Through attending decades of Vermont Town Meetings, I learned that effective facilitation requires respect.
For over two hundred years, my little hometown of Marlboro, Vermont, met at least once a year for “town meeting”: a form of local government where every eligible resident can directly participate in town governance. At our main annual town meeting, we discussed and voted on published agendas that included the town and school budgets and many other articles. Debate, facilitated by a town moderator, was common, people made amendments and voted on them, and the meetings (one for the town and one for the school) could last most of the day.
People filling the Marlboro (Vermont) Town House for the 2012 Town Meeting. Photograph by Zachary P. Stephens/Reformer
In my experience, though people in the room had different points of view, town meetings worked as well as they did because our town moderator respected everyone present and, for the most part, town residents respected each other. We remembered that the folks around us were our neighbors. They were people who, if we needed help, would be there for us despite our disagreements about politics and other issues. Sometimes votes wouldn’t go how we liked, yet we shrugged and moved on.
We could listen and make (sometimes) painful decisions because our moderator modeled respect and we respected each other despite our differences.
However, I’ve learned that listening is a gift you can’t fully give when you don’t respect the person you’re listening to. Effective facilitation is inherently rooted in showing respect to each individual involved. A facilitator needs to respect diverse perspectives and honor the contributions of each participant. This involves active listening—truly tuning in to what others are saying without judgment or interruption.
Respectful facilitation also involves fostering inclusivity and fairness. It means ensuring everyone has an equal opportunity to speak and participate, regardless of status or background.
In essence, effective facilitation is a delicate dance between structure and empathy, where respect serves as a guiding principle. When participants feel respected, they are more likely to engage authentically, share ideas openly, and collaborate productively.
A perspective from meditation practice
Meditation practice can teach us how to cultivate mindful respect. Recently, one of my meditation teachers, Helen Narayan Liebenson, has been speaking about respect from a Buddhist perspective.
One concept she shared is “loosening judgment”. We continually interpret our sensed experience. When this involves listening to others, we may judge them or what they say. Some form of judgment is, perhaps, inescapable, but when we notice it we can practice loosening judgment: moving away from judgment and towards direct experience of another.
She also described performing an “inner bow“. This is a way of honoring either another or oneself, a conscious intention derived from an external act of respect: the act of bowing to another.
Ultimately, such language only points to the action to convey. Listening, loosening judgment, or performing an inner bow are ways to treat others with respect. All of these actions are intertwined and reinforce each other in the process.
Postscript
Marlboro abandoned traditional town meetings at the start of the COVID pandemic in 2020. My town has not readopted them, though many Vermont towns still practice this form of local government. We’ve switched to voting on articles via Australian ballot so there are no more large spring gatherings, debates, or amendments. I appreciate that our new form of government allows all eligible residents to vote, rather than only those who attend an in-person meeting. But I miss meeting with townsfolk and discussing our town’s direction and future together.
No matter our differences, I hope we continue to respect our neighbors, in the same way effective facilitators respect those with whom we work.
While facilitating, I try to remember that we are all different. Here’s why that goal can make me a better facilitator.
I can be better than I expect at noticing differences
I know that everybody’s fingerprints are unique, though that doesn’t help me facilitate better. But sometimes, to my surprise, I become aware of subtle useful differences between members of a group.
For example, most weekdays I meditate with an online group. Each day, while my eyes are closed, one of several teachers starts the group and rings a bell. By now, I can tell which teacher is leading us simply by hearing how they sound the bell.
Another example. Long before the internet existed, I taught introductory programming to college students. They’d hand in their printouts of short programs and sometimes forget to write their names on the paper. No matter. By the second week of class, I could easily recognize the way each student wrote code and know whose program it was.
Having enough time for helpful noticing is often a problem, though, unless I have the luxury of working with a group for a day or more, or meeting with them multiple times.
Facilitation is necessarily imperfect
What’s difficult, of course, is that participants differ in countless ways, most of which I don’t know.
Consequently, when leading a group, any instructions or guidance I share might be just right for some. For others, what I say may be ineffective or even counterproductive.
Knowing this, what can I do to make my facilitation as good as I can?
Knowing my facilitation strengths and weaknesses
To help work with differences, facilitators need to be aware of their strengths and weaknesses. Here are some of mine:
I am usually good at reading faces, body language, and the emotional content of speech.
However, this focus means that my visual awareness of other activities in the room leaves something to be desired. (For example, don’t expect me to notice, at least for a while, the new floral centerpieces that staff installed during a break!)
I’m easily distracted by superfluous noise.
My academic training makes me prone to providing more detail than sometimes is necessary.
Unlike some facilitators, I don’t have much of a gift for rapidly getting participants’ attention.
As I age, my ability to keep track of multiple issues and conversational threads continues to decrease.
Knowing my facilitation “fingerprint” helps me be aware of situations where I need to be especially careful, and perhaps get help. For example, I’ll sometimes co-opt a charismatic participant or two to help me regain participants’ attention. And I often ask volunteers to use a flipchart or projected Google Doc to capture things we need to remember and/or return to.
Noticing differences that matter
Thankfully, although facilitators generally know little about participants, many differences aren’t relevant to the current circumstances. And we often notice valuable differences. Facilitators obtain information from all kinds of things: facial expressions, body language, emotional responses to events, and what people say and do.
Such observations are key to working with a group and responding in useful and supportive ways to what comes up.
For me, noticing differences that improve my facilitation is motivated by deep curiosity and love of people. Curiosity helps me notice potentially important clues to what’s going on, and what people want and need. Love gives me the energy to do what is often hard in-the-moment work.
Noticing differences that matter guides me in one of the more challenging aspects of facilitation: steering a responsive path between the extremes of providing rigid directions for everyone to follow versus letting people do whatever they want with the group. Noticing differences helps me choose the right words and actions that offer appropriate structure and support while still allowing different approaches and responses.
That’s why, while facilitating, I try to remember that we are all different.
Back in 1992, I developed The Three Questions as a fundamental opening process for participant-driven meetings and conferences. I’ve used it myself at hundreds of events, and many facilitators and meeting designers have also adopted it as an effective way for attendees to get to learn about each other and uncover what they would like to discuss while they are together. I’ve written about The Three Questions in all my books, and the links above and this video provide introductions so I won’t describe it further here. Instead, I’ll share how I encourage deeper responses to the Second Question:
“What do I want to have happen?”
How people respond to the Second Question
The Second Question goes to the heart of the peer conference (aka unconference) process. Answering it gives every person present, in turn, an opportunity to share what they would like the ensuing meeting to be about.
Over the years, I’ve noticed a subtle difference between first-time peer conferences and subsequent gatherings of the same community. At first-time gatherings, it’s more likely that some people (typically ~10%) will respond with an answer that comes down to:
“I’m here because I want to learn from others.”
These people are hesitant to share specific top-of-mind issues or questions they have. Of course, that’s OK because there are no wrong answers to The Three Questions. On the other hand, I suspect that many of those who respond this way do have topics or questions, but for a multitude of reasons don’t share them when it’s their turn.
At subsequent community conferences, my experience is that such a response is less likely. Those who offer it are usually first-time attendees. I think participants are more likely to be specific at repeated events because they have experienced the flowering of discussion and sessions based on what is shared during The Three Questions. They have seen that they have the potential to personally shape the peer conference toward their wants and needs.
The limitations of “I want to learn from others”
Again, there’s nothing wrong with an attendee’s answer: “I want to learn from others.” From a group perspective, however, this response doesn’t enrich the set of ideas, topics, and questions that the ensuing meeting could address. (If everyone answered this way, the group would know no more about its collective wants and needs than before The Three Questions started!)
So, a few years ago I added an extra prompt to my original introduction to The Three Questions.
How I encourage deeper responses to the Second Question
I simply add this refinement:
“Some people say ‘I want to learn’. That’s fine, but try to go deeper if you can. See if you can come up with three specific things you’d love to get out of this conference.“
Depending on the conference, I then sometimes supply an example of ideas, topics, and questions that my client thinks might be top-of-mind. For example, writing this in 2023, I might mention artificial intelligence. Then I’ll add that anything of interest can be shared, at any level of detail. For example:
They are using artificial intelligence and want to talk to others who are exploring the same approach; or
They are wondering how AI will affect their profession; or
They simply want to learn more about AI.
How well does this refinement work?
I know that this simple addition has encouraged some people to share more deeply because I now routinely hear attendees say something like, “The N things I want to learn/understand/have questions about are…”. And I suspect that others have been nudged to be more specific too.
Do I still hear “I want to learn from others”? Yes, I do! But not as often as before. And that’s fine!
A June 2023 conference gave me a perfect opportunity to use one of my facilitation tools: Reminders, Sparks, Questions, Puzzles (RSQP). RSQP can be thought of as a highly interactive debrief after an information dump. It’s an efficient way to get participants to rapidly engage with and explore presented content in a personally meaningful way. And, as we’ll see, RSQP offers the potential to devise on-the-fly sessions that meet participants’ uncovered wants and needs.
My 2014 post on RSQP gives a clear example of how it works (and my book Event Crowdsourcing includes full details) so I won’t repeat myself here. The 2014 and the recent conference each had around 200 participants, so the process and timing (around 25 minutes) were pretty similar.
But the 2023 conference ran a mere eight hours, from 8:30 AM – 4:30 PM on a single day.
2. How we used the gallery created by RSQP
The 2014 conference didn’t use the RSQP gallery to directly influence what would happen during the rest of the conference. A small group of subject-matter experts clustered key theme notes into a valuable public resource for review throughout the event. Participants simply used the clustered gallery to discover what their peers were thinking.
In contrast, I designed the 2023 conference to explore the future of a 50-year-old industry, and we needed to use the information mined by RSQP to create same-day sessions that reflected participants’ top-of-mind issues, questions, and concerns. We had just 2½ hours to:
review the information on nearly a thousand sticky notes;
determine an optimum set of sessions to run;
find facilitators for the sessions; and
schedule the sessions to time slots and rooms.
Combining facilitation tools
To make our 2½ hours of participant-driven session determination a little easier, I combined RSQP with another facilitation technique: dot voting.
So, at the end of the standard RSQP process, I added a dot voting step. While the participants individually shared their ideas with the others at their table, the staff gave each table a strip of three red sticky dots. When the flip chart sheets were complete, I asked each table to spend three minutes choosing and adding red dots to the three topics on their sheet they thought were the most important for further discussion. Here’s an example of one table’s work.
An initial review of the gallery’s red-dot items, allowed us to quickly zero in on needed and wanted topics. We saw a nice combination of popular ideas and great individual table suggestions. Being able to initially focus on red-dot topics on the flip charts saved us crucial time.
As a result, we determined the topics, assigned facilitators, and scheduled a set of nine sessions in time to announce them during lunch. (Once again, refer to my book Event Crowdsourcing for the step-by-step procedures we used for session selection and scheduling.) We ran the sessions in two one-hour afternoon time slots, and, as is invariably the case with program crowdsourcing, every session was well-attended and received great reviews.
Conclusion
I’m sure there are still great group facilitation techniques I have yet to discover. But my facilitation toolbox doesn’t get as many new tools added each year as when I began to practice professionally. However, when I consider how many possible combinations of my existing tools are available to solve new group work situations, I feel increasingly confident in my ability to handle novel facilitation challenges that may arise.
After a school board informational meeting the other day, I chatted with the moderator, Steve John. We discussed several aspects of the meeting, including the difficulty of working with both sides of an issue.
The Meeting for the Town/Community Center, Marlboro, VT. Photo by David Holzapfel. I’m the guy wearing a checked shirt.
It’s rare for groups larger than a few people to agree unanimously on an issue. Sometimes the group needs to make a choice between alternatives. Our school board meeting included a discussion of an upcoming vote on whether to keep junior high students educated at our local school or have them “tuition out” to other schools. Strong opinions on both sides were evident during the meeting.
Sometimes there are win-win alternatives to win-lose situations, as I’ve described elsewhere. But sometimes there aren’t, and the group needs to make a choice that some members are going to be unhappy about.
Even though facilitators or moderators need to stay non-judgmental, I sometimes agree more with certain points of view. Steve and I talked about how hard it can be to facilitate discussion on an issue when we have an opinion about it.
Learning from practicing facilitation
Though I find it difficult at times, one of the things I like about facilitation is that it challenges me to practice non-attachment to a perspective.
I probably don’t moderate contentious issues as often as Steve—who has decades of experience running public meetings—as my clients are mostly associations and non-profits. In my work, however, there are often underlying tensions between subgroups.
One common example is conferences where suppliers and practitioners attend the same sessions. Generalizing, suppliers (who also sometimes sponsor the meeting) are there to sell their products and services, while practitioners primarily want to learn from and connect with each other. This can cause friction between these two groups. Part of my pre-meeting work is to uncover, understand, and prepare for potential discord. This involves designing the meeting to respect the wants and needs of each group and facilitating any sticky situations that surface.
Another example is when participants work for organizations of very different sizes or focuses, have disparate ideas about the meeting’s goals, but have historically avoided discussing the resulting tensions with each other. My job, then, can be to open and facilitate uncomfortable but essential conversations about the invisible elephant in the room.
Working with both sides and empathizing with all points of view is good practice for staying open to possibilities in my work and my life.
Image attribution: Photo [source] by and with the permission of David Holzapel.
Most weekdays, my wife and I join a fifteen-minute online meditation offered by teachers at the Insight Meditation Society. The other day, teacher Matthew Hepburn introduced a dharma practice of meditating, not on one’s breath or body sensations, but on another person. As Matthew talked, I realized that I experience good facilitation listening as a meditation.
Matthew Hepburn
When I’m listening well, I’m practicing a form of meditation where I focus my awareness on the person who is speaking. Not just what they are saying but the totality of their being in the moment.
Giving the gift of listening is hard work—until it isn’t. Sometimes, facilitative listening is simple because it’s all that’s going on. The speaker has my full attention. That’s it.
Distractions
At other times, unfortunately, I’m feeling hungry, wondering if we’re on schedule, noticing that the carpet is ugly, etc. A myriad of possible distractions seduce me from full attention, and I succumb to them over and over again.
This is just like meditation.
In doing either, there are moments when you’re just here, and then all the moments when your attention wanders. Facilitators and meditators do the same thing: we notice that our attention has wandered and then bring it back to the object of attention. Over and over again.
Practice
Of course, facilitators don’t have the luxury of devoting their entire allotted time to meditative listening. We have other responsibilities: bringing sharing to a close, breaking on time for lunch, and framing the next segment of our work, to name just a few. Preparing for these transitions requires us to leave listening as a meditation.
But when we’re listening to people, treating such time as a meditation with the speaker as the sole object of our attention is a great practice to practice.
If you’re a facilitator, do you experience facilitative listening as a meditation? Feel free to share your experiences in the comments below.
In a typical in-person conference breakout session, participants divide into small groups to discuss one or more topics. Each group records members’ thoughts and ideas on one or more sheets of flipchart paper. At the end of the discussions, groups post their papers on a wall and everyone walks around reading the different ideas. Facilitators call this a gallery walk. Here’s a tip to improve breakout gallery walks.
Why use gallery walks?
In the past, it was common for small group work to be “reported out”: a representative from each group verbally shared their group’s work with everyone. If there are many groups this takes a while, and there’s typically a fair amount of repetition which makes it hard to maintain focus. In addition, if the groups are covering multiple topics, it’s likely that some or most of the reporting will not be of interest to attendees. In short, reporting out is tiring to take in and inefficient.
A big advantage of gallery walks is that participants can easily concentrate on the topics, thoughts, and ideas that interest them. If a flipchart page is of no interest, it can be ignored. Also, it’s simple to customize a gallery walk to meet specific wants and needs. For example, if there are experts on a specific topic, they can stand near their flipchart notes and answer questions or support discussion. In fact, gallery walks allow ongoing interaction around the captured ideas, something that isn’t possible during “reporting out” which is a broadcast-style activity.
And this leads to my tip…
My tip to improve breakout gallery walks
You can improve the effectiveness of a gallery walk by adding one small step before it starts. Ask everyone to pair up with someone they don’t know and walk the gallery together while discussing what they see. When you do this, each participant:
Gets introduced to and learns about someone new.
Gains new perspectives on the topics under discussion.
Continues to actively learn about the topics after the end of their small group.
In essence, pairing participants increases the reach and impact of the breakout session by extending connection and interaction into the concluding gallery walk.
As usual, lightly ask participants to pair share. I like to think of such requests as giving people permission to do something they might want to do but feel a little awkward asking for it. If folks want to go around with someone they know or have just met, or decide to walk as a trio or alone respect their choices.
Companies bombard me with offers to check out online meeting platforms. Sadly, I simply don’t have time to explore most of them. But every once in a while I hear about a platform that intrigues me enough to schedule a demo. Butter is an online meeting platform that is designed to support the facilitation of great interactive meetings. The demo impressed me enough to delve into the platform, and I liked what I found. So here’s my review of Butter, a meeting platform for facilitators to shine.
In this review of Butter, I’ll share a big-picture overview, what I think is Butter’s finest feature, an example of how to implement a meeting design in Butter, and my closing thoughts.
The usual caveats
Butter is less than a year old. Like just about every recently introduced online platform, its developers are continually updating it. (In fact, my demo focused on a brand-new capability which I think is one of the best features of the product.) So by the time you check it out, some aspects of this review may be inaccurate or incomplete.
In addition, this is not an in-depth shakedown of the product. I haven’t had an opportunity to take Butter through its paces with a full crew of participants and co-facilitators. If you do so and have additional observations, please feel free to share them in the comments below.
Butter — the big picture
Butter is a meeting platform designed for planning and running online “workshops”. I’ve written about workshops that aren’t, and I’m happy to report that the Butter design team defines workshop as I do: a meeting that emphasizes the exchange of ideas and the demonstration and application of techniques and skills. In other words, workshops involve significant amounts of participation and active learning.
What I like about Butter is that it’s easy to use, has a short learning curve, and, most important, its design provides efficient and effective meeting facilitation. I’ve facilitated in-person meetings for decades and online meetings for the last ten years. And, as facilitators with experience in both environments know, there’s a significant workload difference between these two environments.
The challenges of facilitating online versus in-person
I can normally facilitate an in-person workshop with, say, fifty participants by myself. If there are tools I need — whiteboards, flip charts, a few slides, sticky notes, pens, room layouts, etc. — I can set them up in advance and bring them into play if and when needed. Because these tools are an integral part of the physical environment, introducing them during the session is a natural part of the facilitation process.
I can’t run an online workshop of the same size without additional help. Guiding participants through the session while paying attention to group energy and dynamics takes all my attention. I simply can’t do this well while simultaneously handling the event production. (For example, setting up breakouts, running polls, monitoring chat, noticing that a breakout group has only one member, reading participant energy from a host of tiny windows on multiple screens, etc.)
Butter makes facilitating online workshops easier. I explain why below.
A perfectly serviceable platform for most online meetings
It’s worth mentioning that, while Butter lacks some features available in competing tools, it’s a perfectly serviceable platform for vanilla online meetings with fewer than 200 participants. So it’s reasonable to consider adopting Butter for all kinds of online meetings with a specific group. This can ease the inevitable learning curve issues associated with introducing any new tool.
I think the best feature of Butter is its recently introduced Session Planner. The Session Planner provides an integrated run-of-show, called the agenda, which is more than a detailed production agenda. Many production teams use spreadsheet tools like Google Sheets or Excel to create production schedules, though high-end run-of-show software, like Shoflow, is also available. What’s cool about Butter’s Session Planner is that it integrates any desired combination of Butter’s tools into the run-of-show agenda, so they become available for use when needed.
The Session Planner allows you to prep your entire workshop beforehand, just like I do at in-person workshops where I set out my tools in advance. You build a Butter agenda with blocks, and each agenda block can be customized to your needs with the tools — whiteboard, breakouts, polls, Miro boards, Google documents, YouTube videos, and more — that you’ll need for that block.
What’s more, the same agenda, minus the production details, is also available to attendees, so they know what’s going on.
Integrating your chosen tools into the production schedule in this way makes it much more feasible to effectively facilitate an online workshop by yourself. (Butter’s paid versions allow you to add co-facilitators.)
How Butter spreads
Butter’s excellent orientation and Handbook provide detailed information on how to use the product.
You can create and preplan as many meeting rooms as you like. Paid Butter plans allow you to share your room designs with other users.
Let’s hold a meeting session in Adrian’s workshop room.
Each room has its own link (which you can customize) and share in various ways with attendees.
Once you’ve created a room, you can add a Waiting room, co-facilitators (paid plan), custom Tools to be used in this room, and the all-important Agenda.
Let’s look at each of these in a little more detail.
Waiting for Butter
When participants join a meeting, they arrive in a waiting room, like the one above. There they can add their name and a profile image (photo or avatar) if they don’t have a Butter account. Attendees have the opportunity to download the Butter desktop app and can test their camera and microphone while waiting.
You can customize a waiting room can with an image, background color, and optional wait music that an attendee can mute. (Butter has some audio clips or you can upload your own). You can also choose whether attendees can enter a meeting session immediately or must “knock” for the meeting room owner to let them in.
In addition, you can choose to share the meeting agenda with attendees in the waiting room. And a Tips menu informs waiting attendees about how they can react to what’s going on in the meeting and Butter’s hand-raising system for queuing participant comments, questions, or ideas.
Butter tools
Butter includes a comprehensive toolset that you can customize and add, as needed, to a room’s meeting agenda blocks. Each room has its own unique toolbox. A really important feature is that some of the tools — Google Drive: docs/slides/sheets, YouTube, Miro, and Whiteboard) — integrate core resources from other providers directly into Butter. For example, participants can work collaboratively on Miro boards during a session without having to run Miro in a separate app or browser window. Similarly, you can display and work on Google Drive files and watch Youtube videos in a seamless fashion.
Butter breakouts
Importantly, Butter provides breakouts quite similar to those available in Zoom, and with some features that Zoom lacks. You can prebuild two kinds: Rooms and Groups. Participants can move between Rooms, and initial participant assignments can be prechosen or random. With Groups you decide the number of participants you want in each Group, and Butter assigns people automatically when the breakout begins. Participants cannot move between Groups.
In addition, you can assign tasks for breakout groups. Butter shows these tasks in each breakout, and breakout members can mark them complete. This is a nice feature that obviates the need for the session facilitator to message breakouts to tell them what to do.
What’s especially cool is that you can assign tools to breakout groups! Members can watch a video, or work collaboratively on a Google Doc or Miro board.
While breakouts are going on, a facilitator can monitor what’s happening in each breakout. You can observe a breakout without joining it, and see the tasks they’ve checked off. Participants can ask for help and you’ll be notified and can join their breakout. You can broadcast messages to all breakouts. And you can reassign participants to different breakouts, or reshuffle Groups to get a fresh set of people in each.
Butter breakouts provide a well-designed feature set and user interface that other meeting platforms would do well to adopt!
Polls, timers, and whiteboards
Basic polls are another tool. You can create multiple-choice or open-ended polls, which should be sufficient functionality for most situations. Upvoting is available for open-ended polls.
Buffer’s integrated countdown timers provide a welcome tool for keeping sessions on track or timing a break. You can prep them beforehand and start them with a click. Facilitators can stop the timer, and add an extra minute. Participants see a timer task description and can click a button when done. The facilitator can see how many have finished. I love this feature!
Tool use flexibility
You can preset just the tools you need for each agenda block, ready to use when the time comes. But should you need a different tool during a session you can add one on the fly.
The heart of a Butter session — the Agenda
To give a taste of the heart of Butter, here’s a hypothetical meeting design and how you might implement it in Butter.
Meeting design case
Twenty-one people are meeting for the first time as a group to work together on an issue: increasing governmental and non-profit support for the elderly population in their region. The group will meet regularly over the coming year. Some of the attendees know a few other people in the group. The first desired outcomes for the meeting are that:
Participants get to know each other better;
The group creates a coherent set of initial issues and topics to address at subsequent meetings, and;
The group identifies who is interested and willing to work on the selected issues and topics.
Oh, I nearly forgot, we have just one hour for our initial meeting. Obviously, that’s not enough time to completely address these outcomes, especially #1. But let’s see what we can do in the available time.
A possible design
To begin, after a brief welcome, we’ll use one of my key facilitation techniques: The Three Questions. (See my book Event Crowdsourcing for detailed instructions for designing and running this powerful process.) Because of the limited time, we’ll run The Three Questions in trio shares. This will start to satisfy the first desired outcome, while simultaneously uncovering issues and topics that the group wants to explore. Next, we’ll address #2 using a Miro board for participants to share the issues and topics they think are important and/or want to work on. Participants will also cluster what they share during this block, addressing outcome #2.
Finally, we’ll switch to a facilitated group discussion on what’s been suggested, and work on next steps for future meetings (outcome #3), followed by a short closing.
Agenda example
Here’s a potential Agenda for the one-hour session.
I built this Agenda quite quickly in Butter. It’s built of Blocks, each of which can be given a title, description, duration (with the option to show to participants or not), associated tools (see above), and private notes for the facilitator(s).
In the above example, I’ve added several tools to the relevant session blocks, Google slides to introduce The Three Questions, a Group breakout for trio sharing answers, and a Miro board for sharing, clustering, and reviewing topics.
When I begin this session, each Block’s tools are shown in a sidebar, with a Start button for each tool. A click activates the desired tool. Like this.
I haven’t seen an easier online platform for facilitative process tool integration than Butter.
Check out Butter’s extensive Agenda help to learn more about how it works.
Additional capabilities while spreading Butter
Butter includes a spotlight mode, which you can use to bring one or more participants “on stage”, as shown below.
…and the especially useful Raise Hand Queue. This is another feature that facilitators will love. Here’s how a participant raises their hand, with an idea, comment, or question.
And here’s how a facilitator chooses who speaks next.
Butter also includes public, private, and facilitator-only chat. Chat can be “popped out” to a separate window, which is handy if you want to read it on a second monitor. Nice!
Butter quality, onboarding, help, and more
I found Butter unusually easy and intuitive to learn. You can run it in a browser (preferably Chrome) or a desktop app. The user interface is simple and logical. I never found myself thinking “now how do I do that?” — a common experience with other online meeting platforms. I think most new users will have little problem getting up to speed.
Though I haven’t used Butter in a demanding environment, I encountered no errors or glitches while investigating its capabilities. The only limitation I found is that I can only access my root Google Drive folder; I can’t see its subfolders. Hopefully, Butter will remove this limitation in the future.
The Butter Handbook succinctly explains how to use the platform. It’s clearly written, available during a session, and includes excellent graphics, animated when appropriate.
When the platform needs a moment to implement what you’ve requested, a lighthearted message appears letting you what’s going on. The whole product has a “we don’t take ourselves too seriously” vibe.
You can invite participants via Google Calendar, a Room link, and even during a live session.
Online support from Butter is built into the platform. It currently states a response time of under two hours. I didn’t hear back in that time period, but, hey, I asked on a Sunday…
Butter currently has three pricing plans: one free and two paid. The free plan, which I used for this review, includes up to 50 participants and one facilitator.
The Pro plan ($25/month or $300/year) ups the maximum number of participants to 100, allows up to 2 co-facilitators via shared rooms, and includes the capability to record sessions in the cloud.
Butter’s Legendairy(!) plan ($42/month or $500/year) ups the maximum number of participants to 200 and allows unlimited co-facilitators.
Cheska, my demo partner, told me that Butter is reviewing its pricing and may drop the maximum number of participants in the free plan to 20 in the future. I asked about one-off pricing and she told me the company was considering it.
In my experience, it’s common for new platforms like Butter to adjust their pricing models over time, so check here for current information.
Wrapping up this review of Butter
Butter’s tagline is “Virtual collaboration as smooth as butter“. While I have enjoyed thinking up butter-related phrases to use in this post, I’m not a big fan of the product name. (But I’m not a marketing expert either.)
I belong to a couple of small groups that have been meeting regularly for decades. The men’s group meets biweekly, while the consultants’ group meets monthly. I have been exploring and writing about facilitating change since the earliest days of this blog. So in 2021, I developed and facilitated for each group a process for working together to explore what we want to change, and then change our lives.
Each group spent several meetings working through this exercise.
What happened was valuable, so I’m sharing the process for you to use if it fits.
The process design outline
It’s important for the group’s members to receive instructions for the entire exercise well in advance of the first meeting, so they have time to think about their answers before we get together.
Exploring our past experiences of working on change in our lives
We begin with a short, three-question review of our past experiences working on change in our lives.
These questions give everyone the opportunity to review:
the life changes they made or attempted to make in the past;
the strategies they used; and
what they learned in the process.
This supplies baseline information to the individuals and the group for what follows.
The questions cover what:
we worked on.
was tried that did and didn’t work.
we learned from these experiences.
We each share short answers to these questions before continuing to the next stage of the process.
For the rest of the exercise, each group member gets as much time as they need.
Sharing what we would currently like to change in our lives
Next, we ask each person to share anything they would currentlylike to change in their life. This includes issues they may or may not be working on. Group members can ask for help to clarify what they want to change.
Exploring and discussing what we are currently working on to change our lives
Next, each person shares in detail which of the above issues they are currently working on, or want to work on, to change in their life. This can include describing their struggles and what they are learning, and also asking the group for advice and support.
Post-process review
Exploring long-term learning is important. So, after some time has elapsed, perhaps a few months, we run a post-exercise review of the outcomes for each person. This helps to uncover successes as well as difficulties that surfaced, and can also lead to additional appropriate group support and encouragement.
Here’s an example — what I shared and did
Things I’ve tried in the past to make changes in my life that didn’t work
Trying to think my way into making changes w/o taking my feelings/body state into account
e.g. trying to lose weight by going on a diet.
Denial—doing nothing and hoping the change will happen.
What I’ve learned about successful ways to change my life
Anything that improves my awareness of feeling or body state can be a precursor to change: e.g. mindful eating or emotional eating.
Creating habits: e.g. brushing my teeth first thing in the morning; setting triggers (calendar reminders, timers for meditation or breaks).
The habit of daily exercise and regular yoga improves awareness of my body state.
Three issues I worked on
Tidying up and documenting my complicated life before I die.
Living more in gratitude; developing a daily practice.
My post-exercise three-month review
I’m happy with the way I continue to work on the long-term project of tidying up my office, getting caught up on reading, and documenting my household and estate tasks. To help ensure that I work on it every day, I created a simple spreadsheet with columns for various short tasks that advanced my goals. Checking off time spent on one of these tasks each day shows me I’m making progress, and this feels good.
I created a buddy system with another group member who wanted to meditate more. We send each other an email when we’ve meditated. This has greatly improved the likelihood I’ll meditate every day.
After trying a simple daily gratitude practice, I decided to let it go for the time being until my daily meditation became a fully reliable habit. Sometimes, small steps are the best strategy!
Detailed instructions
Interested? OK! Here’s how to run this exercise.
First, explain the process and see if you get buy-in from the group about doing this work. It’s helpful to explain that each person can choose what personal change they want to work on. There are no “right” or “wrong”, or “small” or “large” personal change issues. Any issue that someone wants to work on is valuable to that person, and that’s all that counts.
I think it’s helpful for everyone present to participate, rather than some people being observers, but ultimately, that’s up to the group to decide.
Well before the first meeting, share the following, adapted to your needs, with group members.
Working together to change our lives – the first meeting
“We’ve decided to work together on what we are currently trying to change in our lives. As we will have about an hour for this work at each session, we’ll need two or more meetings for everyone to have their turn.
For the exercise to be fruitful, we will all need to do some preparatory work before the meetings.
Our eventual focus will be on what we are currently trying to change in our lives, and how we are going about it.
We’ll start with questions 1) and 2) below, which are about the past. Please come with short (maximum 2½ minutes total per person) answers to them. Please answer question 3) in 90 seconds or less. At subsequent meetings, we will spend much more time on questions 4) & 5).
Please come to the first meeting prepared to answer the following three questions:
==> 1) What have you tried to make changes in your life that didn’t work? What have you learned over the last 20 years?
==> 2) What have you learned about successful ways to change your life over the last 20 years?
Don’t include childhood/teen lessons learned, unless you really think they’re still relevant to today’s work.
Remember: a maximum of 2½ minutes for questions 1) and 2) combined!
==> 3) What would you currently like to change about how you live your life? (You might not be working on it. You can ask for advice if you want.)
Be as specific as possible in your answer to question 3). Your answer should take 90 seconds or less! (But we’ll provide more time if you want or need help clarifying your goals.)
Working together to change our lives – subsequent meetings
At subsequent meetings, we’ll each take turns to answer questions 4) and 5) below. You’ll have as much time as you need to answer these questions and partake in the subsequent discussion.
==> 4) What are you currently working on to change in your life?
==> 5) How are you going about making the changes you shared in your answer to question 4)? What are the struggles and what are you learning? What advice would you like?”
Running the meetings
At the first meeting, you’ll typically have time for everyone to share their answers to the first three questions. Keep track of the time, be flexible, but don’t let participants ramble. It’s very helpful for the facilitator to take brief notes on what people share. If there’s still time available, I suggest you/the facilitator model the process by sharing their answers to questions 4) and 5) and holding an appropriate discussion. Use subsequent meetings as needed for every group member in turn to answer and discuss these two final questions, and write notes on these discussions too.
The post-exercise review
When this exercise has been completed for everyone, I suggest the group schedule a follow-up review in a few months. If your group starts with check-ins, it can be useful to regularly remind everyone about the review and ask if anything’s come up that someone would like to discuss before the review meeting.
Before the post-exercise review, let group members know that the facilitator will share their notes for each person in turn, and ask them to comment on what’s happened since.
At the start of the post-exercise review, explain that this is an opportunity to share information — discoveries, roadblocks, successes, etc. — without judgment. It’s also a time when group members can ask for ideas, advice, and support from each other.
Finally, you may decide to return to this exercise at a later date. After all, there’s much to be said for working on change throughout our lives. The above process may be the same, but the answers the next time may be quite different!
Have you tried this exercise? How did it work for you? Did you change/improve it in some way? I’d love to hear about your experience with it — please share in the comments below!
After our prime Thanksgiving dinner, I was sleepily washing a large turkey foil platter when I noticed its embossed central message: “Support the bottom.”
I’m going to blame the tryptophan in the turkey for causing me to muse, from a facilitation perspective, about the significance of this unexpected Prime Directive. I have no other excuse.
Support the bottom
It makes sense. We don’t want our heavy turkey to break through or slide off the tray as we’re bringing it to the feast. The manufacturer suggests we shouldn’t take for granted the strength of the thick aluminum foil holding our main course. We should be mindful that the bottom of our feast needs support.
Well, when working with a group of people, the “bottom” of the group also needs support.
Making assumptions
During group work, it’s tempting to assume that things are going well when we’re hearing from many people. When there’s significant interaction between group members. When folks are coming up with new ideas and interesting approaches to explore.
So it’s easy to overlook some people. Without checking, you might not see them. After all, they’re not bringing attention to themselves. People who say little or nothing. People who are distracted or disengaged.
It’s important to suspend judgment of these folks. There have been many times when I’ve been understandably silent/disengaged/distracted during meetings, and I’m sure everyone else has too. Perhaps:
what’s going on is of no interest;
we’re completely lost and confused;
feeling unwell is wrecking our attention;
we’re seriously short on sleep; or
a personal crisis is all we can think about;
and you can probably think of plenty of additional unexceptional circumstances when someone may be currently incapable of doing useful work in a group. We might say they have hit rock bottom.
But then there are the border cases. Frequently, there are people who might just need a nudge. They are at a momentary personal bottom, and they could use some support. A reminder, a reason, an opportunity to engage or reengage.
So what do we do?
How can we support group members at a (hopefully, momentary) bottom?
Noticing
The first step is noticing them. When working with a small group, the quiet folks are easy to spot. A good facilitator will gently check to see if they have something to say, and bring them into the work if they’re willing. With large groups noticing the quiet folks is hard, because, obviously, they’re not drawing attention. If you, as a facilitator, are concentrating on the people who are contributing and interacting — an important piece of your job — it’s easy to overlook those who aren’t.
How can we avoid missing the quiet folks in large groups? By making time for you to notice them! Luckily, this is typically part of good meeting design — it’s not something that you need to awkwardly or artificially introduce. Good large group work includes short breakouts, where impromptu small groups meet, think, discuss, and share. While these activities are going on, it’s fairly easy for a facilitator to roam the room and pick up on disengaged attendees. (Unfortunately, this is much harder to do online, as I mentioned in last week’s post.)
Engage/reengage
The second step is to provide regular opportunities for the “bottom” folks to engage or reengage. Appropriate small group work, like pair or trio share, is an obvious way to do this. When working in small groups, check to see if participants who haven’t spoken for a while have anything they’d like to add. If you’re running a fishbowl or fishbowl sandwich, ask that people not share more than once until everyone’s had a chance to contribute. And be patient when asking people to share. Staying quiet while people are thinking about whether they want to speak and what they might want to say is a tangible form of respect. So remember to shut up and listen.
Don’t expect to engage everyone
Finally, bear in mind that, no matter how brilliant a facilitator you are, your meeting will not be perfect for everyone. Hey, if it’s the best meeting ever for just one person present, I think that’s great! Because you can’t please everyone — and you shouldn’t even try to.
Instead, do your best to respectfully and appropriately engage as many people as you can. Yes, the “bottom” participants will generally need greater support. But focus your time and attention on maximizing the overall group energy, with as many people as possible actively on board.
You may not hear much of the resulting Thanksgiving. But you’ll know you did the best cooking you could.
While facilitating, I try to remember that we are all different. Here’s why that goal can make me a better facilitator.
A June 2023 conference gave me a perfect opportunity to use one of my facilitation tools: Reminders, Sparks, Questions, Puzzles (RSQP). RSQP can be thought of as a highly interactive debrief after an information dump. It’s an efficient way to get participants to rapidly engage with and explore presented content in a personally meaningful way. And, as we’ll see, RSQP offers the potential to devise on-the-fly sessions that meet participants’ uncovered wants and needs.
To make our 2½ hours of participant-driven session determination a little easier, I combined RSQP with another facilitation technique: 
In a typical in-person conference breakout session, participants divide into small groups to discuss one or more topics. Each group records members’ thoughts and ideas on one or more sheets of flipchart paper. At the end of the discussions, groups post their papers on a wall and everyone walks around reading the different ideas. Facilitators call this a gallery walk. Here’s a tip to improve breakout gallery walks.
Companies bombard me with offers to check out online meeting platforms. Sadly, I simply don’t have time to explore most of them. But every once in a while I hear about a platform that intrigues me enough to schedule a demo. 
How to work with others to change our lives