An interesting facilitation technique that I’ve learned to frequently rely on is silence. The first time I ran across the technique was in a CSM course taught by Hubert Smits and Tamara Sulaiman. One of the exercises that we explored was Silent Grouping. The exercise was great and worked very well in the context of the training session.
When I returned to work I started trying various techniques with silence and most of them went very well. The majority of our facilitated sessions were very large and it was usually a constant challenge to move off of side conversations and keep the group focused. One of the techniques that frequently returned good results was using time-boxed silence alongside various other techniques that are used often in agile meetings (brainstorming, prioritizing, sorting, grouping, etc.).
There just seems to be something about the ability to become rational, absorbed, and focused on the task when the “no talking” rule is in effect. It frequently seemed easier to drive towards consensus when the group used silence as a method for creating, grouping, and processing information.
