How do I run a creative session that isn’t a brainstorm?
Send people new material two weeks out. Open by picking up thoughts they have already had, never by asking who has an idea. Keep it to an hour or two. Then break, and come back days later, because that is where the connections get made.
Facilitating is not a person. It is data and time, arranged.
The assumption is that facilitating is about being the facilitator of a creative session. It is not a people thing. It is the process that facilitates.
This is the one that looks like a technique, and isn’t
Think, do, be. Facilitating looks like the most learnable of the ten. Agendas, timings, post-its, a way of standing. All of that is real and you can pick it up in a day.
What you cannot pick up in a day is being the person who can hold a room in not knowing. And the room can always tell.
What it looks like when it’s missing
Watch the facilitator during the first silence.
If they fill it, they have not got it. That silence is people thinking, which is the entire thing you booked the room for, and the urge to rescue it comes from the facilitator’s discomfort rather than the room’s.
The second tell is a session that ends with everyone agreeing. Agreement at the end of ninety minutes means the room found the first answer and stopped. A good session ends with three things that might work and a slight sense of being unfinished.
My first ever session.
My first ever session, when I was starting out. I had never done one before.
In the room: the global head of people at Unilever, and colleagues of mine.
I did not know the process. I did not really know the brief. I did not know the people in the room. And I could not feel where we were going, because I did not know the vision.
It is the only time in my working life that I have wanted the floor to open up and take me.
And the worst of it was not the not knowing. It was this. I could feel people putting their trust in me, and I had no process, no story and no knowledge to hold me through it.
What that room actually taught me, eventually
It took me years to understand what had gone wrong, and the answer turned out to be the thing I have spent the rest of my working life on.
I was not underprepared. I was unheld.
There was nothing in that room built to keep any of us inside the not knowing long enough for something good to turn up. No shape, no sequence, no story about where this was going. So the room did what rooms do when nothing is holding them. It went for the first answer. And so did I.
A facilitator’s job is not to run activities. It is to hold a room in not knowing for longer than it could manage on its own.
Everything I now teach about sessions is a form built to do that holding, so that it does not have to live in the nerve of one person standing at the front of the room. The prep does some of it. The sequence does some of it. The story of where we are going does most of it.
Twenty five years later I wrote a doctorate about exactly this. It is called Rushing to Become: How Story Holds a Person in the Unfinished, and the claim is that what keeps somebody inside an unfinished thing is narrative form, and that the holding can live in a form rather than only in a person.
I did not know any of that at Unilever. I just knew that nothing was holding me.
What the science says.
The room itself is costing you ideas.
Diehl and Stroebe (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1987) compared real brainstorming groups against nominal groups: the same number of people, working alone, ideas pooled afterwards. The real groups produced around 28 ideas. The people working alone produced around 74.5.
And whoever speaks first narrows everybody else.
Kohn and Smith (Applied Cognitive Psychology, 2011) found that being exposed to other people’s ideas causes fixation. The number of ideas people produced stayed about the same, but the range collapsed. They dug deeper into the categories already on the table instead of opening new ones.
Read those two findings next to each other and the standard workshop looks like a machine for suppressing ideas.
Put everyone in one room, let them speak one at a time, and let whatever gets said first set the boundaries for the next two hours.
What to do on Monday.
Three parts, and the two you will be tempted to skip are the ones doing the work.
And if you take one thing from this page, take the silence. When it comes, let it run. It is the only part of the session where anything new is happening.
Diehl, M., & Stroebe, W. (1987). Productivity loss in brainstorming groups: toward the solution of a riddle. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(3), 497-509. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.53.3.497
Kohn, N., & Smith, S. M. (2011). Collaborative fixation: effects of others’ ideas on brainstorming. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 25(3), 359-371. doi:10.1002/acp.1699
BIF source: Matt Hart on his first facilitated session. Prep, Meet, Follow-up from the BIF People Program Q and A. Doctorate: Rushing to Become: How Story Holds a Person in the Unfinished.
The full evidence for Facilitating, with the room it came from and the citations with DOIs.