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-ori­ent­ated 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 centre 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 mono­pol­ises 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
• Sum­mar­ising 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 neighbour in­tro­duc­tions, where each par­ti­cipant briefly in­tro­duces the colleague next to them. In the case of meetings at a small or medium-sized or­gan­isa­tion, where familiar co-workers 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, pri­or­it­ised, 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-ori­ent­ated 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 or­gan­isa­tions 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 sum­mar­ises 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 or­gan­isa­tion.

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.

Please note the legal dis­claim­er relating to this article.