What does the group leader do?

Good facilitation makes it much easier to have a good group output, but facilitation skills may be unfamiliar to many of you. We provide a training session to ensure the group leaders will be comfortable with their role.

The actual activities are described in detail in the session schedules, but there are some overall guidelines for facilitating these groups.

Overall guidelines

Logistics: planning the time and place for each of the sessions. If possible, book all 4 at the start, and ideal spacing is 2 weeks apart. Make sure you have a flip chart pad, sticky notes/post it notes, pens and paper. Remember we have a limited budget to pay some expenses for these items if necessary. If you wish, you can provide hot drinks, snacks.

Preparation: each session requires some preparation, possibly taking up to 1-2 hours of your time. The preparation for each session is detailed in the session schedules. You may want to take some time to run through the games for yourself before the appropriate sessions. The local facilities you have available will vary, so you will have to think about whether sessions you will use projection for a laptop, need flipchart and pens, and so on, and plan accordingly.

Remember you do not have to be the expert! Your role is to help the group through the process, not to impart content, technicalities. The engineer can help with some of the technicalities, but if they don’t know the answer, they can go back to the HeatHack team for further information. If a question comes up that neither of you can answer in the session, please note it down. In some cases, the answer will have to wait for professional intervention, and that’s OK - the point of these sessions is to help groups along their journey, but not to reach their final destination (yet).

Think group, trust the group. Consider always what is the best way forward for the group? Often if you open a question to the group, someone will have an answer or a way forward.

Try to keep to time. People (including you) have given up their time for this important work and we need to honour their time. You could make it clear at the start of a session that it will run from x-x and ask everyone to help you get through all of the activities in time. This also gives you a reason to use if you have to cut a conversation short. If you do need to extend for and reason, you should discuss with the group and gain agreement for how long the session will run. Another technique here is to ask if 2 or more group members might want to take that specific item away to discuss at another time and to bring back the conclusions they reach to the next session. Listening. Not only to what is being said, but how it is being said, how others are reacting to it, body language.

Try to remain neutral in discussions.

Group dynamics

If an item gets contentious between group members here are some options to try: ask if others have any input to the topic; try to summarise or clarify the two points of view; say we’ve got two interesting viewpoints here, but it doesn’t seem like we can reconcile them, so please let’s move on and we can check in later to see if views may have changed; or simply, I don’t think we are going to reach agreement here. Or you might agree to take the topic offline to a separate session if that might help?

If someone is dominating the group discussion, cut it short and move to an activity where people can individually note down their points (perhaps on post its) and add them to an overall list (maybe on a flip chart page) Try to summarise this. If the dominant behaviour continues, consider a discussion with that person before or after a session to ask for their help in letting others contribute.

Make sure that the pairs change each time.