The practical work of digital facilitation

When the most difficult part is to end, not to start

When I wrote this article - Virtual is going to be the new normal - a few weeks ago I thought a lot of people would be reading and I was wrong.

I wrote about why this pandemic forced a global lockdown with unknown historical consequences, I presented evidence about the dance of R: a dance of measures between getting our lives back on track and spreading the disease, one of economy vs. healthcare and ended with a very positive optimistic note. The article started with almost the same number of 'likes' as with page reads, so I thought it would be going viral. Yet, the wrong choice of image (I used an advert from Ingram Micro just as an example) and the LinkedIn team deliberately killed the diffusion of what they thought could be unpaid publicity to some sort of COVID-19-related services.

I then changed the article picture and the situation improved, I have now almost 100 readers but the diffusion is dragging. I decided to stop writing articles on LinkedIn for a while, as you can imagine. Is virtual going to be the new normal?

All of a sudden we are all living in a new reality and all of a sudden we all have to adapt.

Albert Uderzo is one of my favourite all-time comic authors who has recently passed away, and I would like to pay him a tribute here. With his sharp sense of humour, he created a vignette in the book Asterix and Cleopatra that usefully describes the situation right now. When Obelix was sightseeing on top of the Sphinx he inadvertently broke her nose while climbing on her head. Immediately after this unfortunate but now permanent disfiguration, all the merchants in the bazaars replicated the same defect on their replica small statues of the sphinx – they simply adapted to their new reality. This is more or less what I and thousands of other facilitators colleagues in the IAF - International Association of Facilitators - have done, we grabbed Teams or Zoom (or any other videoconference platform) by the horns and started using them to deliver our services.

How do I know that the large majority have adapted? We have started a Fight Back COVID-19 initiative in the IAF - Making Virtual Facilitation a Success - and some online global events addressed this subject. I co-hosted a couple of them with my dear colleague Jeffer London and thanks to this and other similar collective efforts from IAF chapters worldwide, the majority of our members have adapted and are all now delivering virtual facilitation as part of their professional service offer.

From top left to right, besides me, Penny Walker, Rosanna Von Sacken, Jeffer London, Paolo Martinez, Fernando Murray, Hector Villarreal, and Martin Gilbraith (left early) the dream team of professional virtual facilitators invited for this workshop.

Digital tools and the professional use of virtual facilitation

I started this article by sharing an observation about the little diffusion I had on LinkedIn for my article on virtual as the new normal but, on the other hand, I would like to share here a second observation in the opposite direction.
I have just published something so trivial yesterday as this post with the picture below - and it went viral. It seems LinkedIn favours entertainment and amusement rather than the sharing of in-depth thoughts and reflection.

You can join the LinkedIn group mentioned inside here.

This is just an example of such 'Asterix and Cleopatra's sudden adaptation to a new reality. The power of digital tools in a face-to-face facilitated meeting cannot replace the human facilitation skills you need to develop in order to bring the best possible results from meetings. Likewise, in the virtual world, analogue replacements are not only welcome but also needed to remind us of our human nature.

Behind screens as well as face-to-face, it's the same process of collective knowledge sharing that we seek to achieve and the amazing discovery, as you can see by watching the video above, is that we can design and host virtual meetings with the same or even better results than face to face.

The question is - is virtual becoming the new normal? should be replaced by this other one. How can we - professional facilitators - contribute to making virtual the new normal? Why do we want that to happen above all? 

About the author

Paul Nunesdea is the English pen name of Paulo Nunes de Abreu, Facilitator, Master of Ceremonies, Author, and Publisher of the book series - Architecting Collaboration, his LinkedIn profile can be reached here, or in Spanish here, or Portuguese here.

Paul is an IAF Certified Facilitator™ who designs and hosts events for clients ranging from large companies to municipalities and regional governments.

His academic background as a PhD researcher combined with +15 years of experience as a former CEO and entrepreneur has sharpened a client-serving mentality eager to co-create win-win solutions. As an NGO founder, he co-founded Digital Health Portugal and hosts the Health Regions Summit and the Health Data Forum among other initiatives.

As both a GroupMap™ and Howspace™ certified facilitator he co-founded the Digital Collaboration Academy with renowned facilitator Peter Seah united by the vision of creating and sustaining a new emerging field - Digital Facilitation - augmented by the core competencies of the IAF - International Association of Facilitators.