Our Elephant in the Room exercise is a powerful tool for fostering open communication and team collaboration. By using a physical representation of a sensitive or taboo topic, this activity encourages participants to confront uncomfortable issues head-on. This interactive approach promotes a safe and supportive environment where team members can express their concerns and work together to find solutions.
This exercise brings the metaphor of ‘the elephant in the room’ to life by means of a large, stuffed toy elephant. Participants write ‘undiscussable’ topics on cards and pin them anonymously onto the elephant. At regular intervals, the group brings them up and talks them through.
What to Use It For
To make a statement that no topic is ‘off limits’
To allow the group to bring up difficult topics for discussion
How It Works
Step 1. Introduce the elephant as early as possible in the session and invite participants to write any difficult or unmentionable topic on an index card and pin the card onto the elephant.
Step 2. At some convenient interval – the end of a day is a good time – review the cards with the client sponsor and agree how to address them with the group.
Step 3. Hold a group dialogue on these topics.
Timing
Group dialogue timing varies from 10 minutes periodically to larger 30-40 minute conversations.
Keep in Mind
It is important to deal with every issue that gets pinned on the elephant and to avoid censoring difficult topics. To do so defeats the purpose of the exercise.
The bigger the physical elephant, the better!
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When delivering a course online, great facilitation becomes more important than ever.
This article appeared originally in the ICAgile publication on Medium in April 2020.
As the new economic situation becomes clear as a result of the global pandemic, my friends and colleagues have been looking for ways to move their businesses online. More than one person has asked me for advice recently. Here’s what I’ve been thinking about with regard to successful online/virtual learning events.
The biggest learning from my experience has been this: everything is amplified in the online environment. When the facilitator designs opportunities for interaction, it pays dividends during the course. When little attention is paid to how to create engagement, it hurts even more online than if you were working with the group in-person.
Many of you will already have great facilitation skills from your in-person events — the soft skills you use to engage and acknowledge people to make them feel part of your group. That’s right, great facilitation isn’t just energetic hand-waving, Lego games, and other entertainment that so many trainers have come to rely on for good course feedback. Your rapport-building soft skills are crucially important for ensuring people feel they belong in the online group.
Small groups for maximum learning
Activities need to be scoped well for small groups, with transparent instructions that participants can refer back to. People may be working in breakout rooms and, unlike with in-person events, it’s not possible to overhear people’s tone of voice changing which could indicate confusion or frustration with the work to be done. Give examples and set expectations clearly — and leave room for people to ask questions and clarify what they’ve heard — before sending people off to their breakout rooms.
Activities need to be scoped well for small groups, with transparent instructions that participants can refer back to.
Then drop in to the breakout rooms — and be sure to let participants know in advance that you’ll do this — to offer to help get the work back on track if the group is stuck. It’s important that you let people know you’re going to do this and why, before people leave your main meeting for breakout rooms. And it’s important to be available to help the group, because it can be frustrating for people to have their breakout room close without having done the work and gained the learning in the activity.
For some group activities, roles don’t need to be defined, in fact it’s sometimes part of my instructional design to let the group decide how to get the work done.
For example, in my Agile Fundamentals module on Individuals and Interactions, one activity’s purpose is to allow course participants to experience self-organisation. For this type of activity, you need to be clear about how much instruction you’re going to give, and — contrary to the advice I gave earlier — allow the group to decide how it gets the work done. I offer participants the Lean Coffee approach, using any tools that they feel happy using. (I give every participant the link to the Lean Coffee website in a shared folder with all course materials, before the course starts).
Activities like self-facilitated Lean Coffee are sometimes chaotic, usually full of compromise, and require listening to each other to agree how to can achieve the task together.
Psychological safety
Activities are more impactful from a learning perspective when there is psychological safety. I’ve noticed the term ‘psychological safety’ being used a lot lately in the agile community. I’d like to see it used (and understood) more for all learning events. And I hope that facilitators know that simply calling something safe doesn’t create the safety.
I try to create psychological safety through intentional behaviours. Some things off the top of my head:
Let people know, any which way you can, that you want to know what they think.
Encourage small talk at the start of the course so that everyone speaks as early as possible in the meeting. I became consciously aware from talking to Judy Rees about remote facilitation that the warming up and ‘getting to know you’ that happens over a coffee at in-person events isn’t there for remote. I had already made it a conscious practice to chat to my participants about the weather – literally – and about where in the country / world they are sitting. ‘Oh what’s that picture behind you…? How’s the weather in your part of the country…’ etc. Now I make sure to plan that into the first 10-15 minutes of an online course. Lately the small-talk has been about our health and how we’re coping with the lockdown.
Let people know, any which way you can, that you want to know what they think. Leave space for them to jot down ideas, take a screen shot of the slides and annotations in the meeting room, use slides that present a single question for reflection. For example: ‘What do these frameworks have in common?’, ‘How will my role change?’, and ‘What is a team?’. Get into the habit of asking open questions that stimulate thinking to encourage participants to relate the information you presented to their own role/work/life. These are questions for self-reflection, however one of the most satisfying experiences for me as a trainer/facilitator is when people start to feel compelled to verbalise the answers to my reflective questions. They have something important on their mind and they want to be heard. Brilliant!
Make eye contact. I try hard to ensure that I can see every single participant’s video all the time – not just the video of the active speaker.
Make eye contact. I try hard to ensure that I can see every single participant’s video all the time – not just the image of the active speaker. Then I drag the floating palette left or right so the the image of the active speaker is directly underneath my camera – so that I have eye contact with the person.
Number of participants
I know a lot of passionate trainers who have a firm upper-limit on number of people for an event. I’m one of them. For online courses, my preferred upper limit is 8 participants, 10 at a push. That’s for my virtual Agile Fundamentals course using Zoom. There is no absolute number. What you can manage depends greatly on what is being presented (50 participants ok as in webinars) or learned (10 at most with small-group work in breakout rooms), plus the comfort level of the facilitator with the tools and for managing groups generally. Experiment and decide what you’re comfortable with. Don’t be tempted to increase the number of participants. There is a ’tipping point’ which when reached means the quality of your online event collapses due to confusion and poor communication. I have experienced this with large groups in-person. I don’t ever want to find out what that limit is for online courses, as it’s so difficult to get people re-engaged if you’ve lost them.
Use of tools
What I’ll say about Google Docs and any of the other great collaborative tools like Lean Coffee Table, Trello, Mural, etc, is that those are only viable when everyone already knows how to use them. For some of my participants, it took a lot of courage to agree to do a course online instead of in-person. Asking them to learn a new tool inside Zoom is a step too far for many people.
When I facilitate online, I let the participants in each breakout room decide what they’re going to use. There are a lot of benefits to letting the group decide and as trainers of agile development, we should be even more tuned into ways to empower a group. So for my online events, I focus on making sure everyone can get into the Zoom Meeting and then use all of the engagement approaches described here to make people feel part of the event. Then I draw on a suitcase of games, activities, and tools to offer to the group in-the-moment.
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A coach friend asked me to join her online meeting this week and give feedback for how to improve it. I sent her some thoughts after the meeting and you might find them useful too.
These were my comments to my friend, in no priority order. I hope you find them useful.
Setting working agreements (we used to say ‘ground rules’). Online meetings need to have working agreements made explicit at the start. It’s even more important with people who aren’t used to having meetings online. How to ‘raise your hand’ – using the Raise Hand button in Zoom, or your actual hand – when you want to speak is really important because we can’t talk over each other in online meetings. It becomes like nails on a chalkboard quickly. Also how to give feedback like ‘you’re on mute’ (hold up a handmade sign on a post-it) or ‘I agree’ (thumbs up).
Have ways to make people feel heard in the meeting right from the start. To get them interested and keep them interested so they don’t multitask. Create engagement right from the start by asking people to say their name and answer a silly question. Or the last person to speak nominates the next person to speak (forces everyone to stay on their toes and listen to every introduction).
If we’re ‘going around the room’ to hear from everyone, every speaker’s time should time-boxed to a pre-agreed time. ‘1 minute’ cards or hand-made post-its are important to give warning of ‘time up’. I picked this up from Paul Z Jackson who recently delivered an Advanced Facilitation course. They work just as well online as in-person. Thanks to Lisette Sutherland for a great recent example of that.
In the meeting invitation, let participants know what tools you’ll use in the meeting so participants can practice in advance. How many of your workshop participants (meeting invitees) know how to use all of the tools?
Purpose of online meeting should be made really clear so that people know why they’re joining, what they need from it, and if/how they can contribute.
Facilitator should use breakout rooms for larger groups – we just about got away with not having breakout rooms with 5 participants [in the meeting that my friend hosted]. Any larger and we should have had three breakout rooms with a clearly defined task for each group.
How will meeting notes and take-aways be captured and shared with everyone during and after the meeting.
This meeting was loosely structured because the group didn’t need to do any real work in the timeframe. That was understood from the meeting invitation. If the group had to reach a decision or find a way forward, what facilitation process would have been appropriate to help the group do the work, eg brainstorm, prioritise, vote, discuss pros and cons.
What online tools could be useful for facilitating the group to do the work of the meeting/workshop/course? A couple of my favourite tools are Lean Coffee Table, Trello, and Google Docs. I’m learning more about Mural. What if some group members don’t know how to use the tools? What contingency can we have in our back pocket to help the team move forward? Even better – let each small work group decide for themselves what they use. That will be quicker than asking them to re-learn how to work with the facilitator’s favourite tool.
Looking at some of my notes above – most of these ways of working are important for effective in-person meetings but are now super-important for online meetings.
Thanks
I’ve learned loads from others in recent weeks about remote facilitation, having interviewed Judy Rees a few weeks ago for my book on agile coaching. Thanks to all of the great online facilitators that have helped me add to my facilitation toolkit.
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