Facilitation: Meeting the meeting mess - Ben Cooke

How we turn up for work has changed forever. Despite an endless supply of facilitation tricks, hacks and tools we’re spending even longer in meetings, yet we’re achieving worse outcomes in return for our time.

Great facilitation is needed now more than ever, yet it is misunderstood and clouded by gimmicks. As a result, it is viewed with mysticism by some and even scepticism by others.

So what makes successful facilitation, and where can we focus our efforts to become excellent facilitators?

In this session, we explore commonly mis-held beliefs about facilitation and facilitators and discuss what we can do about it to get results.

What will you take away?

This session is about the factors at play when facilitation occurs, and it lifts the lid on the gazillion prepacked meeting formats, facilitation tools, and hacks.

Attendees will discover where to focus their efforts and what to ditch to make meetings, workshops or tough conversations a success. They'll also learn how to nurture their competence and improve their intuition.

About Ben Cooke
Ben is an enterprise agility coach and product development professional who has been helping organisations adapt for more than 15 years.

As a software engineer, Ben worked on pioneering technology in the music industry that we now take for granted. He later contributed to similar tech milestones in online retail and broadcasting before setting up his own agile consultancy and training company in 2014.

In 2018, Ben observed that much of the facilitation by Scrum Masters and Agile coaches he had experienced seemed focused on mimicking games or presentation behaviours at face value rather than serving the specific needs of the group or organisation. This resulted in poor outcomes for organisations and lowered opinions of the value of these roles. The mass move to remote working during the pandemic only worsened this problem, and Ben spent much time helping others improve their facilitation capability.

In 2023, Ben was first to market in Europe with his public course, driving better results for organisations by developing best-in-class facilitators. His Certified Facilitation course is endorsed by Scrum Alliance and is available to book via beliminal.com