Meeting Facilitation

Clients find it useful to empower a facilitator who is objective, free of prejudice, and totally committed to delivering the intended outcomes of a meeting.

Accompli meeting facilitation is capability that supports many other service offerings. For instance, many Accompli engagements begin with a Business 360  process that culminates in a facilitated meeting. An enterprise transformation effort may require a great many facilitated meetings.

Strat Sherman acquired the skill of facilitation prior to joining Accompli, often working as a freelance moderator. For instance, he supported Cisco CEO John Chambers at an intimate, two-day offsite for CEO-CIO pairs from some of Cisco’s top clients.  Microsoft repeatedly engaged Strat to facilitate conferences for CIOs of its major clients, at venues around the globe. Fortune frequently used Strat’s facilitation at CEO, CHRO, and CIO events.

In all, Strat facilitated nearly 70 multi-day, C-level events. Along the way, he gained a wry appreciation of the distinction between entertainment and productive work at business meetings.

At Accompli, meetings are about work. That means delivering intended outcomes: agreements, decisions, and action aligned with strategy.  Facilitation of meetings is never an end in itself, but a means to progress toward a larger goal.

A skilled facilitator can greatly improve the quality of conversation. When topics are sensitive or controversial, a guide from outside the organization can put people at ease, while insisting on their participation. Common-sense questions can spark collective insight.

Often, the facilitator is the most purposeful person in the room, singularly determined that the meeting deliver its outcome. That can require managing groups’ tendency to waste time pursuing interesting digressions, much like pee-wee soccer players bunching around the ball.

A series of facilitated conversations conducted over time, such as cyclical oversight meetings for a transformation effort, can change participants’ mindset and behavior. Leaders become comfortable with a different style of conversation: more direct, candid, fearless, and purposeful than ordinary business talk. When leaders bring that style back to their own organizations, an entire corporate culture can shift.