"Facilitating a meeting involving [technical professionals] is like
herding cats."
- anonymous project manager at a major pharmaceutical company
anonymous project manager. Facilitating discussions
among technical people -- especially statisticians -- can be
a challenging task.
Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, wrote the
following about the facilitator role:
- Facilitators must continually bring forward people who have not
spoken, and prompt them to add their views. They must regulate
the flow of conversation, following a model of dialogue which
invites people to suspend their assumptions and treat each other
as colleagues. All the while, the facilitators must ask people to
explain why they said what they just said -- to urge them to describe
what's behind their thinking.
I have facilitated lengthy discussions among
assembly line workers,
engineers,
programmers,
statisticians,
salespeople,
C-level executives,
and countless combinations of all the above.
I've found that a group dialogue is never perfect, but can
bear fruit if one asks the right questions, continually reads
body language and voice tone among participants, listens
closely, and demonstrates patience throughout.
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