Facilitate Proceedings

I recently joined an international group of facilitators wrapping up a project that involved the development of new innovations labs or i-Labs in the United Kingdom, Turkey, Poland and Romania. As we celebrated the successful completion of these wonderfully creative high-end meeting facilities (read more about i-Labs) the conversation turned to “What next?”. In an era of budget cuts, travel bans and elimination of non-essential activities, each of the participants lamented, how can we attract businesses to a high-end meeting facility?

The conversation started with discussion of cutting costs, reducing fees and eliminating services. However, I challenged the group to practice their own medicine, think out-of-the-box and look at the problem differently. In their case, how might we literally think outside the box of the four walls (or one continuous curvy wall in the case of a i-Lab) of the meeting facility? What if we took away an essential element of their product – the walls of the physical meeting space itself – what might be the market benefit resulting from the displacement? What new market niches might benefit from the removal?

Thinking beyond the walls of the meeting facility lead us to explore the following possibilities and questions…

Reappraising our differentiators
The physical meeting space of an i-Lab is so unique that it is easy to assume that this is the essence of what the i-Lab is all about. Removing the walls made us focus on other essential elements of our services and how we might expand their reach beyond the i-Lab.

• How can an expertise in meeting design and project management be marketed as a separate service?
• How can facilitation skills be utilized in a virtual meeting environment?
• How can we use the range of video arts tools and skills to offer new services to businesses such as communications programs, web development, etc.?

Thinking bigger
A meeting facility has a physical size limit and in the case of a i-Lab is often 12 or 24 seats. Removing the walls allowed the group to think of new possibilities where there was no limitation on number of seats and explore new services for business clients. Existing web-meeting technology within the i-Lab meant that this could be done at no additional cost.

• How can we use virtual meetings and surveys to increase the number of people who participate in the idea generation and data gathering components of our client events?
• How can we use virtual meeting tools to involve pods of people in multiple locations, some within the i-Lab and others far afield?
• What services could we offer if our limit was 500 participants rather than 15?
• What new methods and techniques can we employ to extend the reach of our facilitation services?

A new look at the immediate external environment
The meeting facility we were visiting has been built as a business zone – a place to attract local businesses – largely disconnected to the university of which the i-Lab is a part. Removing the walls reminded us of the rich university environment close at hand with research projects, eminent professors, departments struggling with their own business planning, committees working across multiple campuses.

• What new clients lie within the university?
• How might we partner with university departments to reach new business and research clients outside the university?

Sharpening our skills
An i-Lab is a special space where visitors quickly realize that they are in for a different kind of meeting. The physical environment provides facilitators with a leg up in helping people to start thinking differently. Removing the walls challenged the group of facilitators to be seen outside of this special facility and think about how to compete in an open market with other meeting designers, facilitators and consulting. The economic downturn and challenges of starting up a new business venture meant that the new i-Labs were currently under-utilized providing an opportunity for the facilitators to use the space to practice, offering sessions at no charge as a way to sharpen skills and explore new facilitation techniques.

• What groups can we attract to the facility as we build new skills?

What are we passionate about?
The i-Lab project has been one of great excitement and international collaboration. Thinking about removing the walls of the i-Lab felt like taking away an important chunk of that excitement – the physical manifestation of two years of hard work. This prompted reflection and re-evaluation about what was most important about the project and accomplishments to each individual in the group.

• If we need to readjust and move in a new direction, where do we have the most energy and interest to devote our efforts?
• How can we take our passion for innovative thinking and export it to more locations?

I first read about this displacement approach to thinking about problem solving in a book called Creativity in Product Innovation by Jacob Goldenberg and David Mazursky. Cambridge University Press (2002).

What I am left wondering about is… What other techniques are facilitators using to challenge their old business models and step out of the box when business is slow?

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