The Remote Facilitator's Pocket Guide

By Kirsten Clacey and Jay-Allen Morris

This approach to remote facilitation makes virtual meetings powerful means of collaboration using proven techniques to accommodate a diversity of cultures, locations, and personalities.

Many people struggle with remote meetings: a cocktail of factors, such as technical barriers and invisible group norms, increase the uncertainty and risk of the already vulnerable task of collaborating and sharing ideas. When remote meetings go badly, they go really badly. Few things feel as lonely and intimidating as speaking to a screen with unreadable faces staring back in silence. This book will help you improve the quality of your remote meetings. With a little awareness, some planning, and some practice, you can make your remote meetings an effective, engaging, and powerful mechanism for collaboration within your organization. 

This book is for anyone seeking to get more value from remote meetings. Whether you're a seasoned facilitator, a new facilitator, or someone hoping to improve team meetings, you will be empowered with principles and actionable methods to enhance your organization's effectiveness.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781523089123

Book preview

Cover: The Remote Facilitator’s Pocket Guide

Praise for The Remote Facilitator’s Pocket Guide

We are all woefully unprepared for the evolution of effective spaces into the distributed environment. This book teaches us what to do so that we need not be.

—Aveshan Govender, Engineering Manager, Spotify

This is inclusive design at its finest: an invitation to go beyond our ordinary context and be involved in the discovery along the way. I have an increasing demand for distributed facilitation, and this approach is the best I’ve ever experienced.

—Cara Turner, CEO, Project codeX

This groundbreaking book is for people who want remote connections to be at least as productive, vibrant, and alive as the very best gatherings with everyone in the same room. It’s delightfully refreshing for experts and also offers a fresh, safe, inspiring start point for anyone new to facilitation of any kind.

—Steve Holyer, Agile Coach and Facilitator, CoachingCocktails.com

Remote meetings can’t be considered cutting edge anymore—yet we are surprisingly bad at them. Kirsten and Jay-Allen understand how people behave in meetings and how you can encourage them to have positive behaviors that lead to vastly more effective meetings. Their art is a mix of psychology, empathy, and practical techniques.

—Ted Pietrzak, Vice President, Application Modernization, The Charles Schwab Corporation

Jay-Allen and Kirsten provide loads of practical ideas to experiment with to make your meetings more productive, equal, and fun. If you care about your teams, your effectiveness, and your general well-being at remote work, this book is for you!

—Louise Perold, Quality Manager

THE REMOTE FACILITATOR’S POCKET GUIDE

The Remote Facilitator’s Pocket Guide

Copyright © 2020 by Kirsten Clacey and Jay-Allen Morris

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, rcording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

Ordering information for print editions

Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the Special Sales Department at the Berrett-Koehler address above.

Individual sales. Berrett-Koehler publications are available through most bookstores. They can also be ordered directly from Berrett-Koehler: Tel: [phone]; Fax: [phone]; www.bkconnection.com

Orders for college textbook/course adoption use. Please contact Berrett-Koehler: Tel: [phone]; Fax: [phone].

Distributed to the U.S. trade and internationally by Penguin Random House Publisher Services.

Berrett-Koehler and the BK logo are registered trademarks of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

First Edition

Paperback print edition ISBN 978-1-5230-8910-9

PDF e-book ISBN 978-1-5230-8911-6

IDPF e-book ISBN 978-1-5230-8912-3

Digital audio ISBN 978-1-5230-8913-0

2020-1

Book producer: Westchester Publishing Company. Cover design and illustration: Yvonne Chan. Interior illustrations: Kirsten Clacey

To our teams who experimented with us, and Nelson and Wesley who supported us throughout.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD BY ESTHER DERBY

INTRODUCTION

WHY IS REMOTE COLLABORATION DIFFICULT?

WHAT IS THE ROLE OF A (REMOTE) FACILITATOR?

PRINCIPLE 1: CREATE EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

PRINCIPLE 2: ENABLE FLOW

PRINCIPLE 3: GUIDE WITH VISUALS

PRINCIPLE 4: NURTURE CONNECTION

PRINCIPLE 5: ENABLE PLAYFUL LEARNING

PRINCIPLE 6: MASTER YOUR TOOLS

AFTER THE CALL: HOW TO MAINTAIN CONNECTION WHEN THE CALL ENDS

TYING IT TOGETHER

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

FOREWORD

I spent years honing my facilitation skills. I learned how people process information. I learned how to create an environment that enables groups to share information, discuss, think, and decide together. I then introduced a process for helping groups do just that, detailed in Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great (2006). That book describes how teams can reflect, learn, and improve—when they are together.

However, remote meetings are a different animal. Over the years, I’ve adapted practices and come up with workarounds for remote meetings. Still, remote meetings often don’t have the oomph of in-person interactions.

As a participant, I’ve spent countless hours in remote meetings. While I am certain it hasn’t actually been an eternity, sometimes it feels that way. Faced with low participation, isolation, and lack of feedback, sometimes I check out. I’m not alone. People often take refuge in online solitaire, checking email, Twitter, Slack, or doing real work. Even when the tools allow for visual communication and screen sharing, the default is camera off—which makes it easier to disengage and hide out. It doesn’t feel like robust collaboration, no matter how much the participants and leaders wish it were so. Perhaps you’ve had this experience, too.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

I had the pleasure to meet Jay-Allen and Kirsten at the Regional Scrum Gathering in Durban, South Africa in 2018. Their topic, Hacking Remote Facilitation, intrigued me. I figured that while I knew some things, it couldn’t hurt to see what other people were doing. I might pick up a tip or two.

Their session provided the best advice on the mechanics of remote facilitation I’ve seen. Anywhere.

Their lovely new book describes in detail how to make remote meetings more participative, engaging, and useful. It also makes clear that their ideas go deeper than mere mechanics.

Jay-Allen and Kirsten developed their methods based on a true appreciation for creating space for people to collaborate. Their values and experience show up in the six principles outlined in the book. The methods that implement each principle derive from the science of how our brains function. Throughout the book, an understanding of what people need to collaborate effectively shines though.

Jay-Allen and Kirsten don’t just tell you what to do. They explain why the methods work. After studying this book, you will have a starting set of methods. You’ll also gain the knowledge to adapt, modify, and create your own methods to fit your context.

Collaboration is the heart of creative work. But collaborative work isn’t always easy. Collaborative work requires hearing and harmonizing different viewpoints, harnessing constructive conflict, and reaching decisions that a group will own. Groups struggle through, sometimes with damaged relationships to uncertain results, even when they are face-to-face. Remoteness exacerbates the issue.

This costs organizations in wasted time and wasted money. Worse, the failure to overcome the challenge of remote collaboration drains engagement. People check out during meetings, and often stay checked out. People who might come up with creative solutions and market-changing innovation never feel the spark.

Collaboration and creativity across distance isn’t out of reach. Remote meetings can be engaging and productive. This book will show you how.

Esther Derby

Duluth, MN

INTRODUCTION

Everyone is on mute.

Your heart is pounding; you are not usually this nervous in meetings.

What were you saying?

The energy on the call feels like it is slipping away.

Very few people speak.

You hoped this meeting would be more engaging than the last one.

It isn’t.

If the above scene feels at all familiar, we can relate. When remote meetings go badly, they go really badly. Few things feel as lonely and intimidating as speaking to a screen, with unreadable faces staring back in silence. We wrote this book to help you improve the quality of your remote meetings. With a little awareness, some planning, and some practice, you can make your remote meetings effective, engaging, and a powerful mechanism for collaboration within your organization.

We hope this book enables you to think differently about your remote meetings and find new inspiration. We hope that you feel a little braver in remote meetings. That when you finish reading you have something practical that makes your meetings more productive. That your teams enjoy remote meetings a little bit more. That your meetings achieve more powerful outcomes. That your organization begins to reap the fruit of meaningful meetings. We hope that the growing trend of remote working is made healthier by the work of this book.

WHY CARE ABOUT REMOTE MEETINGS?

Organizations are built on tons of interactions and decisions, both big and small. From a few people compiling a report, to a big group deciding the budgeting strategy for a high-risk project, these moments of people thinking together combine and compound to create the complex ecosystem that is a company. If we explore this a bit further, meetings are possibly one of the smallest and most discrete units of collaboration within organizations. Meetings are also one of the most impacted spaces in distributed environments.

While 10 years ago, remote working and distributed teams might have been considered cutting edge, current trends indicate that this style of working is becoming the norm for many organizations. Multiple-location offices, a shift in work-life balance, regional skills scarcity, and city congestion are but a few drivers of this global trend.¹ However, many teams and organizations are battling to reach the same degree of effectiveness and satisfaction in their remote spaces.² We believe it is possible to drastically improve an organization’s outcomes by focusing on the quality of its remote meetings.

WHO IS THIS BOOK FOR?