Virtual facilitation: can it actually be a thing?
Intrigued but skeptical. If I had to define my state of mind when hearing about virtual Design Sprints and workshops for the first time, that would be it. Very much aware of the challenges that face-to-face facilitation embeds, I was doubtful about whether the remote set up would have survived the test.
Can virtual facilitation cover-up for not sharing the same physical space with participants to sense their energy levels, for example?
Can virtual Design Sprints be a solid alternative leading to meaningful outcomes beyond a productive (less boring) online team meeting?
I was curious to try and test it myself. Hopeful to be proven wrong, keen to be surprised. I then jumped on the train of the Global Virtual Design Sprint initiative by Robert Skrobe from Dallas Design Sprints and got the chance to put myself in learning mode and join different types of virtual sessions, as a participant, to experience the virtual environment within creative facilitation.
So what did I observe exactly and took out from this journey?👇
1. Virtual energisers (once again) do the magic. ✨
Some time ago I wrote an article about energisers, elaborating on how to use them valuably to help you succeed at your goals. Well, it turns out, that they do bring a positive boost to the remote environment as well, you just need to select a set suitable for it. Here is a list of virtual energisers I experienced, that I saw working pretty well:
Sketch your neighbour.👫
The facilitator splits the team into pairs, that have to sketch each other in 30 seconds. You can either use actual paper or the virtual canvas as a sketching surface. At the end of the 30 seconds, participants show/review the sketches with the rest of the team. A fun note to kick start your session!
Note: Ask everyone to show the sketches on the camera and take a group photo: it’ll be a nice team snapshot to send everyone after the session.
Post-it gift.🎁
Every participant is asked to make a gift for another participant the facilitator assigns to you, out of one single paper post-it. You silently show the gift to the receiver without explaining anything. The gift receiver has to thank you and share his/her understanding of it, what he/she would do with your gift. The highlights of this impro-game are all-around personal interpretation and empathy triggering within the team.
Note: Personally when I receive gifts I always feel slightly embarrassed, and I felt kind of the same in this one, so expect potential slightly awkward vibes, but leading to a fun and constructive place as a team at the end.
Favourite holiday destination.🌴
Perfect ice-breaker in combination with a round of personal intros, at the very beginning of a virtual session. Each participant has to pick and share a couple of pictures about his/her favourite holiday destination, telling why of the choice. We had one virtual canvas to co-create and one part of it was already set up with blank spaces for each participant to add the pictures in. If you are using Mural as we did, there’s a handy option to add a picture directly from Mural itself and avoid copy-paste. To minimize friction in the process and keep the participant focused on sharing rather than doing manual work, the facilitator was the one adding images to the Mural in line with the given holiday destination: it worked pretty well.
Note: Such a type of energiser focused on the sharing of personal preference or story, can be applied to any other topic of interest. I.e. What was your favourite toy as a child? What is your favourite dish? Etc. Always combine it with a visual representation: an image like above or a sketch. It’ll help everyone in the team to visualize more easily what is being described.
2. Solid facilitation shrinks multitasking frictions.⚡
When both facilitating and participating in a virtual co-creation session, juggling multiple tools is part of the game. You need at least two things: a video call software (we used Zoom) and a digital canvas (We used Mural).
I entered the session slightly intimidated by this amount of virtual tools and not so confident about my ability to juggle them well: in no time, such frictions were minimised by a solid facilitation performance.
The facilitator has - exactly like face-to-face - the responsibility and control over the session, which in the virtual set up means always having the admin role in the software accounts used and with access over all the software settings and features. Even if not standing within the same physical space as participants, the facilitator can still make sure to get everyone’s attention. One example is the ‘Summon’ option, which I found very very handy as a participant: this feature allows the facilitator to get everyone or specific individuals to focus on a common area of the canvas so that all the participants can visualise the same thing at the same time. It makes sure everybody is seeing what needs to be seen, or it simply gets attention back from participants that accidentally got ‘lost’ in the canvas.
Also in the virtual environment, the facilitator has the power to minimise friction and to make participants’ co-creation experience smooth and able to set free the best version of themselves.
3. Fell in love with virtual LDJs.🙊
1.5 hour packed with straight forward exercises you can solve any kind of problem with. Testing the Lightning Decision Jam (LDJ) format was a very efficient and eye-opening way for a team to get unstuck and make progress remotely. The aspect that I appreciated most about LDJs? Silent teamwork.
During my virtual LDJ, I experienced something that in my face-to-face facilitation experience was not necessarily the norm: most of my virtual session happened in silence, by actively working on tasks at the same time as my team, with only the facilitator guiding us, activity after activity. After the intro and ice-breaker, no other extensive time was spent in open discussions. Everyone was working alone, together, on the Mural, without the need to ask questions, cause everything was self-explanatory enough to be almost self-driven. And it all felt fantastically efficient. The absence of open dialogue increased, in my opinion, the effectiveness and fast-emerging truths unlocked by the process.
Note: This scenario goes hand in hand with the level of experience of the facilitator leading the virtual session. In the case of less experienced facilitators, more than once questions and moments of confusion came up and required open discussions. That is normal and part of the learning process, but efficient silent teamwork should be the end goal to thrive for, cause synonymous with common understanding, clarity of instructions and logical flow in the chosen exercises.
4. (Digital) preparation is key. 📌
In all the virtual sessions I experienced, the set up was visibly, already detailed out and carefully structured on the digital canvas (in our case a Mural board). You could tell that a lot of time was spent in preparing the canvas and flow of exercises: each of them was laid out with instructions, step by step. The Mural was brought to the level of clarity of a self-explanatory document that could have potentially done the job by itself. The facilitator, therefore, didn’t have to represent necessarily the only source of guidance, but rather a narrator role to fill in the gaps, engage the audience and complement if needed.
A carefully executed preparation, like a digital canvas meticulously set up beforehand, felt getting started with a bonus of 40%.
Good preparation does not only frame and guide participants’ actions to ensure greater smoothness in the process, but provides clear instructions that ease the facilitator role as well, resulting in a killer double benefit.
5. The virtual set up cuts down the bias.🐘
If we look back at the Design Sprint book, there were several attempts and tricks to keep the process as bias-free as possible. To let participants - for example - vote for any idea they might have liked despite whether who sketched it was their boss or peer colleague. Though, in my experience, when you are working with a team in one room, you kind of know who did what: getting REALLY bias-free is quite hard.
In a virtual session, the good news is that you can achieve real anonymous contributions way more easily. Mural gives you the option, for example, to enter the canvas anonymously (with funny animal names nonetheless) so that your team can just figure as a weird bunch of animals hanging out on a Mural.
What happens during the voting is also pretty interesting: you get assigned a number of votes by the facilitator and the voting session starts for everyone, at the same time, with a timer that allows the team to easily keep track of time. You can follow in real-time the velocity participants are voting but in contrast to face-to-face sessions, you can’t see where and on what your teammates are voting. Your only task is to reflect, deep breath and vote.
Also for what concerns the ideation phase, ideas are sketched and placed in the canvas as homework, prior to the session, so that when the actual session starts, all the ideas are already placed on the board ready for review. No time to notice the marker colour your teammate is using or any other detail that might get visible when sharing the same physical space. The virtual set up can help to keep your session truly bias-free.
6. Real-time group mapping can be intense. 🤯
For most of the activities conducted in a virtual set up, as a participant, I had to either fill in cards already present in the Mural or cluster them with the affinity diagram. That was happening together with all the other participants, simultaneously.
Although I really appreciated the feeling of working ‘together alone’, I have to admit that often the set up felt a bit overwhelming and distracting the quality of the input I was providing. In the same area where you are asked to provide input on an idea, criteria, or sprint question, all the other participants are editing nearby cards: visually your attention is caught up in multiple ways and staying focused can be tough. Everything moves, you get this rush feeling coming up, and I felt a bit frozen at times: I wanted to give my contribution but I was lost in the flow of others, faster than me.
I would explore a scenario where you have one part of the Mural assigned to each participant to focus on and contribute to, for each exercise. This could promote focus and still be approached in anonymous mode.
Conclusion
Moving towards a future of remote jobs and companies, virtual facilitation has indeed a strong potential for teamwork to be efficient, purposeful and still human-interaction driven.
By joining the Global Virtual Design Sprint initiative I had the chance to connect with an amazing community of facilitation practitioners and to learn more about the art of virtual facilitation.
Such an illuminating experience made me realise how the field has still a lot of room for exploration, improvement, and testing of different approaches, making it an exciting angle for me and other facilitation enthusiasts to further explore in the future. And you, keen to try it out?
I hope my reflections triggered some inspiration of yours and if curious to experience virtual facilitation yourself, connect with Robert Skrobe to stay up to date with upcoming future virtual sessions.💡
Do you have any tips or takeaways on virtual facilitation to share? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below! 💬
Thanks for reading! 💛 If you have feedback to share, feel free to say hello 👋🏿
