Shaping Time

A Simple Guide to one of the most fundamental materials a facilitator can shape.

Time is one of the most fundamental materials a facilitator can shape.

The most obvious ways we shape time is through an agenda. At the end of this article, I’ll share my Process Iteration Worksheet…Eight of my favorite ways to rethink and re-imagine agendas.

How much Time?

One of the biggest challenges for every facilitator is to decide how much time to give to each activity or topic in the agenda.

Alas, there’s no hard or universal rule for how long an activity can or should take…it’s something that you learn through practice (i.e., failure!)

Factors include the group size, the “juiciness” or size of the challenge and the mindset of the group…all of which can be moving targets!

However, I can share some universal time management principles.

Some Agenda Scoping Guidelines

1. Subtract. You should always follow the law of subtraction — take one thing out of your agenda. Or at least, decide what’s “nice to have.” I had a friend who would add “fake” items to their agendas, knowing the group would never get to them, but to convince them that the meeting would be jam-packed and worthwhile. Yes…it’s a strange approach, and yes, it worked for them. Your mileage may vary!

2. Round up. Nothing takes 2 or 3 minutes. Everything takes at least 5 minutes. This was true in person, and it’s more true online. Rounding up means you have slack in your agenda, which is always a better position to be in than the opposite situation.

3. Add it up. Transitions take time. Transitions from activity to activity are not instantaneous. Getting a whole group ready to move on from the current activity and oriented to a new activity takes time.

So do transitions from place to place. In IRL meetings, that can mean the time to get a group up to the wall to collaborate or in breakout groups.

In Virtual/Distributed sessions, moving from digital place to digital place takes time, too. Moving a group from a Zoom conversation to a shared canvas like Mural or Google Slides takes time. That transition will absolutely take more than 3 minutes when someone can’t log in, or isn’t familiar with the tool. See tip #2!

These three principles are only the most tangible aspects of time…what I like to call “workshop math”.

“Your primary influence is the environment you create.”
Peter Senge

Time-shaping as agenda-scoping is only one way to create an environment. A facilitator creates an environment mainly through the questions they ask — how do we frame each topic?

How do your questions frame and shape time-thinking for the group?

Each week I spend 3 hours with a group of talented facilitators as part of the facilitation masterclass I offer. The soul of the program is practicing facilitation in small groups and then reflecting on how it went.

I break the larger group into 3 groups. Each group runs an experimental session hosted by one of the facilitators in the program. Each facilitator is trying out a new agenda or a new approach to their facilitation and gets focused feedback from their group. Each breakout group then shares their insights with the larger group.

I wan to highlight three very different approaches towards molding time I saw the group take this week— through the questions they asked their participants.

1. Future Pacing and Anchoring. The idea of imagining an ideal future and bringing it into the present doesn’t belong to NLP (NeuroLinguistic Programming) but they certainly popularized it. The facilitator asked people in her group to imagine how they wanted to feel at the end of the session and to summarize that feeling in one word. She then asked the group to rename themselves in Zoom, making that feeling their *literal* middle name. That feeling was then present and persistent through the session — She brought the future feeling into the present, effortlessly.

2. Future Feeling to Facts. Another facilitator led his group though a longer arc of future pacing. It can be hard to get teams to think past the quarter…it’s even harder to imagine 5–10 years out. So this facilitator asked his group to start with the act of celebration. He asked them to simply imagine what they like to do to celebrate a big win. With the image of celebration in mind, he then prompted the group to ask themselves — what are we celebrating? Pushing people’s imaginations deeper into the future can take more thoughtful question patterns…and this is a great example of that.

3. Starting at the beginning. While it’s certainly one of the best lines in the Princess Bride, it’s also a powerful time-facilitation skill. Getting a group to think of the first time they did something can evoke powerful memories and provide ample material to work with. Bringing the past into the present is an extremely powerful facilitation technique.

Getting a group to focus on the past or the future with clarity is essential. Have you ever heard someone try to kill an idea by pointing out that it was tried, in some way, in the past? And who ever has the presence of mind to ask how the future might be different from the past in that moment? Instead, the conversation stops in its tracks as the group struggles to find a new approach that’s never been tried before. Spoiler alert — everything is a remix, so don’t stress.

Scoping, Shaping and… Sequencing

The three principles of scoping (subtract, round up and add it up) can help you scope better agendas.

Shaping time by asking the group to futurecast or backcast can help you frame the conversation and evoke powerful insights.

Sequencing is an art…In what order should we address each topic on the agenda? Do we start at the end? Or go back to the beginning first?

Sequencing topics and activities can feel like a puzzle…moving things around until they find a logical order. Having a narrative structure or process model can help you frame that conversation.

Download my narrative iteration worksheet to do some deep-dive brainstorming on your upcoming agenda. Your brain might bend or break in the process…but you’ll end up with something much more interesting at the end, I promise!

If you want to work on the finer points of facilitation with a supportive group of talented facilitators, there are still spots open for the June 10th, 5-week cohort coming up. Learn more and sign up here.

Going deeper on ALL the ways a Facilitator Shapes Experiences

If you want more, sign up for my FREE Facilitation Course here. Time is just one of the 42 “hats” a facilitator wears. I’ve drawn, described and written a deep dive for all of them.

When I first started facilitation, I took on the “time cop” role…I was strict and firm on time. Then…I learned that i could be friendly with time…I could stretch it and shape it, however I wanted.

A facilitator I know always used to say “Time is always against us.”

Now I say:

“Time is always with us. Let’s make it our friend.”

More ways to shape time: Flexing and Shaving

In my conversations with several facilitators about the topic of time since posting the above article, I realized that there are three more essential ideas in time-shaping that I wanted to share with you: Time Boxing, Flexing, and Shaving.

The more you understand time the more you can make it your friend and not your adversary in your facilitation work.

Time Boxing

Time is everything we have. Our meetings, calls, workshops are all made up of a certain amount of time.

Time Boxing is core to almost all human productivity. Right now, I’m working on a timer, virtually, with 70 other people. I’m working courtesy of a group called Caveday (more on them here. Without Caveday’s work sprints, I never would have completed either of my books…I’m quite sure of it.)

Deadlines help people focus and for most of us, nothing would get done without them. So, too, with meetings, sprints and workshops of all stripes.

But…show of hands…who has left a meeting with work incomplete? With decisions pushed out to another meeting? With follow up emails to send?

This is one of the reasons why the Google Sprint is so powerful in concept. On Monday the team agrees that on Friday, they are going to test *something* with *some* people. Even if we don’t feel 100% ready, it’s going to happen. Why? We’ve already started recruiting customers! They’re going to show up, so we’ve better have something to show them.

This is the true essence of time-boxing. The Facilitator helps a team set up a series of time boxes and gets the group to move from one to another. The team might not feel ready to move on, but move on they will, trusting that the process will work out in the end.

And often, it does. But even the most skilled facilitators sometimes need to flex their time boxes to allow more time for a group to get enough work done in order to move on to the next activity.

Flexing

We’ve all done it.

Said to ourselves, “They need just a little more time to finish…”

Groups ask for more time *all the time*.

When participants ask nicely for 5 more minutes what do you say?

If you say yes to the group and your intuitions, your generosity might cost you — the other agenda items will suffer as you run out of time…will you drop or cut those future activities in your agenda?

Or will the group’s anxiety levels rise instead as you try to shove too much action into too small of a time box?

However, if you read the medium article on time I mentioned earlier on your agendas should have the space to flex with such stresses — since you would have learned to subtract something from your agenda that you didn’t really need, round up all your activity timings and add up all the timings thoughtfully, in detail.

If you still need to flex (and it happens to the best of us) you’re going to need to start shaving soon…

Shaving

I’ve done this many times.

Looked over an agenda and saw that there was more time on the paper than there was on the clock.

So what to do? Look for places to shave. Every activity we rounded up, we now round down.

You work to convince yourself: “We can totally do that in 6 minutes instead of 10.”

Groups have five minutes for an activity? Shave a minute or two…they won’t even notice, right?

But if you shave too closely, you can easily create a sense of rushing in the group, building anxiety in the room.

So shave calmly. Telling a group “we need to cut time!” will not create the clarity and focus you likely want to cultivate in the room.

One of my favorite responses to my medium article came from Mark Saffire, who shared his time spreadsheet. I remember the day when I realized Microsoft Excel could add and subtract time. I never used Word to work on my agendas ever again.

What’s great about Mark’s spreadsheet is that it acknowledges the common reality of adjusting planned time to reflect “real” time. It’s a feature that Session Lab needs to develop. Session Lab, if you’ve never used it, is a gift to time-aware facilitators and the people they collaborate with.

Speaking of collaboration…

Solo vs Co-Facilitation

If you are working as the sole facilitator for a team, there is only one person who needs to pay the price for flexing: you! If you are on the hook for the agenda and the process working out, it’s your job to shave and flex to make sure things work.

If you’re working with another facilitator, your flex could become their shave.

And that can be painful and challenging for any professional relationship.

I’ve definitely had to manage myself on this account. I’ve come in as a guest facilitator, having dutifully prepared slides and activities only to have them cut for time.

It’s frustrating.

So it’s critical that if you need to flex you confer with your co-facilitator.

This is hard to do online. Let me tell you a story about how I failed at it.

Clear Communication

My friend Douglas Ferguson and I run a 2-day workshop on facilitating Large Virtual Meetings. Check my events page to see when we offer it next…it’s a really fun workshop.

We were drifting off of our planned time boxes and I was getting a little worried.

So, while Douglas was holding space and running the current activity, I went off into Session Lab and started shaving and re-time-boxing, and making sure everything we had planned would work out and fit in.

Meanwhile, Douglas was flexing! He was facilitating an excellent conversation, diving deep into unpacking the last exercise. People were enjoying it.

I was thinking: “What is going on?! Doesn’t he know we are over time?”

Finally, I stepped in and mentioned that we needed to move on.

What I love about working with Douglas is that he’s generally 1000% chill and unflappable, so he went with my suggestion.

However, over the chat he later asked,“Why were you moving us on? We had plenty of time!”

In my focus on time, I had neglected to communicate all of my shaving work with Douglas…so as he looked at the agenda on Session Lab, he thought we were right on time.

Oops.

Time. It’s a thing.

How can you make time more of a friend and companion than an adversary in your facilitation work?

How can you help the group see time and work within its constraints?