Thrive: The Facilitator’s Guide to Radically Inclusive Meetings

By Mark Smutny

Imagine meetings where everyone is heard and all people matter.

 

Picture organizations that embrace all voices and are committed to justice, equity and opportunity. Imagine businesses, nonprofits and the public sector creatively engaging people in thousands of ways—seeking their best ideas, empowering the silenced, and building communities where all are treated with dignity and respect. 

 

That's what Thrive seeks to create. 

 

Each chapter contains practical insights and accessible stories that transform meetings from dull to dynamic.

 

You will learn how to:

• capitalize on diversity's strengths.
• keep meetings task-oriented and collegial.
• facilitate effectively in polarized or conflicted settings.

Thrive includes chapters on privilege and power, multilingual and virtual meetings, and full inclusion of people with disabilities.

 

Whether you are a skilled practitioner or new to leadership, Thrive will teach you techniques for facilitating more effective, inclusive and energizing meetings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Emerald Lake Books
• Release date: Oct 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781945847493

Book preview

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PREFACE

When did you facilitate your first meeting? My first one was in the fourth grade. I had been elected captain of my basketball team at Bickel Elementary School in Twin Falls, Idaho, my hometown. The captain had the privilege of naming the team. I named them the Smutny Sharpshooters.

We were diverse: Santos Salinas, Jesse Hernandez, Ricardo Montez and David Galvin joined Michael Fuller, Michael Covington, Gary Cooper and me. The boys with Spanish names had parents born in Mexico. I was half Czech. The others sounded like their families arrived on the Mayflower. We had no coach, only yours truly.

The first meeting was during lunch hour on the asphalt playground. It wasn’t much of a basketball court. The stripes marking the court boundaries were faded. The hoops had no net. Bickel was the poor elementary school in town. A third of the student body came from South Park where redlining forced Mexican Americans to live. The remainder were farm kids. I was reared on a dairy farm. Hard work, sports, church and family defined my upbringing.

At the first meeting of the Smutny Sharpshooters, I knew enough about coaching to know it was not a democracy. However, if I simply ordered people around there would be a revolt. I knew I needed to keep it short and clear, have my teammates practice a few exercises, and mostly let them play basketball.

The biggest challenge was the boy who was unable to reach the hoop with his shot. He was simply uncoordinated. I taught him to engage his entire body when shooting hoops. By getting him to push up with his legs, torso and arms, like unleashing a coiled spring, he was able to shoot the ball to the elusive goal. He beamed when he made his first shot. The rest of the team cheered. I was hooked on coaching—a form of facilitation.

I learned through that experience that one job of a facilitator is to cheer. Encouragement is central if you want a group to thrive, whether a sports team or a board of directors.

Basic skills are equally important. Reaching the goal, building community, and including everyone makes it easier for the group to thrive. With these basic skills, you’ve got a team, and you’re on your way to a good meeting.

We went on to lose most of our games. The teams from the richer side of town had adult coaches who knew what they were doing. I’ll never forget when, in the heat of a game, David Galvin made a shot from twenty-five feet—amazing for a fourth grader.

I’ll also never forget my first homemade, freshly baked tortilla that Ricardo Montez’s mother made one afternoon after basketball practice. I had been invited to Ricardo’s home as our little team bonded. The steaming tortilla, slathered with butter and cinnamon sugar, was unbelievably tasty.

I learned a lot about facilitation in fourth grade: exude calm authority, encourage the team, and let others shine. Teach basic skills and practice them. Have fun. Don’t be too serious. Work toward a common goal. Cheer a lot. Eat afterward.

Since those days on the playground, I have participated in thousands of meetings. In graduate school, I helped plan and organize a peace conference at the Kennedy School of Government during the height of the arms race—we met twenty times to pull off the event. We attracted twelve hundred people from all over Massachusetts. As a Presbyterian pastor in Ohio, New York, California and Washington State, I participated in as many meetings as stars in the sky. Some were poorly run, and I was able to catch up on missed sleep. I’ve also experienced meetings run so well that I never wanted them to end.

I’ve chaired hundreds of meetings for local and regional governments, private/public partnerships, business groups and nonprofits. I’ve led hundreds of strategy meetings. I’ve planned everything from how best to win a mayoral election to what size place mats should decorate dining tables. I’ve coached soccer, organized food drives, and held meetings with traumatized victims of police sweeps clearing homeless camps under freeways. I’ve served on boards of directors, consulted with governments, and revitalized citizen groups.

Meetings are a fact of life. At work and play; in all walks of life; in all disciplines; in the public, private and nonprofit sectors; we meet. We meet incessantly for good and for ill.

All of us have stories about poor meetings. Some of us have stories of great meetings. The difference between poor and great often depends on the skill of the facilitator, how the meeting is structured, and whether diversity is embraced. The root of the word facilitation means to make easy. I want to make easy all the meetings you attend or facilitate.

Fortunately, facilitation can be learned. I encourage you to read Thrive cover-to-cover, then pick and choose ideas as they best fit your context. I hope you discover the joy of a well-run meeting. May all your meetings engage, include and thrive. As Captain Picard ordered in every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Make it so.

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INTRODUCTION

Imagine meetings where everyone is heard and all people matter. Picture organizations that embrace all voices and are committed to justice, equity and opportunity for all. Imagine businesses, nonprofits and the public sector creatively engaging people in thousands of ways to draw out their best ideas, empower the silenced, and build communities where all are treated with dignity and respect.

In a time when Black Americans, Asian Americans and other marginalized groups continue to experience systemic racism and hate crimes that maim and traumatize, imagine thousands of settings where each voice is treasured, diversity is honored, and inclusion is practiced.

We spend a huge amount of our time in meetings. Virtual meetings, in-person meetings, meetings to plan a new product or service line, and meetings to plan the next meeting. Meetings are the canvas upon which we paint much of our organizational life. Because they are ubiquitous, meetings need to matter. They need to include every voice and embrace every perspective.

I want to teach you how to design meetings where inclusion and engagement are central. I want you to design and lead meetings where a kaleidoscope of humanity is energized, speaks forthrightly, listens carefully, and respects all. I want you to recommit to the fundamental belief we are best as a people when we live the creed of e pluribus unum, out of many, one.

I wrote Thrive: The Facilitator’s Guide to Radically Inclusive Meetings driven by a vision where equity, inclusion and engagement can happen for every participant in every meeting, conference and summit. I want your meetings to have energy and imagination and be worth every second of your time. In a word, I want your meetings—all of them—to thrive!

Whether you meet in person or online, Thrive will teach you a set of inclusive meeting practices that fire your imagination and provide you with easily used, practical skills to move your organization toward greater inclusion.

The second edition of this book includes a new chapter on facilitating inclusive virtual meetings. During the coronavirus pandemic, virtual meetings became the norm, and they continue to play a larger role in our lives than ever before. Therefore, it is essential that we learn how to make them engaging, inclusive, energizing and productive.

I have been facilitating meetings for over a third of a century and have participated in thousands of meetings as a nonprofit leader, business owner, consultant, pastor and community organizer. Some meetings sailed along with ease and reached their destination. Others sputtered and stalled. Still others never left port. All were attended by people who said they valued everyone’s participation. But too often, a few people dominated. When the voices of the many were not heard, the meetings were less productive and more frustrating than they needed to be.

Inclusive meeting designs help organizations capitalize on their diversity. A mix of perspectives, life experience and other forms of diversity reveals greater truth than that discerned by any one person alone. Much is lost when groups are mostly of one gender, race or ethnicity. Similarly, when groups that look diverse fail to draw out the unique insights and perspectives of each person, diversity is squandered. When people of different genders, races and ethnicities meet in groups designed to include everyone, and the group is facilitated well, we are more likely to realize diversity’s promise to deliver better thinking and results.

I believe equality and equity are more than lofty words. They are practices. We practice equality by being even-handed and fair. We embody equity by the way we respect and include every voice and each perspective. Embodying these values throughout our meetings and organizations makes space for us to rise to what President Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. We become more open, curious and respectful. Justice for all becomes more than a slogan. It becomes a way of life. The result is better outcomes, increased productivity, and more motivated employees, volunteers and stakeholders.

Think of meetings in which a few people dominated. Remember how most people stayed quiet, doodled or texted until a break in the meeting. Then recall the noise level during breaks as conversation erupted. The purpose of this book is to help you bring the energy of break time into your meetings. I’ll teach you how, with good meeting design and a few techniques and tools, to include those voices and energy in your meetings, no matter the size or occasion. I’ll also teach you how to bring similar energy and engagement to your virtual meetings.

This book covers multiple topics to make your meetings thrive. It begins with a chapter on disastrous meetings—the type of meeting we want to avoid. We all have a list of similar experiences. These painful memories and my core values inspire my passion and vision for better, more inclusive meetings. My family taught me through example the importance of moral courage, compassion and the pursuit of social justice. Because we spend so much of our time in meetings, they are a good place to start practicing basic fairness and respect for all voices. Doing so combats injustice by building businesses, nonprofits and public institutions that embody fairness and inclusion.

I imagine you have lived long enough to have experienced plenty of meetings dominated by a few tedious, unimaginative and longwinded voices. Real, engaged conversation was absent. Thrive can help you make sure this doesn’t happen in the meetings you lead.

In the coming years, you may design and facilitate hundreds of meetings, small and large, in which you will want to elicit energy, engagement, imagination and productivity. Funders are increasingly expecting that employees, teams and leadership reflect the diversity of our society. They know that diverse viewpoints bring better ideas and create greater productivity. But it’s not just about having diverse faces at the table. You need to know how to draw out diverse perspectives as well.

In the search for resources on how to embody diversity, equity and inclusion, you have probably seen plenty of books on these topics. When you open them, many are dense, scholarly tomes raising awareness about diversity but failing to provide practical ways to embody diversity and inclusion, especially in meetings, where we spend so much of our time.

My aim in writing this book is to provide you with a kit of innovative, easily implemented tools and techniques that strengthen inclusion and make diversity a value we embody every day in our organizational lives.

I trust you share with me a sense of urgency about the importance of facilitating well and hearing every voice in our increasingly polarized times. We need leaders with the personal courage and skill set to embody inclusion in our meetings, organizations and wider community. We need people like you to lead inclusively, to build bridges instead of widening canyons. In Thrive, I give you the tools that foster understanding and respect.

We will start with a bit of theory about the role communication plays in developing inclusive organizations. This is crucial to becoming more conscious of the way power and cultural difference shape how meetings are often run. But there are competencies you can cultivate that will bring your best self to meeting facilitation, including nurturing listening skills, mindfulness and emotional and cultural intelligence.

Equally important are the core values of radical equality, equity and inclusion. These values are the heartbeat of everything else I say.

We will also explore the nature of conversational leadership and its implications for our meetings and organizations. With a foundation in the values of inclusivity and an organization-wide commitment to nurturing strategic conversations, you will find the wisdom you need to ready yourself to lead and facilitate meetings. Preparation begins with developing emotional resilience and achieving mindfulness.

This is where applying the seven listening skills needed to become a proficient listener are particularly useful. In an era of intense polarization, these skills help you listen to powerful emotions and criticism without becoming defensive.

Of course, any book on meeting facilitation would be lacking if it didn’t provide an outline of the elements needed in every well-run, inclusive meeting. These include topics like centering, icebreakers and ground rules.

There are also a variety of meeting designs to choose from that engender inclusivity and full participation. These include framing questions that invite energy and imagination, simple meeting designs that engage all voices in a short time, and a variety of whole-group planning methods that have emerged in the past three decades. All are rooted in the values of inclusion and what I call radical equality, and they combine small-group conversations with larger, whole-group sessions.

In addition to an overview of meeting designs, I also share tools and techniques that help diverse groups thrive. Some of the practices and accommodations you can implement serve to embrace diverse voices and perspectives. These ensure that your meetings are accessible cross-culturally as well as to people with disabilities.

Facilitators find themselves in special circumstances, such as needing negotiating techniques and facilitating conflict in polarized times. Thrive will teach you how to navigate those treacherous waters.

For an organization to create successful strategic plans, it needs to make the planning process inclusive of all of its stakeholders. There are practical ways for your plan to avoid the destiny of many others—being ignored as they gather dust on a shelf.

To change the entire culture of your organization, with buy-in from every employee and stakeholder, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with the eight practices of change leaders. These insights apply to all kinds of change initiatives from implementing values of diversity, equity and inclusion to technological change, embracing new markets, and breaking down organizational silos.

Groups of all types can become mindful of patterns in their history that shape the way they behave today and respond to the future. As you lead them to an awareness of these patterns, your groups will be more likely to move forward with health, optimism and renewed energy.

But facilitating meetings doesn’t end with gathering people together and leading them through a strategic process. When the meeting is drawing to a close, it’s imperative to record, conclude and evaluate the meeting. And, in order to continually improve upon inclusion and engagement efforts, it is necessary to evaluate meetings objectively. Therefore, I have provided a sample survey you can use to measure how successful your meeting was at being inclusive.

Since strong writing skills are essential for communications in every business or nonprofit, I have provided some of my best tips for writing well. As facilitators and leaders, we write emails, memos and reports every day. Writing that is simple, clean and devoid of clutter strengthens our work and the groups we serve.

After reading this book, you may wonder when it makes sense to hire a professional facilitator rather than tackling a meeting on your own. One of the final chapters outlines when and how a professional facilitator can be the best solution for your group, conference or summit. While I hope this book benefits you in becoming a skilled facilitator, circumstances will arise when your group needs the objectivity and detachment of an outside facilitator and consultant.

I want