A key part of running a meeting or workshop is being attentive and listening. Sounds obvious, right? But this is commonly overlooked by leaders, who often seek to, well, lead - meaning they can often miss out on opportunities to adapt and improve.

Sometimes these opportunities offer themselves before the meeting even starts. This happened to me recently, as I was getting ready to facilitate a session that had been months in the planning. Suddenly, as is often necessary, I had to improvise.

Soon after I arrived, I learned that four of the 12 participants had decided to join via Teams rather than in-person. One of them needed to duck out for another meeting during the morning, and another needed to leave an hour early in the afternoon. The team member who had been assigned note-taking duties had called in sick. We were to be in a different room than originally planned. Several people were running late, meaning we wouldn’t be able to start on time.

Now these are all pretty common occurrences. As a facilitator you have to work with, and sometimes around, your participants.

Often when a meeting becomes hybrid, it can be difficult to ensure an equal experience. The people in the room generally dominate and the remote participants become more passive. It can be tricky to fully involve everyone in conversations in a productive and fair way.

I decided to lean into the hybrid experience, and redesigned a few elements of the session on the fly. One of our tasks was to co-create a set of brand values, so originally we had separated out the various elements of this into a series of group discussion-based agenda items. I changed this into a series of small breakout groups, and as everyone had their laptops with them anyway, had everyone add their ideas to a shared Miro board.

This meant that people in the room were collaborating in the same way as people joining remotely, who were put into breakout groups on Teams.

It also meant we could all participate in several rounds of dot voting using Miro’s voting functionality. This allowed the group as a whole to iterate and refine several versions of the brand values.

These are fairly small adjustments, but my experience and expertise in running virtual sessions enabled me to quickly add these extra elements to the workshop, without extra setup time.

My client, and most of the participants, had used Miro before, but I was able to quickly notice that only I would be able to introduce these changes quickly enough, so I took the initiative to set up suitable templates and virtual post-it notes on the Miro board in the minutes before the session started. The venue wifi was playing up, so I connected my laptop to my phone’s hotspot.

As a facilitator, noticing what’s needed is key. Needs may be evident but often unsaid, so experience and intuition helps to spot and identify them, and to quickly know which actions to take.

This means being open and flexible. Planning a session is important, but not fixed. Being able to listen and reflect in the moment and over time enables you to keep adapting, learning, conceptualising, and ultimately creating new solutions.

This is part of the thrill for me of what I do - there are always new experiences and challenges, and the element of unpredictability keeps things exciting and interesting. It’s highly satisfying to be able to help a group collaborate effectively and get closer to the outcomes they need.

The result? The session went well, according to the client: “We all felt it was really productive, challenged our thinking and ideas. Many thanks once again. It was invaluable.”