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Make things better by making better things.
Facilitating really productive group discussions is an art.
If you do them enough, you will begin to notice that there is often one person standing outside the circle.
Why is that?
Well, it turns out that we are making the wrong assumptions about what is actually happening.
Because the story we tell ourselves is…
She doesn’t care.
She thinks she’s too good for this group.
She’s always quiet.
This is just noise in our head.
To get rid of it for next time (and make you a better facilitator), it helps to go test it. So, once the discussion is over ask the person what they were thinking.
What you’ll be surprised to discover is that their noise is always different than your noise. That in fact, our noise is irrelevant. Completely irrelevant to what is going on.
What happens is we often misinterpret the signals others are sending. And we let our biases get in the way.
Subsequently, we build the wrong narrative about people who sit outside the circle.