Introduction to Planning and Facilitating Effective Meetings

For many organizations, meetings are a way of life. Clearly, making these meetings as productive as possible goes a long way toward increasing organizational productivity. This guidebook provides the basic techniques used by professionals for meeting planning and facilitation, and while facilitation is as much an art as a science, familiarity with these concepts can help even novice facilitators plan and bring about more effective meetings. Many types of meetings can benefit from having a facilitator present. Some of the more common include strategic planning or visioning, brainstorming, stakeholder input, project evaluation, staff retreats, policy development or review, project design, and prioritization of goals and actions.
A common misconception is that good results will occur simply by getting all the experts together in the same room. Getting the right people together is certainly important, but that’s just a first step. A facilitator supports the meeting process by keeping the group on track to produce the desired objectives.