When Facilitation Doesn’t Look Like Facilitation

Facilitation beyond the agenda

While I am a strong proponent of the rigor and structure of process, as in many things, rules are best learnt to know when you should break them.

Steve Morris is an experienced facilitator and colleague who has been discovering the same in the world of facilitation, and he shares his experience here.

Over to Steve!

Warmly,
Jonathan

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Not all facilitation looks like a workshop. Sometimes the most important work happens in rooms where people need to come and go, senior leaders dip in and out, a little distracted, decisions are implied rather than declared, and alignment is more nuanced than simply getting everyone to agree in the moment. For better or worse, this is the reality of modern business with its busy schedules, mixed time zones and many competing priorities.

In those situations, the task isn’t to set rules and run exercises. It’s to keep things coherent, honest and moving in the right direction.

Recently, I was asked to support a series of senior strategy and planning sessions with exactly that in mind. The brief wasn’t to design or run a new workshop, or to introduce a fresh framework. It was to help make sense of what was already on the table: to listen across conversations and presentations, notice where alignment was forming (and where it wasn’t), and help ensure that what emerged over the three days could be clearly understood and taken forward once the sessions ended.

Over three days of planning sessions and quick fire recap presentations, people moved in and out of the room. Different voices carried different weight. Certain ideas only really landed when they were presented - and spoken aloud - in a particular way. The agenda mattered less than what surfaced between the lines.

Creation or coherence

Although I have run more structured sessions with the same client, the work needed here was different. It wasn’t about steering everyone through a predefined process, but about paying attention: noticing where alignment was forming, where it wasn’t, and knowing when to pause, reflect something back or simply let the conversation breathe. Some sessions are about creating something new. Others are about making sense of what already exists.

In senior settings, the challenge is often not a lack of ideas, but a lack of stability of meaning. Conversations can easily fragment across presentations, meetings and partial attendance. Language shifts slightly each time it’s repeated. Everyone believes they’re aligned, yet the story has a habit of changing depending on who you ask.

Sense-making as a discipline

In those situations, the real work isn’t to create something new, but to help meaning settle — to notice which ideas are gaining traction, which language is sticking, and what can realistically survive once people return to their daily work. This is something different from being at the front guiding, it’s the craft of sense-making.

Working this way has helped me to rethink what good facilitation looks like in senior, messy, real-world settings. No bad thing! A few lessons have stuck with me, particularly for facilitators who are more used to leading from the front.

A few of my own learnings worth holding onto

1. Be flexible with structure

Structure still matters, but it should serve the situation, not the other way around. Over long, multi-day sessions, what’s needed on day three may look quite different from day one. Things evolve and situations change.

2. Adapt as the session unfolds

Pay attention to what’s actually happening in the room, not just what was planned. Valuable insight often shows up unexpectedly.

3. Don’t be precious about your role

You’re not always there to lead and that can be uncomfortable, especially for facilitators who enjoy being visible or “performing” (guilty as charged!), but sometimes the most valuable move is to just step back.

4. Learn to listen in the background

Notice who endorses ideas publicly, how language starts to cohere and settle, and when something becomes ‘true enough’ for the group - often without a formal decision being made.

5. Optimise for coherence, not novelty

In these settings, the goal isn’t to generate something new, but to help the existing story become clear, stable, and retellable.

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Technology, in service of the work

In this kind of work, technology can play a genuinely useful supporting role - but only when it stays in its place! Used carefully, it can help hold the thread across days of conversation: supporting synthesis, memory and clarity without smoothing over nuance or replacing the judgement (and wisdom) that only humans in the room can bring.

What stayed with me wasn’t the tools themselves — I’ll share more on those another time — but the care required and taken in how they were used. The real work involved listening, noticing, and deciding what mattered enough to take forward. The technology simply helped make that work more durable.

Something I’ve increasingly noticed is that in senior, ‘messy’ settings like this, good facilitation isn’t about control, performance or being highly prescriptive. I’m learning to be less precious about those things, because what really matters is what the situation calls for: paying attention, and helping meaning hold long enough to survive - and thrive - beyond the room. Now that’s something really valuable.

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Steve Morris is the founder of Spark + Forge and an experienced designer and facilitator specialising in creativity and strategic collaboration. Trained as a LEGO® Serious Play® facilitator by Make Happy, he brings a strong design and design-thinking background to his work with leadership teams and cross-functional groups.