How do you evaluate your facilitation?

We utilize a Design Team to review agendas ahead of time. They give advance feedback on meeting agendas and objectives, so that there’s agreement on what we’re working towards.

As an independent facilitator, I must collaborate and set clear goals and expectations with my clients before the session. During the session, I'll check in with the key stakeholders to ensure that we're on the same page and provide an opportunity for feedback. Maintaining alignment with others is helpful because it creates a clear path forward and prevents misunderstandings and misinterpretations.

Make sure the tools you use are easy to access, understand, and use.getting feedback depends on how easy you make it for your audience to respond. Share these results as soon as possible because they are rewarded for their efforts.

AI tools like ChatGPT are a great source of inspiration when designing feedback-related questions. Evaluating an event (workshop / meeting / training / ...) is best when done during the event - people tend to give you more information then, so at minimum plan 2-3 minutes at the end of the session for people to give (write, say, ...) some feedback. For longer events (the ones that have at least one break in them), think about how you can ask for feedback before the event is finished. It might be a simple "rate this event so far" type of question before the break. It helps you to compare that with the end-of-event feedback, and see how things changed over time.

Personally, I favour organic tools. Good old regular share and discuss with key stakeholders. 1. Before the session, my source of feedback is the Client. We discuss the goal, the questions, the dynamics, and the participants. By the end, we ask if our insights and proposals added value to the final design. 2. During the session, my source of feedback are the Owner and the Participants. At the end of each iteration, we ask the Owner if she is satisfied with the result. By the end of the session, we do a Retro, focusing on the experience. 3. After the session, my source of feedback are all stakeholders. When we share the output, we ask if it’s accurate and insightful, and if it adds value to the core problem or opportunity in hand.

I have found the automatic generated responses such as the word clouds and graphs in MS Forms to be very helpful in quickly visualizing data for my audiences.

Never under estimate the power of your intuition. You know what works, has worked and isn't working in any given situation. The evaluation of ones methods can glean helpful information to be sure. Your gut will also tell you what didn't work. Trust yourself, use SMART and create your evaluation methods based on what you know and want to know. Not on how you think you've failed.

Traditionally, feedback forms were distributed at the end of sessions. The problem with that is it's too late to fix any problems or address any concerns. The approach I prefer is to get feedback throughout the session and engage participants in problem solving and course correction. I usually collect feedback at the end of the first morning and review it with the group after lunch. I usually distribute another feedback form at the end of the first day and daily after that. Then, there is the end of session feedback. Using this approach, all issues should be resolved by the end of the session.