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Facilitating Event Planning for a Distributed Team

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Recently I have been talking to several clients that are seeking facilitation services for the planning of events that are a month or two away and are looking for assistance in convening geographically diverse teams in planning the events.  Having planned many regional and national conferences over my 17 plus year career,  it is clear to me that the facilitation process of planning an event is as important as the facilitation process at the event. While not quite as prophetic as the GIGO mantra of “garbage in garbage out, ” my experience has taught me that there is a direct relationship between the quality of the planning and the quality of the event.  I have also found that he stakes in event planning are increased when planning team is geographically distant and unable to convene face-to-face for the planning process. So in this post, I wanted to outline some of the principles of facilitating an event planning process for a “virtual” planning team.

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Technology Choices:  The first principle is to be thoughtful and intentional about technology choices.  In an ideal world, everyone would have broadband access to the Internet, using state of the art computers with integrated Voice Over Internet capabilities and attached video cameras.  In that ideal world, users would have the technology competencies to understand not only email and basic web browsing but also how to use tools like Skype, WIKIS, Twitter, collaborative workspaces, content management systems.  Unfortunately, while the generation now coming up through the ranks is more technology savvy, a facilitator needs to be able to rapidly assess the competencies of a planning team to find the lowest common denominator of technology tools to manage the planning process.  At the most basic level technology tools need to ensure thee things:  a) communication, b) documentation, c) tracking progress.

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Communication:  Planning teams need to communicate and  three of the most common formats are teleconferencing, webinar and email.   The trade off of teleconferencing or using a webinar platform is primarily one of cost and technology competency.  If a team can afford it and has the competencies, using a webinar format for planning meetings opens up visual as well as audio communications.  I find email is useful only as an adjunct communication tool because of the inherent limitations that asynchrony bring to the communication process, because of the competing noise of 40-50 other emails a day, and fragmentation inherent in multiple email messages.

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Documentation:  The ability to document a planning process using a common technology platform is critical to the planning process.  For example, I have been working with a distributed team on an organizational development process where one of their primary challenges is tracking who on the team has the current version of any given document.  That is not the way to work and we are exploring technology options to solve that problem. However, planning teams need to get documentation correct up front as timelines for event planning don’t reward inefficiency of lost documents. Elsewhere I have written extensively about managing technology-based collaborative workspaces.

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Tracking Progress: Tracking progress across a distributed team can also be managed using online collaborative workspaces or can be as simple as using a running task list that is reviewed at each planning call. Ideally tracking progress integrates a dates (calendar), tasks, milestones and responsibilities.

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Agendas & Ground Rules: I have written elsewhere on agenda development and when working with a virtual planning team, the importance of using an effective agenda in facilitating a planning process needs to be underscored.  When a meeting is being conducted by a teleconference there is an absence of visual interaction and having a clear agenda is one tool to help participants track progress of the conversation.   The other tool that is important to facilitating teleconferences is a discussion of “ground rules.”  While many facilitators rigorously define ground rules at the beginning of a facilitation process, I am much more lax in this processes, often omitting consideration of ground rules, unless a client feels that the step is important. However, for conference calls, I do believe that it is important to establish some working ground rules.  Some rules are related to professional courtesy while others are intended to improve productivity. Specifically, I feel that it is important to create agreements around a) multi-tasking (answer emails and web surf in addition to participating in the call), b) muting phones except when talking, c) identifying oneself before speaking, d) restating agreements in the summary.

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Facilitation Tasks:  When facilitating a virtual group I believe that the facilitator has five tasks including 1) preparation, 2) movement, 3) understanding, 4) inclusion, and 5) decisions.

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Preparation:  There are two dimensions of preparation.  The first dimension is creating the clear understanding of meeting outcomes and make sure that the virtual team has in advance to the meeting, the agenda and background materials needed to make them successful in achieving the meeting outcomes. There is both art and science in using technology effectively and that surfaces the second dimension of preparation. A facilitator needs a deep understanding of the technology media being used.

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Movement:  As with all facilitation, the role of the facilitator is to design and implement a process that moves participants from the beginning of the process to the end.  In a technology-mediated environment, without visual cues, such facilitation will rely more on more procedural skills to specifically engage participants and create action.  Polling, sequential talking, motion – discussion & vote, are examples or process tools that are needed to compensate for the lack of visual cues.

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Understanding: As a third process, checking for understanding becomes important in a technology-mediated environment. The facilitator may need to check in on understanding using processes like, asking for paraphrasing or verbal affirmations of understanding.

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Inclusion:  Ensuring inclusion is a facilitator task in any setting. In facilitating virtual groups the task of inclusion has the dimension of ensuring equity of voice and the occasional dimension of re-engaging those who wander off into multi-taking land.

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Decisions: The final facilitator task is to ensure that decisions are made and documented.  I have also posted on decision-making previously and it goes without saying that decisions made are the markers of progress in the event planning process.

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Documentation: The final principle to discuss is documentation and version control. The success of team-based event planning is the ability to manage the documentation process.  Again, as a subject worthy of more in-depth consideration, I had posted extended thoughts on documentation previously.   As I stated in that post, “developing a documentation plan as part of facilitation should be standard practice, although I have encountered few facilitators who are so intentional about this process.  To be successful in this area, a facilitator needs to be familiar with concepts of information ecology and knowledge management in addition to having strong technology competencies. The benefits of investing the time and energy in document planning are seen in greater productivity, efficiency of the process.”

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Successful event planning by virtual teams not only requires facilitation but a well-managed facilitation process.  Investing in the event planning design as well as the event design will often be the difference between an event and an outcome.  Events can be planned but events that achieve outcomes require distributed planning teams to the carefully design a process that use of technology, meeting process, and document management to ensure planning success.

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As always, your thoughts are welcome.

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Facilitating Advisory Groups: Labels & Social Contracts

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When convening a group, two of the primary tasks of a facilitator are to clearly articulate the label that is applied to the group and to create an appropriate social contract between group members.  The terms “workgroup,” “taskforce,” “coalition” and “advisory group” are labels that are often used loosely and sometimes even used interchangeably. However, each of these labels carries a very different meaning and more importantly a different implied social contract.  My experience (both as a group participant and a facilitator) is that when a group of people are convened as an “advisory group” the front-end work around developing a social contract becomes critical.

Perhaps there are more sophisticated definitions for an advisory group but in general, as the name implies, an advisory group is a collective of participants who are invited because of expertise, representation of constituents, connections, and/or position for the purpose of helping to inform representative decisions.  In their highest use, advisory groups are convened because the increasing complexity of social problems demands broad critical thinking.  In their lowest use, advisory groups are convened to create the illusion of participation and provide political coverage for decisions that need to be made.  In between these two points on the continuum there are likely a number of different points of functioning for advisory groups.  One can readily see that, wherever an advisory group falls on the continuum, the success of the group will be dependent upon the clarity, expectations and social contract negotiated with the group.

Groups convene, partnerships are formed, and collaboration occurs largely because there is a compelling need that transcends the abilities of an individual or single organization.  Adapting from an excellent resource on evaluating collaboratives (see resources below), I would suggest that collaboration occurs in the social sector because: 1) social problems are complex, 2) there are intensive resource pressures, 3) the social net continues to fragment, 4) communities don’t respond well to endemic problems, and 5) change is pervasive, rapid and sweeping.  Implicit in these magnetic forces is the need to network and create shared solutions.

While I have written before that there is a compelling shift towards collaboration and networking, I believe that  there remain organizational challenges and barriers to collaboration.  The polar opposites that make collaboration difficult are such issues as 1) cultures of organizational superiority, 2) single-issue myopia, 3) differing mandates and procedures, and 4) competing/adversary relationships (especially around resources).

In this context, when an advisory group is convened, there is an unspoken orientation towards action and, at times, the internal undercurrent of the barriers that initially undermines trust in the process.  This mix of expectations and barriers is the driving reason to create a social contract for participation. So what does a social contract for an advisory group look like?

Explicit Definition of Advisory:  First and foremost, a facilitator needs to help the parties define the “advisory purpose” of the group.  If there is a “disconnect” between the perceived role of the participants and the intention of the convener, the group progress will be hindered because of the conflicting expectations.  The facilitator needs to ensure that everyone is in agreement to what “advisory” means for the group process. Inherent in this definition is the concept of authority.  In other words, the group needs to be clear what authority is connected with the advice.  For example, if a government agency brings together an advisory group to help prioritize pressing community issues for funding, the participants need to be clear if their advice (in terms of prioritizing) has a direct link to decisions made about funding or if the advisory authority is limited and other constraints could possibly trump their recommendations. Failure to make this expectation clear has the potential to undermine the entire advisory process.

Consideration of Transaction:  A second component of the social contract relates to the transactional or relational nature of the advisory group.  With limited resources, especially time, the convening of an advisory group needs to bring some benefit to the participants other than the potential of free coffee and pasties at the meeting.  This is especially true if the group authority is limited by external constraints.  Profile, status and relationships are often implicit (but not often explicit) transactions that can support an advisory function. However, following authority to influence direction, the transaction that is important to advisory group participation is bringing the “voice” of the community to the process.  Indeed, as the voice of the community is amplified by the collective participation of group members become a community organizing effort even if authority is lacking.  Advisory group participation builds relationships and can be the foundation for future action.

Process Support:  A third characteristic of a social contract for advisory groups is to ensure the process is supported and resourced.  The facilitation of the group must include the supporting structure that is the basis for any meeting facilitation (clear agendas, decision-making process, and minutes).  Additional support includes clear communication during and between meetings and a clear beginning and end point with movement markers in between.

Participant Expectations:  Finally the social contract must define participant expectations.  For an advisory group to be successful expectations that are important include: 1) being honest and open, 2) making contributions to the process, 3) focusing on issues and content, and 4) being a provocateur when needed. In addition, standard meeting ground rules such as respecting others, being on time and following through on agreements and action items need to be in place.

While not essential, the most successful advisory groups I have participated in, codify the social contract in a brief operating procedure.  In the resources below, I link to a handbook for community advisory groups that was developed to guide EPA advisory groups.  While very jargon laden, the document has some sample documents that can serve as models for advisory groups seeking to create a written social contract.

The point that I am trying to make is that unique group structures require unique facilitation approaches.  While coalitions derive power from collective action, advisory groups primarily inform and influence the actions of others.  This is not to judge the importance of one structure over the other but simply points to the unique facilitation needs of advisory groups. It is my belief that advisory groups are a critical component of the civic engagement process and their success is dependent upon the clarity of process and expectations.  Social sector organizations need collective wisdom and advisory groups are one pathway to that wisdom. Skilled facilitation that pays attention to the labels and social contract can help such groups succeed.

Resources

Taylor-Powell, E., Rossing, B., & Geran, J. (1998). Evaluating Collaboratives: Reaching the Potential. Madison: University of Wisconsin-System Board of Regents and University Wisconsin-Extension, Cooperative Extension (190 pages pdf).

Community Advisory Group (CAG) Handbook Department of Toxic Substances Control California Environmental Protection Agency

Facilitating for Government & Governance

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.Over the course of my career I have studied with many talented facilitation mentors from both the organizational development world and the world of community organization.  Studying and, more importantly, practicing in both worlds has helped me develop an understanding that there are two facilitation disciplines that require different sets of skills.

A traditional organizational development approach to facilitation takes the perspective of “government” thinking.  Government thinking has been used to describe the hierarchical business approach with all that it implies. Government thinking is dominated concepts like hierarchy, centralized decision making, sole authority, dependent relationship, uniform policy, outputs and vertical relationships.  Facilitation, in this context, employs a range of meeting process tools like brainstorming, decision-making, group dynamic, negotiation and mediation.  Often parochial in nature, the primary objective of government thinking is to solicit advice, convince those that work “down-stream,” and ensure negotiated progress toward centralized plans.

At the other end of the spectrum is “governance” thinking that has historically been the domain of community collaboration and community organization.  I started my professional career working in the community tasked with developing coalitions and partnerships. Over the years I have participated in the development of numerous working collaboratives.  In governance thinking the characteristics are almost antithetical to government thinking.  In governance there are multiple “authorities,” decentralized decision-making, negotiation and persuasion, participatory relationships, localized policies and community level outcomes.  The goal of governance is collective and democratic action.

Many facilitators coming through the ranks of corporate human resource, training or organizational development departments who “cut their teeth” on traditional meeting facilitation, planning and/or in labor-management negotiations are likely well versed in government thinking and are masters at operating in this environment.  However it is increasingly important for facilitators to possess the complimenting governance-oriented skills and experience.  Indeed, the sea change that is occurring across all economic sectors (both public and private) is that governance thinking is now no longer the sole domain of community organizers. Government agencies and private sector organizations are embracing governance thinking. More and more companies are interested in the whole, are creating networks, and are operating in a triple bottom line environment –all earmarks of governance thinking. It is my belief that the correlation between the rapid proliferation of networking technologies and the acceleration in governance thinking is no accident.  Technology tools have fundamentally redefined organizational hierarchy.  This shift has also redefined facilitation skills required to be effective in this new systems-environment.

Given the shift to governance thinking, facilitators need to go back to the roots of community-based organizing and immerse themselves in systems-thinking, empowerment education, collaborative technology and adult leaning theory.  In is only with a blended understanding drawing from the principles of governance that facilitators can make significant contributions to performance.  Recently I came across a list of skills in an academic journal related to social work (1) that I adapted as a list of governance-related facilitation skills.  In addition to meeting process skills, governance facilitation requires:

Activation/Enabling Skills: First and foremost strong facilitation understands how to convene (and hold together) stakeholders to address community issues.  In public involvement this might include bringing together government, nonprofit, advocacy groups, faith-based communities, and unaffiliated citizens.  In the private sector this might include bringing not only those up and down the supply chain but external influencers like regulators and consumers.

Framing Skills:  A facilitator must be able to create a focusing frame and values around the issue(s) and facilitate agreements related to roles and responsibilities of players that, when coordinated, move the group towards values-based solutions.   Core to the process of framing both focus and agreement is the ability to think and act from a systems perspective, fostering a whole that is more than the sum of the parts.

Orchestrating/Mobilizing Skills:  This is the skill set that demonstrates the facilitator’s ability to manage the movement towards the milestones, objectives and outcomes.  Facilitation as movement requires expertise in community engagement.

Social Networking Skills: I have written elsewhere of the facilitators need to be able to manage connections and relationships for the process of knowledge creation.  This point is underscored in a governance model where the network is core to success.  This truism is familiar to any facilitator who has come up through the community-side of facilitation.  Making and supporting connections between people and  managing the collective wisdom are often what makes the difference between success and failure.

Synthesizing & Editing  skills:  All facilitation requires the facilitator to have a deep toolbox of strategies that enables him/her to effectively synthesize, edit and transform the process as it unfolds. Such tools supporting this work include such things as mediation, interest-based problem solving, and possibly even strategies that create incentive for progress.

Some have suggested that the shift from government to governance is a revolution.  Others, like me, believe that governance thinking is simply the process of re-imagining and re-discovering our roots in community organizing.  Whether this shift is evolution, revolution or rediscovery matters less than how governance thinking impacts facilitation.  Governance thinking is about creating networks of democratic action.  It is about increasing leverage and effectiveness.  Fundamentally governance is about thinking and working in new ways and is about re-imagining social impact whether it is in the public or private sector and fostering this impact is the heart and soul of facilitation.

References

(1) Frahm, K. A. & Martin, L. L. (2009). From Government to Governance: Implications for Social Work Administration.Administration in Social Work, 33(4), 407-422. doi:10.1080/03643100903173016

(2) Working Wikily

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Using Taxonomies in Facilitation

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If you have been following this blog, you likely already know that my goal is to move beyond “Facilitation 101” and focus on the deeper context of facilitation, which I believe is the ability to connect people, technology, and process in ways that create performance improvement.   It is my belief that the traditional view of facilitators “running good meetings” is wholly inadequate for today’s competitive and rapidly changing social-political and economic environment.  One such “deeper” theme of this blog is the understanding of the facilitator’s role in managing knowledge creation.  I have written before of the process of facilitating knowledge creation and managing the documentation of knowledge.  In this post, I wanted to add another dimension of knowledge management by discussing the importance of using taxonomies as a strategic tool in facilitation.  Knowledge taxonomies are based on the science of classifying words, ideas and concepts, according to natural relationships and should be part of the operating system of a facilitator. There are two ways of thinking about taxonomy development. One use is the use of a taxonomy in “organization of knowledge” and the second is the use of a taxonomy in “organization of people. Ideally a facilitator can use taxonomy in a blended approach taking the best of both orientations.

Taxonomy and Organizing Knowledge:  One of the clearest benefits of creating a taxonomy is that it serves as an organizer.  A few years ago I worked with a team managing three large resource libraries and had the privilege of being mentored by some truly amazing librarians who taught me a tremendous amount about managing knowledge through taxonomies.  While there is a large science of taxonomies, the process of developing a taxonomy boils down to identifying the requirements, conducting a concept mapping exercise, building a draft taxonomy, getting a usability feedback, refining the taxonomy and applying/maintaining the system. The power of proactive knowledge taxonomy is that it gives order to process at the beginning and the dividends are accrued when content multiplies and expands. If a knowledge taxonomy is created up front, then as materials are created they can be labeled, organized and stored effectively.  In the absence of a defined taxonomy, one can spend hours on a shared drive looking for a reference article, only to find it in the “download archive” folder named something like “3089.doc”

Taxonomy and Building Community: Almost polar opposite to creating a structured taxonomy is  a community taxonomy that is iteratively and built from the bottom up by those contributing and using the knowledge.  Sometimes called a folksonomy to contrast it from an informatics approach, a folksonomy is a democratized approach to building a defined taxonomy.  It builds upon the social life of information and lends itself to community building. A common example of a folksonomy can be seen the use of keywords and tags associated with blogs.  If you have ever seen a tag cloud, you begin to get the sense of how folksonomies are developed.  Concepts attract concepts, patterns are recognized and a shared understanding grows out of the mutual use of terms.  Another example of a folksonomy can be found in personal lists Twitter users create to sort content.  Lists are developed, cross-posted, referenced and begin to “trend” as a shared concept.  The power of such folksonomies is found when user tags are combined and refined based on the principle of self-organization.

If a facilitator understands the concept of taxonomies s/he can harness both the power of structure and community organization in creating framework for organization of knowledge.  This brings us to the application of taxonomies in facilitation.  How does understanding the use of taxonomies improve facilitation?

Managing Documents: The obvious, and previously stated, application is in the management of documents.  For those facilitation assignments that require the creation and management of multiple documents, the use of a taxonomy is critical.  Whether a top down informatics approach or a bottom up community approach, defining a taxonomy is essential to managing documents.

Making the Complex Simple: A second use of a taxonomy in facilitation is in taking a large and/or complex topics and breaking down so that it builds a common understanding of the group.  The most common taxonomy exercise is creating a concept map.  Concept mapping is a way off creating an inventory of ideas and vocabulary and creating relationships between the ideas and vocabulary.  While some may argue that creating a concept map differs from creating a taxonomy, in my opinion, the two are at least close cousins.

Depoliticizing Words: A final application of taxonomy thinking in facilitation is as a tool to depoliticize language.  For example, I have been in many discussions about affordable rental housing where group members used interchangeably words like: low-income housing, public housing, undercapitalized housing, substandard housing and predatory housing.  Each of these terms can be loaded with a political agenda.  A facilitator could easily remove the politics by starting with the higher order concept of housing and creating a taxonomy.  In that process, the politics are uncoupled from the concepts and common ground is more likely to be created as a platform for productive rather than polarized discussions.

As I suggested earlier, facilitating the development of a knowledge taxonomy is likely the result of a blended structure that is in part designed but also allows for the iterative co-creation and improvement of how processes are organized.  The point of this blog is not to teach informatics but is to describe the intentional clarity that a facilitator needs to bring to language, words and concepts. Facilitation has as a core foundation principle the ability to bring order to diversity. In the past, such facilitation might have been achieved by charisma, felt-tipped markers, and easel paper. However, the increasing complexity of process demands more than simple facilitation skills.  Markers and easel paper are still required but the facilitator needs to understand how to think and design in terms of systems, organization and knowledge management.  Such facilitation requires the theory and application of taxonomies as part of the facilitation toolbox.  With taxonomy skills facilitation meets the need of times, when there is more at stake than running a good meeting.

References

(1) Taxonomy Development for Knowledge Management

(2) Taxonomy and Folksonomy Cookbook


Managing Documentation: A Key Facilitation Skill

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I once served on an advisory group process that spanned a number of months and consisted of a steering committee, a workgroup, three subcommittees and a couple of ad hoc committees.  I was not the facilitator but a participant and as the weeks unfolded, I found myself increasingly frustrated by the lack of process for facilitating the management of documents.  That lack, meant that meeting minutes arrived in various inconsistent formats.  Worse, minutes were consistently presented as sketchy and random notes rather than an effective process/decision summary.  There was no accessible centralized file archive of documents presented at meetings nor were there version controlled copies of the recommendation papers being developed by the subcommittees.  The bottom line is the lack of document organization negatively impacted the productivity of the group.

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I compare a document management plan to the “operating system” of a computer.  The user of a computer doesn’t turn on his/her computer and think “hmmm is my OS X or Windows XP working today?” –okay maybe you question your Windows operating system- but in general one does not often think about the operating system even though it is what makes the computer work. While we word process or email, or work with databases and spreadsheets the operating system makes the experience seamless.  In the same way document management should be something operates in the background as a critical operating platform that supports the facilitation process. Effectively managing documents needs to be part of the facilitator’s “operating system” because it is essential to the facilitation process.

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In this day of age, I cannot imagine a facilitation consultant working with a client without creating a shared electronic workspace for the effective management of documents.  In fact, I have presented a two-part overview (Part 1 & Part 2) of facilitating in a shared electronic workspace.  In this post I would like to focus on the facilitation skill of developing a document management plan for creating, storing, editing and distributing of written materials.  I believe that the facilitation skills associated with managing documents requires three distinct planning phases that include: 1) defining and mapping data, 2) creating people networks, and, 3) creating connections between people and data.

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Defining & Mapping Data:  At the start of every project, the facilitator needs to be clear about the expectations relating to documents being developed and the associated documentation process.  In general, a larger facilitation process will include: a) progress documentation b) reference documentation; and c) production documents.  Process documentation includes such things as meeting agendas, minutes, process summaries, and workplans. Reference documentation, might be reports, articles, manuals, slide presentations that collectively comprise the project-based information library. Production documents are those documents that become part of the project deliverables.  For example, facilitating a proposal development process, the production documents would include the narrative, budget, forms and appendices.

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Once the documentation requirements are defined, they then need to be mapped in order to be accessible. Specifically mapping includes: a) using a defined hierarchy of folders, b) standardizing naming conventions for files, and c) for really complex projects defining the knowledge taxonomy or folksomony (the subject of another post to be written). Finally decisions need to be made as to how the documents will be accessible.  Ideally, electronic documents need to be centralized on shared drive or collaborative workspace.  If there is a print document file system then it is the facilitator’s role to provide access to the document files.  Going back to my opening advisory committee example, every advisory committee member was given a 3” binder with tabs. Possibly a good start but then again, not all materials were distributed in a print format; rarely were the agendas or handouts three-hole punched; and none of the documents had clear version control (i.e., creation date headers or footers).

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Creating People Networks:  The second consideration in creating a document system is to determine the people need access to what information and how is the best way to keep them informed?  Going back to the advisory board example, we could be confident that randomly someone who should have received the communication would be left off the distribution list. The facilitator’s response would inevitably be, “I did not know s/he needed the information.”  In good document design practice, at the beginning of the process, information users need to be defined clearly and given appropriate access to materials. For example, are there decision makers or stakeholders external to the process that need to be informed as the process unfolds? Part of facilitation planning needs to include creating a clear picture of the people network involved with the process.

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Creating Connections Between People & Data: The final consideration for creating a document management plan is to create the appropriate connections between the documents and people network.  How the participants will use the documents in a facilitation process requires some thought.  If data and documents are categorized into process, reference and production, it suggests connecting the team with documents in different ways.  Process documents, such as meeting minutes and workplans, may be filed in an online repository or distributed (three-hole punched) for filing into binders.  However, within minutes and workplans are often tasks that should be called out to make the information useful.  Many web-based shared workspaces have functionality for document storage as well as the creation and assignment of tasks (yet another argument for supporting facilitation with technology).  However, even if meeting minutes are distributed by email as an attachment, good facilitation will “call out” in the text of the email message the action steps and tasks, responsible person(s) and due dates.  For reference documents, it is useful to associate the name of contributor to the document itself (either as a tag, or as part of the file name). If this connection is made explicitly then team members with questions about a resource can go to the document owner  for clarification and/or expansion.  Finally, team members accessing production documents need to have permissions assigned, such as “read only,” “read and edit,” or  “approve or delete” and, of course, the facilitator must ensure version control.

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Taken together, the process of thinking about documentation, documentation use, and how the two interface is key to the facilitation processes. Developing a documentation plan as part of facilitation should be standard practice, although I have encountered few facilitators who are so intentional about this process.  To be successful in this area, a facilitator needs to be familiar with concepts of information ecology and knowledge management in addition to having strong technology competencies. The benefits of investing the time and energy in document planning are seen in greater productivity, efficiency of the process.  For facilitators, understanding document management is essential when there is more at stake than running a good meeting.

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Again, you comments are welcome.

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