Design facilitation: the secret sauce of great designers

Design can be incredibly fulfilling when done well, but it can also be incredibly difficult. Design is a team sport and while everyone wants the same thing, there are usually dozens of different ideas about how to achieve results. Success, then, depends on creating a shared understanding of all those ideas and then somehow choosing a direction without hours and days of meaningless debate.

The reality, however, is that most projects start out like this:

Image: Jeff Patton & Associates

​Design facilitation is the process of helping a cross-functional team to capture, evaluate, and merge disparate ideas to create a better overall product. It often is a lot harder than it sounds, but the ability to be a great facilitator of design is the secret sauce that all influential designers and design leaders have in common. Consciously working to improve your design facilitation skills can have a greater return and impact on your ability to deliver improved outcomes to your customers than almost anything else. Why? Because it is the secret to unlocking not only your own potential, but that of your entire team and stakeholders. In essence, design facilitation is the key to unlocking the cross-functional power of shared understanding and diversity.

So how do you go about it? Well that’s what I’m hoping I can help with and why I wrote this article.

Collaboration by Default or Design?

Collaboration, much like culture, can either happen by design or by default. The trouble is that all too often collaboration happens by default. We get a bunch of cross functional team members & stakeholders in a room and just start throwing out ideas. Often it turns into a war of who can throw their weight around most, and ultimately the person with the highest job title or loudest voice wins. The other extreme is almost worse. You know, where no one wants to make a decision without the entire group being on board. We have a phrasefor that: “design by committee”. Designing by committee might be collaborative but it certainly isn’t effective. There is almost nothing that will water down your effectiveness & agility as much as designing by committee. Then where is the balance? How do you collaborate effectively while still not allowing “too many cooks in the kitchen”?

First, it helps to understand what problems lead to ineffective collaboration in the first place. Then I will share 4 keys to developing better facilitation skills and design meaningful collaboration.

Lack of Confidence

First off, I have observed that one of the main reasons many executives and stakeholders feel the need to step in and throw their weight around stems from a concern about the quality of the product or past results. Overbearing behavior (especially from executives) is often an attempt to try to course correct. I have often seen this occur on teams due to inexperience or unrealistic timelines which has influenced designers to revert to only exploring a single direction before moving forward.

This lack of confidence can also result from insufficient communication. Maybe you have explored multiple directions, validated them with users, and chosen a direction but have not communicated your findings and reasons for design decisions to team members/stakeholders. This lack of communication can result in tension between product teams and executives. While I am a big proponent of autonomy for product teams, reporting chains are the reality of the business world. If you are not clearly communicating the results, findings, and reasons for your decisions in a frequent and concise way, this could be leading to lack of confidence.

Lack of Involvement

Another cause of ineffective collaboration can be when some team members (often developers) don’t feel involved in discovery and brainstorming. In the agile, fast-paced world so many tech companies operate in these days, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of just delivering designs to a dev team to implement. Apart from the myriad of other problems this creates, while inadvertent, it can cause an “us vs them” mentality that can stifle effective collaboration.

Very few people like to be given tasks to complete without any influence on what to make or how to make it. I use the example of developers, but this is also true for designers. Sometimes Product Managers deliver requirements fully baked to designers and prescribe exactly what should be built. While PMs are (and should absolutely be) the deciders on what to build, it shouldn’t be done in isolation. Everyone likes to be given a problem to solve and then have the flexibility to participate in solving that problem. (More on ‘deciders’ later on).

Too Much Passion

I know, I know. This sounds like one of those interview questions everyone makes fun of:

Q: “What is your biggest weakness?”
A: “My biggest weakness is that I’m too passionate”

But stick with me for a minute here. Some people (I know because I often fall into this category) are so passionate about their ideas that it can come across to people that don’t know them well as overbearing/arrogant. I am a fierce advocate for both collaboration and exploring others’ ideas. Yet, sometimes when I get into a passionate brainstorming session I get so excited about exploring a particular idea that it seems like I don’t want to listen to anyone else’s perspective. This can be a major hindrance to effective collaboration.

Some people are more vocal than others. There are also people on the opposite side of the spectrum who won’t contribute until called on. Not all vocal people are arrogant and not all quiet people are timid. Yet, either characteristic can be a major barrier to facilitating collaborative design.

4 Keys to Facilitating Effective Design

All of these problems can pose a challenge to effective design. As facilitators we must learn to recognize and mitigate these situations in order to deliver increased value to our customers & users. I have found that there are 4 key things you as a facilitator can do to improve collaboration and deliver results that will get you the kind of autonomy we all desire.

Clearly Identify Scope

Nothing can get a brainstorming or feedback session off track quicker than failing to clearly identify the scope of the meeting/activity. You shouldn’t start from scratch or leave the process up for debate. Here are some tips that have helped me in the past:

1. Define business goals, objectives, and target users ahead of time.
2. Utilize “How Might We…” questions (i.e. “ How might we decrease shopping cart abandons” or “How might we better connect our partners with service providers”).
3. Define what is out of scope for the meeting.
4. Review relevant research, learning, assumptions, personas, vision boards, and anything else that can serve as a basis to spring board off from.
5. Give an overview of the technique you will be using and how the process works.

For example, in a recent workshop with team members and stakeholders I hosted to gather shared understanding on the Jobs To Be Done of 2 specific personas, I started out the session reviewing the target users we would be brainstorming solutions for, explained what a “Job To Be Done”, “Job Driver”, “Current Approach”, “Pain Point”, and “Competitor” are from the JTBD lens, and explained the process we would be following to identify each of these. I also explained that the goal of this particular workshop was not to identify solutions nor focus on our other personas only to clearly identify the Jobs these two personas that were outlined.

In other situations, the goal has been to debrief and prioritize next steps after a research trip. In these instances I would review our user research plan, what the business problem we set out to solve was (using a How Might We… question), and emphasize that we are not looking for the “right” approach, just to capture all the learning from our trip and prioritize an order in which to explore possibilities.

There are a myriad ways to define the scope, but it is vital that you clearly draw the box of focus in the minds of the participants. It’s essential that everyone understand what we are there to do, and what we are not there to do.

Normalize the Power Struggle

Another vital thing to facilitating effective design collaboration is to normalize the power struggle. Sometimes the power struggle is intentional and sometimes it’s inadvertent but unless specific steps are taken to counter it, it virtually always happens. There are 3 main ways I have found to accomplish this:

1. Clearly identify roles at the beginning of the meeting — most people in any given meeting fall into 1 of 3 categories. “Facilitator” (the person running the meeting and keeping things on track), “Decider” (the person making decisions when needed to move things along), or “Participant” (the majority of people in any given meeting). Clearly defining who fits into each role at the outset can save a ton of grief and lost time later.
   NOTE: The facilitator and decider can be the same person, but it is often useful to separate the roles. I often like to make the product manager or highest ranking executive the Decider. This allows me to run the meeting and control the power struggle without needing to try to make decisions that due to lack of authority and political capital may not stick later.
2. Silence is your friend — one of the best ways I’ve found to normalize the power struggle is to use silent brainstorming & prioritization techniques. There are many ways to do this, but the general idea is to give everyone in the room a pre-determined amount of time to write down as many ideas as they can on post-it notes. Then at the end of the time to put them up on the board and use dot stickers to vote for the one they like the best. Not only do you generate more ideas this way, but everyone gets to participate and have an equal voice. The most common technique for silent brainstorming is Affinity Mapping but there are many many others as well. The key is just to eliminate/limit debate.
3. Round Robin Discussions — you can’t always use silent brainstorming or prioritization techniques. In those situations, what I typically do is establish a time limit (say 2 minutes) and go around the room in a circle. Every person gets 2 minutes to express their ideas, then it moves to the next person. This ensures that everyone gets a chance to speak, and is limited to the same amount of time.

Keep Things Moving

Perhaps one of the most important and challenging aspects of facilitation can be to keep on schedule. If you get off track it can derail the effectiveness of what you’re trying to accomplish. On the other hand, the facilitator also needs the flexibility to spend an extra couple minutes here or there when lots of great ideas are flowing (within reason). Some ways that have worked well for me in the past to keep things moving are:

1. Establish time limits and enforce them strictly — this can be challenging. How I always approach it is, at the beginning I say something along the lines of: “We’re really glad everyone could come help us _____ today. Just by way of explanation, we have a lot to get through today. So I am going to be setting a timer for each part of the brainstorming. When the timer goes off, I will be cutting the activity off and we’ll need to move on. This isn’t directed at any one person or intended to be mean. It simply is to help us move along and accomplish all we want to today. We definitely value your time and don’t want to keep you longer than we scheduled for this.” This helps set expectations ahead of time and using a timer provides an audible notification of when time is up to prevent anyone from getting upset and me personally. Then if someone tries to keep writing or talking, you actually DO have to cut them off. Unless of course you want to give everyone more time. Then you can state that to the group.
2. Be intentional about body language — use the setup of your room and body language to your advantage. One of the reasons I like using whiteboards so much is because it gives me an excuse to be standing while everyone else is sitting. This reinforces subconsciously that you are running the meeting. If you use this approach, make sure to use submissive gestures (like gesturing in their direction with both hands, palms facing upwards) to the decider whenever a decision is needed to reinforce that you are deferring to his/her judgement. Also, if you know there is someone that will likely try to dominate the meeting, it helps to go stand next to them while giving instructions or ending a given activity. An entire article could be written on these techniques alone, but the goal just is to be intentional (but not overbearing) in the messages you send with your body language.
3. Defer to the decider when needed — one of the main reasons I love assigning a decider that isn’t me is because it really helps move things along and helps decisions stick. This is one of the main things I love about the Google Ventures Design Sprint methodology. If you reach a point where your time is up but have not made a decision yet, turn to your decider and ask for a decision. No more discussion is allowed, the decider simply decides. A note is made of the decision and you move on. Simple as that. It doesn’t mean the other ideas were bad, and it doesn’t even mean you can’t explore them later, it just means you need to move on. This alone could improve so many facilitation sessions I’ve participated in.

Fill Your Toolbox with Multiple Tools

Another important thing you can do to maximize effectiveness and improve facilitation skills is to fill your toolbox with multiple brainstorming, debriefing, and prioritization techniques. Affinity Mapping, or Mind Mapping, or User Story Mapping, or Design Studios, or Reverse Brainstorming are all great but if you are a one-trick pony and always use the same technique, people might get bored and not want to participate any longer. So become familiar with various different techniques and try new ones out. Experiment. See what resonates at your company and with your users/colleagues. I’ve even used silent and verbal brainstorming in the same session before to try to break up the monotony.

For a while, in order to drive this point home, I implemented a rule on my team that every month we had to try at least 1 new facilitation technique and no 2 sessions could use the same technique. It was a really interesting experiment. The facilitation skills of each team member grew exponentially and all participants seemed to have a lot of fun.

Here are some different methods we’ve tried if you’re stuck in a rut and need ideas:

• 5 Whys
• 6 Thinking Hats
• Affinity Diagramming
• Brain Writing
• Charrette
• Design Studios
• Driver Analysis
• Figure Storming
• Forced Connections
• Gap Filling
• Group Sketching
• Hypothesis Statements
• Job To Be Done brainstorming
• Journey Mapping
• KJ Analysis
• Mind Mapping
• Problem Statements
• Proto Personas
• Rapid Ideation
• Reverse Brainstorming
• Reverse Thinking
• Role Storming
• Round Robin Brainstorming
• S.C.A.M.P.E.R.
• Starbursting
• Step Ladder Brainstorming
• Storyboarding
• Trigger Storming
• User Story Mapping
• What If…’ Brainstorming
• Wishing
• Zero Draft

Conclusion

Naturally the only sure way to learn anything is by practicing, and facilitation is no different. These tips don’t apply only with product/ux design work at a tech company. There are so many applications. One other I want to make sure not to forget is white board exercises for interviews. One of the chief reasons I give white board exercises when I’m interviewing a candidate is to see how they work with a team and judge their facilitation skills. So if you are given a white board challenge, don’t just assume that the interviewers want you to talk out loud, taking them through the design process. Facilitate the group solving the design problem together. Show off your facilitation skills. Especially if they have assembled a cross-functional group. You may have been doing these white board challenges wrong all along. Naturally some companies DO just want to see your thought process drawn out on a whiteboard so be sure to ask. I know I would be super impressed if you took on the role of facilitator in an interview with my team (especially if you did it well).

I hope this has been helpful. I wish us all the best of luck at becoming better facilitators as we seek to clearly identify scope, normalize the power struggle, keep things moving, and fill our toolboxes with multiple tools.

Have something to add? Need a product leader to help shape your organization’s UX maturity? Connect with me on LinkedIn to join the conversation or check out my portfolio to learn more about my work.