Virtual Facilitation

7Purpose

Figure 7.1 Always start with the purpose

The purpose is key to the design of your session. That's why it's at the centre of the Design Star (Figure 7.1). It's the reason for you're meeting. Without a clear purpose it's impossible to have effective sessions; the purpose of the session guides all the other elements of the planning process. Challenge yourself to make the purpose of your session very concrete.

In addition to having a main purpose, you can have sub-purposes for your session. These are things that might not be visible on the agenda but that you believe are a key by-product of the session, such as socialising, building trust or seeing if you are a good match for future collaboration. You should always have one main purpose for the session that is clear to you and your participants and also list any sub-purposes for your session, even if they will not appear on the agenda.

If you don't think about both purposes, you are unlikely to achieve them.

Define your purpose

As a virtual facilitator, your role doesn't begin in the session, it begins with finding the ‘Why?’. As the facilitator, you will be in charge of driving this process. The natural starting point is to ask the ‘big why’ question: Why are we having this session? There are a number of questions to ask alongside this: What is the purpose of the session? What is the impact we might get out of this? ...