General Approach
- Download the Facilitated Discovery Guide
- Get agreement to work together on the challenge
- Get a few volunteers to act as facilitators
- Facilitators & Recorders: Learn and adapt the materials; get your supplies
- Facilitators: Propose your schedule of sessions with the flow of topics
- Team: Prepare for the sessions, participate; study the materials after each session
- Team: Wrap-up -- Coalesce top line results
- Illustrators: Pretty up the materials in full scale; Digitize and assemble
- Facilitators: Communicate: Post the full-scale materials; Distribute the digital materials, widely
- Call in the Experts: Wow them ... you'll probably be the best-prepared client they've seen in a long time
Facilitators
In Facilitated Discovery, the facilitator's foremost interest is discovery, a lust for content. Contrast this to group meetings where the paramount interest is discipline: orderly session conduct. In Facilitated Discovery, you work to elicit the most from the group, to help the group reconsider and enhance their results, and then to communicate the results to the larger team and organization. Figuratively, you are helping your team write its own story for the design at hand, of what was, and what can be.
Recorders
A key element of success is the recorder, who should be an individual comfortable with your pace of working, and one who is able (after some briefing and study) to recognize the entities and relationships likely to come up, and to comprehend the jargon. Ideally, the recorder will also be the one to embellish and decorate the work later (possibly working with an illustrator), to clarify and highlight the important concepts.
Session Conduct
Review the Team section of the Guide. One thing you'll learn there is that the methods of Facilitated Discovery are highly derivative of the pioneering work on group process and facilitation by David Sibbet and Grove Consultants International, and the work of Sam Kaner, including the Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making.
There are, however, differences. Facilitated Discovery is, for one, focused on the design process: getting more into the design process, getting more out of it. Also, Facilitated Discovery emphasizes a more participatory-style approach, one more in line with the highly-parallel and fast-moving styles of the work teams we were serving.
The structure of the Facilitated Discovery method supports a distributed role for facilitators and timekeepers. Successful execution of Facilitated Discovery depends on a flexible environment, with lots of in-and-out of participants and significant mixed-technology participation (e.g., voting, blogging, texting, real-time wiki and task board updates). Instead of thinking of a questinonaire run-through, from top-to-bottom, think instead of a meandering dialog that is managed (by the group) so as to eventually cover every question.
In this environment, successful time control and agenda process, for two examples, are dependent less on early planning decisions, and more on the in-the-moment decisions based on current participants and the relative value emerging from the current work. Enlisting a wide group of participants, even with some attending for just a short time or via texting or online commenting, is more important than keeping a fixed team focused for the entire day following an hourly agenda. Facilitated Discovery let's you take advantage of the fresh perspectives of newcomers. Almost every activity in Facilitated Discovery offers the opportunity to spread around roles in facilitation, presentation, the coordination of subgroups, and the team's direct contribution to the recorded work--it's a really active method.
