JO’s Newsletter 📰

Hello, and welcome to the retro newsletter. It’s well into January and just the start of the year of the Wood-Snake. I had a fabulous 4 weeks of holiday and returned to a busy and full-on January. As I get a chance to breathe again, I’m diving into this first Newsletter of the year. Sometime last year, a few people answered our poll with a request for some large group facilitation techniques, and so that’s what I will be diving into today.

“Reflection is one of the most underused yet powerful tools for success.”

Richard Carlson

What's in this newsletter

• Large Groups 🧑‍🧑‍🧒‍🧒

  • Introduction

  • 1. Know what the group needs

  • 2. Create a solid container

  • 3. Make space for all voices

  • 4. Synthesise information

  • 5. Agree on Outcomes

  • 6. Specific Techniques: World Café

  • Conclusion

  • Bonus Tips

• Subscribe

• Next Issue

Large Groups 🧑‍🧑‍🧒‍🧒

Introduction

Sometimes, facilitating large groups can feel a little like hearing cats. We want to get great outcomes and make space for as many voices and perspectives as possible, but we also often have limited time. Here are some things I like to focus on that can help get to good outcomes.

1. Know what the group needs

• Why it matters: An essential first step is ensuring you have a good understanding of the context and the needs of the group.

• How to do it: Ask the stakeholders some questions. What is the topic of the retro? Who are the role players? Are they a close group or disparate individuals who barely know each other? Are you retroing the monthly deployment for an IT group or the results of a 2-day exco strategy session? How big is the group? How often do they see each other? What are they looking to achieve?

I like to start with these questions to ensure I know what outcomes the group is looking for and how much time I have. This information will significantly influence the interactions I create and how I use the time.

2. Create a solid container

• Why it matters: Bigger groups are scarier for most people and are also made up of people who might not know each other very well. So, it’s vital to invest some time in building a safe container.

• How to do it:

  • Spend time making sure everyone knows why they are there. Create a visible purpose and outcomes on a poster.

  • Invest time in creating group working agreements - who will we be together? You won’t have time to go as deep as you can for a smaller group, but making sure there are some co-created and shared working agreements is important.

  • Make sure everyone knows how to participate and what their role is here.

3. Make space for all voices

• What’s important: It’s much more difficult to get all the voices in the room when you have many people. There is also often not enough time for everyone to say something; for some people, it’s intimidating to share in a big group. It also sucks the energy out of a room when we need to listen to 30 or more people say something about a topic. So, we need other mechanisms.

• How to do it:

  • Create space for people to think individually and write that on sticky notes.

  • Use small groups for the discussions or exercises like 1,2,4 all to get the bigger themes and important points into the room.

  • Facilitation techniques like World Cafe can also work well for things like this.

4. Synthesise information

• What’s important: You aren’t going to have time to get to all the detail that is important for everyone. So, you will need the smaller groups to invest time discussing the details and then bringing back the main points to the larger group. Here, you need to trust that the container you built upfront will help ensure the most critical information for the group gets shared.

• How to do it:

  • Get each group to report back on themes and visualise those

  • Use visuals, either remote tools like Miro and Mural or whiteboards and flipcharts, to create visibility of the shared conversations and the themes.

  • Once you have the themes that are important, you can once again go into smaller groups for problem-solving

5. Agree on Outcomes

• What’s important: Large group retro’s can quickly become routine and redundant so it’s critical to ensure that you are getting good outcomes. That way you will get good participation. The outcomes can be deep insights as well as actions for the group.

• How to do it:

  • Once each group has come up with ideas for what to you, you will need to use a mechanism to enable people to choose or vote for the most important. I usually do this in plenary.

  • Once the group has chosen make sure that they assign a champion or an owner to each of the outcomes so that they are happening.

6. Specific Techniques: World Café

• What it is: The World Café is a facilitation technique designed for large groups to explore topics through rotating, conversational rounds. I love it because it creates space for all voices and has a mechanism for groups to rotate and change groups so you get cross-pollination and learning across the whole larger group.

• Pro Tip: What I sometimes do is change groups between each phase of the retro. So, I will do the rotation at each of the retro stages except set the stage. I do Set the stage and then Gather data with the same groups. Then, I will get the groups to rotate, and they will need to understand the data that’s there and then generate insights based on the data. This is very useful for spreading shared learning across a large group, but it won’t work very well if the smaller groups have very different contexts or problems from each other.

• A Story: I used to use World Cafe to facilitate the month-end release retro for a group in a large bank. What was fabulous about it was that the different areas would send a representative, and because of the way we mixed things up, people began to appreciate and gain insight into the frustrations and struggles of their colleagues. They started to understand why some things took longer but also began to see where they were making things better or worse.

Conclusion

Large group facilitation means dancing between the details and the highlights package. There will always be the tradeoff that not everyone will hear all the information or the details because that will take up too much time. So focus on creating a great container, making space for all voices, using small groups effectively and focusing on group outcomes.

Bonus Tips

• Here is a list of other places that I go to for facilitation ideas for large groups

  • Liberating Structures

  • GameStorming

Let me know what you are up to and how you are using these.

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Next Issue

I’d love to hear from you. This year, I plan to publish every two weeks—just the right cadence for a 2-week sprint. I am still planning the interview with Esther; I would love to know what you want to know. Contact me at [email protected] and share what you want me to discuss or ask for help with specific scenarios.