In this guide, we provide an overview of the skills you need as a meeting facilitator. We discuss active listening, questioning, summarising and synthesis.

📚 This guide is part of a series on how to facilitate meetings.

Summary #

Good listening and communication skills are at the core of good facilitation. This helps us build trust and openness in the group, understand each other, and ultimately, come up with better decisions. It is important for a facilitator to develop these skills - but everyone can help the meeting along by practising them too.

Put simply:

• Active listening enables us to hear what others are saying;

• Questioning helps clarify what people are saying, or supports people to explore their needs and come up with new possibilities;

• Summarising helps remind us of the key points in the discussion and check we have the same understanding;

• Synthesising is the skill that allows us to draw together different views and ideas to form one proposal that works for everyone.

Active listening #

Listening is a skill that is often under-estimated and under-valued. However, it is an essential part of effective communication, and requires an active effort to do well. When we really listen, we communicate that what someone is saying is important to us, and we try to get an accurate understanding of what they are actually saying.

To really listen, try to set aside your own interpretations and opinions about what someone is saying. Instead focus on trying to really get where someone is coming from

One objective is making sure that points don't get lost, especially when they are put forward by someone who lacks confidence, or who is representing a minority viewpoint.

Careful listening also builds trust – it is much easier to be open when we feel heard and understood. Combined with supportive questioning, this can help people explore what core needs they are trying to meet. This opens the door to finding new and creative solutions that work for everyone – instead of everyone simply fighting their own corner.

Often in a meeting setting, listening is about focusing on all the different opinions and needs being put forward. In a situation where a group is having difficulty in hearing a particular perspective, you might choose to give one or two people focused attention to help them express it.

Questioning #

Asking good questions is part of the process of active listening. This can help the facilitator and the rest of the meeting get a good understanding of what someone is trying to put across. It can also support people to explore their reasoning or come up with new options - which can both help to find ways forward when the group is stuck.

You could support them with clarifying questions, e.g. "What I think you're saying is... Am I right?" or "When you say that we 'aren't pulling our weight', can you say more about what you'd like us to do?"

Be wary of interrogating someone, or asking them to prove themselves - the aim is to support them to put their message across, not to pull it to pieces!

Sometimes, it is more helpful if you ask open questions which don't have yes/no answers. E.g. "How are you feeling about that?", "Can you explain more about the reasons you are worried?" or "What are other possible options in this situation?" etc. Open questions give people more choice over what they want to put across, and create space for the group to generate new ideas.

Summarising #

Offering a summary of the discussion can help reassure speakers they are being heard, and help to focus meetings. Usually this will involve pulling out key points of a discussion to help people think about ways forward. Occasionally, summarising an individual contribution can help - for example, if someone spoke a long time, and you want to check you all had an accurate understanding of what they were trying to say.

Think about when it is helpful to use your own words in a summary, or to use the words of the speaker. Using your own words may be more effective in showing up misunderstandings, and could make it easier to keep your summary short. Sometimes a person will have chosen a word to put across a specific meaning, and if you use a different word in your summary they may not trust you were really listening. For example, if they said they were "furious" and you described them as "annoyed", they may feel misunderstood, or even judged for the strength of their feelings.

Bear in mind also that a summary carries more weight than an average contribution to a discussion. Especially when you are summarising the views of the whole group. For example, if you say "So we're all agreed that..." it makes it harder for someone to disagree! This makes it very important to give people chance to correct you.

Some people find it helpful to take notes as the discussion happens. This makes a succinct and accurate summary much easier.

Summarising effectively #

Wait until the speaker has finished. Offer the summary tentatively and allow people to correct you if you get it wrong. Use phrases such as: “What I've heard people saying so far is... Did I miss anything out?”, “It sounds to me like the main concern you're raising is.... Is that right?”

Keep it short and simple. What you say should be easy to understand and concentrate on - rather than repeating everything that's been said already!

Synthesis #

Bringing together different ideas and trying to find a proposal that is agreeable to everyone is at the core of consensus. We call this process synthesis: finding connections between seemingly competing ideas and weaving them together to form proposals.

There are a number of background steps you can take to help people move towards synthesising a proposal.

Summarising areas of agreement and disagreement #

Try a summary of where you think the group and its different members are at: “It seems like we've almost reached agreement on that element of the proposal, but that we need to explore this part further to address everyone's concerns.” It's important to not only pick up on clear differences, but also on more subtle agree­ment or disagreement.

It can really help to use a flipchart or something else everyone can see to write up the areas of agreement and issues to be resolved. Having visuals can help more people stay focused on the discussion.

Help people explore reasons for their preferences #

It is common for people to enter a discussion with strong views on concrete options they do and don't like. This is particularly the case when the discussion starts with only one option on the table, and the group can get polarised between who wants it and who doesn't. Finding a way forward often involves taking a step backwards and exploring the reasons why people like different options. Once you've identified what people are trying to achieve, you may find new possibilities, where all the needs are met.

Example: A volunteer-run community shop was trying to decide whether to open an extra day at the weekend. Digging deeper into the different concerns revealed that everyone agreed that it would help the shop to thrive if they were open at times when most full time workers were able to go shopping. However, some members were not at all keen to lose their own weekends. Identifying these core issues enabled them to look for new solutions: opening one weekday evening, and doing a big publicity push for new volunteers who were free to do weekend shifts.

Building a proposal #

Start with whatever agreement there is and build the proposal from that. Look for ideas on how the differences can be resolved. Focus on solutions that address the funda­mental needs and key concerns that people within the group have. Often people are willing to give way on some things yet not on others which affect them more closely. The solution will often be found by combining elements from different suggestions.

People often argue over small details and overlook the fact that they agree on the big picture. Making this obvious to the group can help to provide ways forward.

Even when there is strong disagreement within the group, synthesis can help move the discussion on. Always try and find some common ground, no matter how small: “So we're all agreed that climate change demands urgent action, even if we disagree on whether the solution lies in developing new technologies, or reducing consumption”. This can reinforce that we're all on the same side, and remind a group of their overall shared aims – a necessary condition for consensus.

Also synthesising a solution doesn't necessarily mean uniformity or unanimity. Sometimes a solution is staring us in the face, but our desire to get full agreement becomes an obstacle: “So we're all agreed we'd like to go ahead with the protest. However some feel strongly that the target of our protest should be government, and others feel it ought to be corporations – is there any reason why we have to choose between the two? Could we not agree that both can happen?”

Attribution #

Work from the following sources was reused:

• Facilitating Meetings by Seeds for Change (2019)