Home › Forums › Virtual discussion on facilitation issues

The challenges of facilitating meetings

Tue, 11/25/2008 - 15:36 — Cristina Sette

What are the challenges you face when facilitating meetings?

Here are some of the challenges I face:

  • run out of time
  • keeping the agenda and objectives in the participant's mind
  • some participants rush to make decisions
  • participants don't want to participate
  • when one or two participants take over the discussion
  • participants checking their emails or doing their work during the meeting
  • not knowing the entire background of the project before the meeting (trying to catch the hiden issues on spot)
  • dealing with conflicts (when the person in charge has different objectives/views than the participants)

What other challenges do you face? And what do you do?

Bookmark/Search this post with:
Tue, 12/02/2008 - 16:12 — Julius Nyangaga

I agree with the List

I agree with the List Cristina has started with.

In addition, in the process of trying to be flexible to allow the participants to be comfortable with the setting, the objective and allow them room to indicate their interests, you can easily digress from the agenda with its effective setting planned in advance.

Along this is when a facilitating team (in the middle of a meeting session!!) does not agree on the process and the way the session should proceed. You cannot openly dis-agree but you are not comfortable what is agreed as the way forward.

But the biggest challenge I face is how to keep everyone involved in discussions and decision-making, especially in pleneary session. Or at least letting everyone realize it is their activitiy and the more they get interested and involved, the more effective the final outputs.

I will share more glitches and how I try to resolve them soon.

Thanks,

Julius, Innovation Works, ILRI