You are planning to facilitate a workshop or meeting? And it’s not a routine workshop or meeting? Or you are an un-experienced facilitator who needs to facilitate a challenging group and feel insecure about getting it all right? You have checked all items on the meeting or workshop checklist and planned the meeting or workshop accordingly. You know in which activities you want the participants to engage. Everything makes sense to you in preparation land and still you are anxious you will forget something in the meeting or workshop itself. A meeting or workshop script that you can sneak at during the meeting or workshop could help you here. This post describes three different types.
1. Meeting/Workshop Time schedule
A very easy and straight-forward script is a flowchart or time schedule. On a document it simply gives you an overview of
– the sequence (check-in, gather data, discussion,…)
– the goal of the sequence
– the activity
– the needed material
– the duration of the sequence
– the words of introduction
Here is an example of a flowchart or time schedule to give you an impression:
Especially the “words of introduction” helped me a lot when I began facilitating groups: As I was nervous or insecure I started babbling incoherent words or sentences (I still sometimes do…) and missed the opportunity to get the activity started. Taking preparation time and writing down the first couple of sentences I want to say helped me to gain more security.
2. Sketching your Meeting/Workshop
The idea of Sketching was introduced to me by Ben, who was a participant in one of our last trainings. Ben is working for the Berlin based company Momox. When we were discussing about different options how to script your meeting, he explained that it helps him to scribble the sequences of the meeting. As you can see in the photo: Ben not only scribbles the starting question(s), the sequential steps of the activity and the needed material. He also scribbles what might happen in the room: Where do the participants interact? Where do the materials go?
What I enjoy about Ben’s scribble is that it makes your meeting/workshop preparation very lively. And additionally it helps you to find some (logistic) challenges beforehand (Where is the flipchart put in the room? Do I have enough space for what I have planned?) and gives you enough time to find options to tackle those.
3. Meeting/Workshop Flowchart
Using a Meeting Flowchart is kind of a mixture of the previous two types. I use those especially for workshops that last for more than one day. As you can see in the photo: It easily shows you the different activities I want to use including all important questions to ask, how I could structure the material and the time the activity will take.
So here they are: Three different types of a script that can guide you through your meeting: time schedule, sketching and flowchart. Especially for un-experienced facilitators scripting your meeting in one of the three ways can help to give more security. Of course, the more routine you have as a moderator or facilitator the less detailed your script will be. In that case you might want to have a look at stringing your workshop with Liberating Structures. And I’m sure there are more types of meeting or workshop scripts than those three.
It is important to prepare your meeting or workshop and the three scripts can help you in your preparation. It is more important still, to actually sense what the group or the participants really need in the meeting or workshop. As a consequence you might have to trash your meeting or workshop script and need to react on reality.
Please let me know how you are scripting your meetings or workshops.