How to weave new understandings with the help of facilitation templates

If you have attended a training event by Mesopartner, then you have been exposed to the templates that we use in different ways during our process facilitation work. These templates are not only useful for training exercises. We utilise these templates in our daily work to support our clients in understanding their contexts or making sense of a situation so that they can take appropriate decisions. Most of the instruments that we use as process facilitators must work even when there is little reliable data, as well as uncertainty about how others would react or how other structural changes may affect a situation.

Each template we use is supported by a body of knowledge, making it possible to guide a group through a facilitated process without requiring them to understand a huge and often jargon-laden subject with all its nuances. We continually work on short articles that we publish in our Mesopartner Reflection series or on our website. We prefer methods that can serve multiple purposes in a process, because they reduce the learning curve for facilitators, participants and stakeholders. Therefore, we value methods that can be used with slight adjustments to reflect, plan, diagnose, make sense, visualise, adjust, evaluate, or explain a situation.

"If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking" — Richard Buckminster Fuller

Next, we will provide suggestions on how to utilise the templates we shared during the training in our daily work.

Combine templates to gain a deeper understanding of a situation

Because the templates emphasise different aspects of the same socioeconomic system, we often combine various templates in a process. This usually helps the group to identify different patterns, overlooked features, or gaps in their understanding of the system. For example, the Ecosystem Map Poster can be used to explain the key characteristics of an ecosystem, and it can also serve as a quick analysis of the ecosystem's strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. I often use this template to identify potential collaborators or to elaborate potential departure points for an exploration of what is possible by working with others that have different capabilities than we have.

However, to diagnose a pattern or find potential entry points, one of the other templates or methods may be needed additionally. For instance, we often use the Systemic Competitiveness template to assess the dynamism within and between different institutins and patterns in a system.

We tend to start with templates that help to create an overall view of the situation, which is then followed by methods that allow us to explore specific patterns or features of the system.

Use the templates to focus the dialogue on the situation

The templates work best when placed on a flat surface, such as a table. This limits the group size to 2-7 people per template, but it also fosters deeper conversations and information exchange within smaller groups. If there are more people, we use two or more tables. It usually happens that different tables produce different results, which then lead to meaningful discussions about how we all perceive the same situation differently and explore the possible reasons for multiple, often contradictory, opinions. Thus, the facilitator can iteratively shift from smaller group to larger group reflections.

However, a facilitator doesn’t need to use our templates. Perhaps they just need some of the questions, or they want to create a huge template that fills the entire room. The template simply gives orientation. Or perhaps they want to develop their own template or use a method developed by somebody else.

We do not only use these templates during workshops. Often, I use it in a conversation with a stakeholder. Or perhaps I pull out the template after a meeting to capture some of my insights, findings or data on the template so that I don't forget anything important.

"The task is not to see what has never been seen before, but to think what has never been thought before about what you see everyday" - Erwin Schrödinger (1887 - 1961)

Capturing insights on Post-It Notes

We use Post-It notes to record observations about the system's features, performance, or patterns. These are noted as short, standalone statements on a Post-It note. The advantage of using a Post-It note is that it limits the amount of writing. The challenge is that there is no designated space for capturing important reference documents or other vital data. Post-It Notes can be easily moved around and are inexpensive. Moving things, pointing at a card, or rephrasing a word or a sentence are all important ways for us to make sense, form connections and develop a shared understanding.

It is also possible to use a template in a digital workspace to assist the workshop, with applications like MS Teams, Zoom, Mural, Miro, Slack, and others offering collaboration spaces. However, in my experience as a facilitator, building trust and maintaining a shared awareness of a situation is somewhat more challenging in online workshops.

Layers of visualisation

Different colours of Post-It notes can also be used to signal additional information. For example, I often use green to indicate an area of strength or high competence, while blue signifies weakness or incompetence. Orange indicates inconsistency or unreliability, meaning it can be strong at times and weak at others. During our Weaver training, we used pink to signal an opportunity where collaboration might lead to an innovative solution. However, as facilitators, we must be careful that the classification of strong, weak, or unreliable does not cause harm or offend stakeholders. Describing a key stakeholder as unreliable might hinder future cooperation.

Systemic Competitiveness Template using Post-It Notes and Systemic Insight

You could also use additional props on your template. In the example above, the hexi cards are used to signal different behaviours directed at areas on the map. Or you could use string or other objects.

Getting the level of detail just right

Crafting clear yet concise statements about a situation's characteristics is vital for improving shared situational awareness and understanding. As facilitators, we often need to guide participants from broad statements, which may be seen as widely accepted truths, towards more specific assertions that highlight different contextual nuances or exceptions to common beliefs. While broad statements can be useful for briefly describing a situation, they might hinder the design of context-specific and locally relevant solutions. This process of breaking generalisations into detailed, context-specific statements is called disaggregation. Conversely, it may also be necessary to combine a group of statements without losing their core meaning. This process is known as aggregation, and facilitators should aim to frame the aggregated statement so that the essence of the combined statements is neither lost nor altered — a risk often present when labelling groups of ideas hastily.  

An example of disaggregation is when a broad statement like “small enterprises lack finance” is challenged. The participants then realise that although many SMEs lack finance, there are also situations where “SMEs that complain about a lack of finance have not tried to apply recently” or “some SMEs get credit from suppliers” or “some SMEs need working capital” who are different to “investors cannot easily identify SMEs who are ready for investment”.

“Real change in a social system always involves changing how decisions are made, and/or who makes them” - Daniel Mezick

The same template could be used for different purposes

A template can serve various purposes within the same process. For example, we could use a template to record a description of a current situation, as we did during the training. The same template could also be employed to identify the type of data we need to collect or to develop questions for a series of interviews. To evaluate how a situation has changed, the template can be utilised to assess the impact of interventions or to describe how a situation has evolved.

In conclusion

This blog describes how a facilitator can use templates to help a small group of stakeholders develop a shared understanding of a situation. In complex cases, we aim to guide the group from broad descriptions to more specific, contextually relevant ones. As facilitators working within ecosystems to promote change and innovation, we often have little or no reliable data to support decision making by the members of the ecosystem. Or perhaps some members have lost their agency or confidence to act individually or in collaboration with others. Therefore, a facilitated workshop is not just about gathering or analysing data or getting people to discuss an issue; it is also about strengthening a shared situational awareness that enables people to make decisions based on where they are and what their respective strategies or resource endowments are.

Links to selected Mesopartner Templates used in the Entrepreneurial Innovation Ecosystem weaver training:

Visit the Systemic Competitiveness page for more information and to download the template. Visit the Entrepreneurial Innovation Ecosystems page for more information and to download the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem template.

Visit the Systemic Insight page for more information on the facilitation kit.

In the Weaver training documentation, we had additional templates, like the Action Portfolios templates, Cynefin (or Decision-support), the Opportunity Mapping (or Estuarine Mapping) or the Network Functions Mapping.