They say “Preparation work is 80% of success”. Facilitation is a thing I was avoiding at all costs during my whole career.

But… I needed exactly this magic and seeming uncomfortable or even scary thing as facilitation very often in my professional life.

In fact there is nothing scary as long you know what you need it for, what goal you want to achieve with your team, plan ‘the show’, set the stage, agree on the rules and follow the process. … and be okay doing the mistakes.

Before we were unaligned about the road to choose to start with. I suggested to have a meeting about that.

Remembering my experience with the majority of meetings in my career where with other teams we spent time unproductively, I thought it would be wise to actually run a workshop, so that 3 of us agree on our starting direction and plan the next actions.

The workshop took us 4 hours, 4 hours of collaborative and individual work.

Preparation, however, took me almost 3 hours.

What a great feeling of fulfillment once the work is done and the whole team is aligned and agreed on the final result!