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🤔 ▶️ What are different facilitation styles?
Daniele Catalanotto avatar
Written by Daniele Catalanotto
Updated over a year ago

Summary of the video

  • Minute by minute activities require significant preparation time and involve building a workshop around specific activities with defined times, group work, tasks, and challenges.

  • Framework-based workshops use established tools or structures and have been tested by many people, but can feel rigid and require less preparation time.

  • Big chunks workshops designate time for answering one to three questions and rely on facilitator experience and participant contributions. They require less planning than other formats and work well for philosophical questions/topics or when the team knows each other well.

Video transcript

This transcript was generated using Descript. So it might contain some creative mistakes.

What are examples of different facilitation styles? Even if I have a personal style, when it comes to facilitating workshops or meetings, I still use different facilitation styles. Here are three facilitation styles. I've used in the past.

Minute by minute activities.

Here, the idea is that you build your workshop around activities that have a specific time to be done.

In your preparation, you have a minute by minute schedule. And for each activity. You will define how the group has to work. Is it individually? Is it a subgroups? Is it everyone together? You'll also define the task and the challenge that you give to the people.

This works really well when you have a lot of time to prepare your workshop.

Framework based workshops.

You might know tools like the Business Model Canvas or workshop structures, like the Design Sprint.

These are like recipes that you can use to run a workshop.

They have already been tested by many people and they have a clear structure that you can follow.

So they don't need as much preparation. But sometimes they can feel a bit rigid.

Big chunks, workshops.

In such workshops, you don't design specific activities, but you just say: We want to have answers for maybe one or two or three questions.

So you can say for first topic, we're going to have one hour for the second one 30 minutes. And for the last one, one hour.

And then you rely on your own experience as a facilitator to improvise a bit more the facilitation.

And you also rely on the workshop participants to make the workshop go faster.

This method works pretty well when everyone in the team knows each other already pretty well. And what's really nice is that you don't have to plan as much as in other workshop formats.

Plus it works when you have questions and topics that are a bit more philosophical and need a bit more time to be explored.

✨ Made with assistance of AI.

The transcript of the video was made using Descript, and the summary was made by using Notion.ai and the automated transcript with the prompt: "Make a summary with bullet points" and then using a second prompt that says: "Summarize in three bullet points" as the output was too long.

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