Mod­er­a­tion Tech­niques for Efficient Meetings

Many people initially associate the word “moderator” with en­ter­tain­ing tele­vi­sion and radio pre­sen­ters. However, meetings typically have little to do with en­ter­tain­ment shows – without skilled fa­cil­i­ta­tion, par­tic­i­pants quickly tune out and the meeting goes nowhere. In the world of work, mod­er­at­ing is less about amusing en­ter­tain­ment and more about con­struc­tive, goal-oriented dis­cus­sions. Nonethe­less, we can learn a few things from good en­ter­tain­ers. After all, in essence the aim is to pique the interest of par­tic­i­pants and encourage con­struc­tive con­ver­sa­tions.

People with different mo­ti­va­tions, knowledge, per­spec­tives, and per­son­al­i­ties come together in meetings. What they share in common is that they’re working on the same project which they intend to complete as suc­cess­ful­ly as possible. The leader of a meeting has the task of involving the various par­tic­i­pants so that they can each benefit from one another, with every in­di­vid­ual being able to con­tribute to suc­cess­ful teamwork. But that’s easier said than done. For example, there are the attention-seekers who love to talk without saying much, the shy types who keep good ideas to them­selves because they don’t like taking center stage, the un­pre­pared, the late­com­ers, the naysayers, and the stubborn dog­ma­tists.

If you want to conduct meetings ef­fi­cient­ly, you need to ensure that as many par­tic­i­pants as possible have an equal op­por­tu­ni­ty to speak and that no-one mo­nop­o­lizes the speaking time for them­selves. Various fa­cil­i­ta­tion tech­niques can help you achieve this with little effort. You can use them to divide speaking time fairly, bring rambling dis­cus­sions back on topic, and encourage timid col­leagues to get involved without leaving anyone feeling put out.

To un­der­stand where each mod­er­a­tion technique comes in and which are best suited for certain problems, you first need to learn the actual tasks of a moderator:

• Planning and directing the course of the meeting
• Defining the goal of the meeting and reminding the par­tic­i­pants of it when necessary
• Sum­ma­riz­ing facts so that all par­tic­i­pants are on the same page
• For­mu­lat­ing follow-up questions with the goal in mind
• Mo­ti­vat­ing all attendees to par­tic­i­pate
• Reining in any dom­i­nat­ing speakers
• Including shy par­tic­i­pants
• Pre­vent­ing any con­ver­sa­tions from straying too far from topic
• Deesca­lat­ing debates (mediating between the parties if necessary)
• Creating an open and con­struc­tive at­mos­phere

If you succeed in per­form­ing the role of moderator, you’ll create the ideal con­di­tions for a con­struc­tive meeting.

Time and again, people complain that meetings often drag on un­nec­es­sar­i­ly, without even de­liv­er­ing useful results or solutions after endless dis­cus­sion. This can be due to a number of reasons. But a competent fa­cil­i­ta­tor is able to counter many of them by applying the right strategy. Mod­er­a­tion tech­niques are con­sid­ered to be among the soft skills that any manager should learn, as well as anyone who regularly conducts meetings.

Of course, not every technique is suitable for every meeting. It always depends on the par­tic­i­pants and, above all, the purpose of the meeting. An overview of proven mod­er­a­tion tech­niques is presented below. Before choosing one of the methods, you should always ask yourself what the purpose of your meeting is and whether the fa­cil­i­ta­tion technique is ap­pro­pri­ate.

When people come together in meetings who have never met each other before or only com­mu­ni­cat­ed by email, it’s ab­solute­ly essential to introduce the par­tic­i­pants. There are several different ways to do this. The simplest and most fre­quent­ly used method are self-in­tro­duc­tions. Here, the par­tic­i­pants introduce them­selves in turn by name, role within the company, and any other facts related to their pro­fes­sion­al career.

If you have more time and wish to create a more trusting at­mos­phere, you can also use tech­niques like partner in­ter­views – where two of the attendees interview each other – or neighbor in­tro­duc­tions, where each par­tic­i­pant briefly in­tro­duces the colleague next to them. In the case of meetings at a small or medium-sized or­ga­ni­za­tion, where familiar coworkers quickly need a solution to an existing problem, it’s best to go without any lengthy rounds of in­tro­duc­tions.

Before the meeting actually starts, the moderator can ask the par­tic­i­pants about what they expect from the meeting, what answers and solutions they hope to find, or how they want the meeting to progress. This method is useful for quickly gauging topics that are es­pe­cial­ly important to the par­tic­i­pants, or to weight the pre­de­fined topics. It is critical that the moderator makes no value judgments and treats all answers with the same level of attention.

This approach is par­tic­u­lar­ly suitable for dis­cus­sions in which the par­tic­i­pants already know each other and have pre­vi­ous­ly had meetings together.

Sometimes, the timing of a meeting can fall apart if you wrongly assess the time to discuss in­di­vid­ual agenda items as the fa­cil­i­ta­tor. This can be the case if points orig­i­nal­ly seen as less important turn out to require more dis­cus­sion time, thereby pro­tract­ing the meeting con­sid­er­ably.

You can prevent this situation by preparing the course and timing together with the par­tic­i­pants. Although you send out the agenda items be­fore­hand, you define the order and priority together with them at the beginning of the meeting. To do so, write all the topics on a poster and ask each par­tic­i­pant to mark the topics that are more important or in­ter­est­ing to them. You can use the traffic light system here, for example, or each par­tic­i­pant can allocate a certain number of points to topics they find most relevant. This will give you a good picture of which topics should take priority, allowing you to adjust the sequence and timing ac­cord­ing­ly.

If new ideas for projects are to be developed or internal processes improved in the meeting, brain­storm­ing together continues to be the best way for reaching an outcome that everyone is happy with. At the same time, this method allows you to promote the cre­ativ­i­ty of par­tic­i­pants and also involve more reserved col­leagues.

In terms of the actual approach, there’s a huge selection of brain­storm­ing concepts available. For example, you could specify a relevant starting term and ask the par­tic­i­pants to call out their as­so­ci­a­tions. Or you could define clusters of topics on buzzword boards and get the attendees to write their ideas as key points for each. If they write these ideas on flash cards, they can then be easily arranged, pri­or­i­tized, and connected with one another.

After that, the ideas can be evaluated, discussed, and further developed – ideally trans­form­ing the most popular ideas into an outcome that everyone agrees with.

In case you’re unsure whether all the par­tic­i­pants are happy with the course and result of the meeting, you can simply ask them at the end. If just a few people offer feedback – or none at all – you can also use the points or traffic light system for eval­u­at­ing the results. But instead of the agenda items, the discussed results should be rated. This way, you can be sure that all the par­tic­i­pants will take part and you’ll get a good idea of how satisfied they are with the outcome of the meeting.

As explained above, you can see that suc­cess­ful mod­er­a­tion is primarily about asking the right questions at the right time to involve all the par­tic­i­pants in the dis­cus­sion. As the moderator, you should know how you can influence a dis­cus­sion with different ques­tion­ing tech­niques. Simply by de­lib­er­ate­ly choosing open, closed and goal-oriented questions, you can steer a con­ver­sa­tion in the desired direction.

However, it’s always important to demon­strate social skills as the fa­cil­i­ta­tor. This means staying neutral and objective when needed, and not trying to impose your own views. At the same time, you also have to be assertive and prevent dis­cus­sions from becoming unfair or straying away from the topic at hand.

The fa­cil­i­ta­tion tech­niques described above are intended for smaller project or team meetings of the sort that happen at work on a daily basis. But there are sometimes also large staff meetings in or­ga­ni­za­tions or cross-company con­fer­ences with far greater numbers of par­tic­i­pants. In these cases, reaching and involving all par­tic­i­pants is a par­tic­u­lar challenge and it takes special strate­gies. We briefly introduce the three most well-known below:

• World Café: The par­tic­i­pants are divided into small groups of around eight people, each with a “leader”, and they discuss a set question within their group. After a certain amount of time, all par­tic­i­pants switch group. They move to the next “leader”, who sum­ma­rizes the question and dis­cus­sion from the previous round and develops the group’s ideas for the next topic. This model allows large groups to ef­fec­tive­ly engage in clus­ter­ing and brain­storm­ing.
• Open Space: Likewise, in this model the par­tic­i­pants gather in small groups to discuss questions. However, they develop these questions them­selves. In other words, the groups don’t explore pre­de­fined topics. During the dis­cus­sion phase, they can move freely from one group to the next when they have the feeling that they have nothing more to con­tribute toward a topic or if they want to get an overview or in­spi­ra­tion from another group.
• Future Con­fer­ence: Here, the par­tic­i­pants discuss their ideal vision of the future in small groups. For instance, this can relate to general processes in a company, ap­proach­es for dealing with socially relevant changes (such as political conflicts or en­vi­ron­men­tal issues), as well as solutions to a specific problem in an or­ga­ni­za­tion.

With all these models, the groups’ ideas are collected at the end, providing a basis for a common solution that takes into account the views of the in­di­vid­ual par­tic­i­pants.