By Marc Steinlin
We have noticed that quite a few (even experienced) facilitators are apprehensive of facilitating virtual sessions.
Have you seen the French National Orchestra performing Ravel’s Bolero during the lockdown, each from their home? If not, do yourself a favour and watch it:
Now, being a sort of conductors ourselves, we are of course fascinated by this orchestration – and encouraged. If they can do it, why not us?
So in our own sphere, what does it take to deliver a perfectly tuned piece of collaboration, where each contributes her/his own tone to the grand oeuvre? We’d like to share few lessons and insights from our past practice.
Separate the Roles of the Facilitator and the Technical Driver
Have you ever participated in a sightseeing tour on a tourist bus?
While you drive through the landscape, a guide stands at the front, microphone in hand, provides you with more or less useful information and escorts you through the trip. They keep you on the go, give instructions, encourage and explain, and ensure you have an insightful and productive ride.
The person, who you cannot see from your seat, but you know is there, is the bus driver. This person takes care of steering the vehicle (i.e. technological platform) you’re sitting on, manages the engine, pushes buttons and levers, and keeps track of the route. And “off the record” your tour guide may also receive valuable hints and observations from the driver.
Given how much technology is involved, a virtual session is no different. In particular if – as we like to – you combine different platforms and employ a useful alternation of tools throughout your session. Like on a tourist bus, it is not useful, if not reckless, to do both at the same time. There is too much distraction in both directions: a bus driver having to animate a crowd needs to take his/her eyes off the road and instrument panel, which is negligent; and a tour guide handling the engine and watching the road, is too absent and absorbed to maintain connection and flow with participants.
We have conducted such events with the facilitators and technical drivers connecting from different continents even. They have their own 1:1 hotline, namely a dedicated chat window, which they use to co-ordinate and collaborate during the entire session. If you can, it’s nice to be side-by-side on two parallel computers in the same room, but not a prerequisite at all.
Script Your Session
We have come to appreciate scripted sessions, where we plan the course of activities in virtual sessions in much more detail than we would for face-to-face sessions. The reason being that while it is easy to freestyle with paper-based artefacts, tech platforms need a higher degree of set up, preparation and “pushing the right buttons” at the right time. This is even more true if the facilitator and driver are not in the same room, or if there are several facilitators and technical drivers involved. Then they need to have a shared understanding and detailed broadcasting script for running the session smoothly.
Here is an example of one of our virtual call scripts:
As you note, the sessions tend to be planned in more detail than sessions in the physical realm. Column G provides instructions to the facilitator; column H to the driver. Both see at any given time what their role is.
It’s quite frequent that facilitator, driver and the participants are in different time zones. The spreadsheet converts times and keeps everybody in sync. You can determine the principal time zone, and then enter the time deviation in hours into cells C5 and D5 if needed.
Highlighting different platforms in different colours helps discerning quickly what tools come into play. Working with icons (emoticons, as Google Spreadsheet doesn’t allow images in cells in combination with text) will make the script even more accessible.
If this time sheet is kept on GoogleSpreadsheet, then the driver can update the times during the delivery of the session by increasing or reducing the duration of sessions. She/he can keep track of the end time and if necessary warn the facilitator and/or reduce the duration of upcoming sessions to bring the ending time back into range. To this end it is best if the driver and the facilitator have discussed this beforehand, namely which process steps to shorten or skip if necessary.
Given the real-time update of GoogleSpreadsheets, both, facilitator and driver (and possible guest speakers) always have a current view of the situation and remain quite literally, on the same page.
Lastly, for facilitator and driver to work smoothly hand-in-hand, a thorough briefing is quintessential. For both to understand every aspect of the process is indispensable. Once the session has started, things become very lively and fast-moving and there is little time for clarifying exchanges between the two, and even less if there is an entire team involved. Once more our saying of being “well prepared is 80% of the success” applies!
Our example spreadsheet above is accessible under: https://tinyurl.com/wlzbwyb; this view is read-only, but you can download it, and we’re very happy for you to use it.
Please contact us on info@i-p-k.co.za or on WhatsApp +27676087464 for more information or to plan a virtual session together. We look forward to hearing from you!