling solution to their idea so with these four principles you really sidestep all of the problems that exist within meetings you know with together alone note and vote over discussion time box everything and then progress over perfectionism you're able to create something that's really magical and we keep seeing this week in and week out as we work with clients who've never used workshops before and never had anyone facilitate progress for them it's great to see every single time and it always surprises people because like I said these principles sound counterintuitive at first but they're really essential for progress so by now you might be worried that you have to come up with these custom workshops that are based on the principles that we just covered but the good news is that you don't there are a ton of workshops already out there that have been thought through and tested hundreds of times by the biggest companies in the world and you can just like lift those workshops and then deploy them with your teams internally or even as a freelance consultant so those are things like the design sprint the strategy sprint three-hour brand sprint or a lightning decision jam for just general problem solving so there are tons of these workshops out there if you just google any of the things that I just said you'll find a ton of results and we also link to them in the free facilitation guidebook that you can find in the description box so you can grab that to have everything in one place and this is really an area that's growing rapidly and the demand is growing with it I know for a fact that there are communities online with thousands of people who are doing this as their full-time job either internally at a company in an innovation department where they go around and facilitate workshops or as freelance consultants and of course we can speak from our own experience at ADN Smart because that's all we do for our clients we facilitate workshops and guide them through particular recipes for strategy and product design and the like and even if you look at recent reports from sources like the World Economic Forum around what are the most in-demand skills right now you'll find things like complex problem solving reasoning, creativity, innovation and analytical thinking and you can accomplish all of that by using the right workshop for the right situation to help teams solve their particular challenges and make decisions so let me give you an example from a recent project that we were working on we had a client who had a ton of material around self-development and the latest research and psychology of how to develop yourself better and they wanted to put that into a course they knew that there was a lot of very useful stuff in there but they didn't know how to package it together they didn't know if people would want it they had been talking about it internally for over 10 months but no progress was taking place and that's when they decided to come to us and so when we worked with them we used a series of structured workshops that are already built so like these are ready recipes that you can use and apply in many different industries and we took them through these workshops and were able to help them set the strategy for what this product would be so they have things to work on for the entire year but we also helped them to get started on packaging all this material together and then presenting it to potential customers to kind of test the market and see if there was demand for this and people went crazy over it and they were right to think that they had something really unique here but they just didn't know how to pull it all together and make it happen and now they have the answer for that they have the beginning of the solution already solved and they've been executing on it for the past few months going off of the strategy that we came up with together and here's the thing most of the ideas actually came from them not from us we were there to guide them through the process to be a sounding board for their ideas but most of the work actually came from them and that's why you can apply the skill of facilitation no matter what your role is and you don't really need to be the expert in that so if you got this far into the video you're probably curious about how to get started and again the best way to do that is to just download the free facilitation guidebook that's linked in the description box below it's the resource that I really wish existed when I was starting out and we put everything in there to help you get started everything that I mentioned in the video and more so just go and grab that it's totally free and it'll help you get started on your facilitation journey so if you enjoyed this video or found it helpful at all and you're curious about learning more about facilitation this is the first of many more videos to come from us on facilitation so make sure to subscribe and hit the bell icon to get notified when those videos come out thank you for watching and if you're interested in learning more about how you can run a one-hour workshop then make sure to watch the video that's on the screen right now and I'll see you next time now let's get started now let's get started now let's get started all right there's actually one now let's get started