Module 2 quiz | Facilitation Foundations

Question 1 of 8

A colleague sends you three lines for the objective box: “Map the customer journey.” “Our onboarding process.” “A written list of the top three drop-off points, agreed, in priority order.” In order, what are they?

Activity, outcome, topic. Activity, topic, outcome. Topic, activity, outcome. Outcome, topic, activity.

Question 2 of 8

What actually separates “align on priorities” from “a ranked roadmap with an owner on the top three”?

The second names a business outcome rather than a team outcome. The second is measurable, and objectives should always be measurable. The second is more specific, so people will take it more seriously. The second can be finished; the first can only be stopped, and anyone in the room could tell you whether you got the second.

Question 3 of 8

A sponsor writes: “By the end, we will have alignment on Q3.” It has a finish line and it has a noun. Why does it still fail?

It does not say who is responsible for the alignment. It should say “we will be” rather than “we will have”. Alignment is a feeling, and a feeling cannot be checked — two people can leave genuinely feeling aligned having agreed to different things. Q3 is too broad a scope for a single session.

Question 4 of 8

You are running a retrospective. The team says it is about how the sprint felt, which is not something you can photograph. What is the artifact?

A written summary of what went well and what went badly. A score out of ten for the sprint, tracked over time. Three specific changes the team will try next sprint, with a name on each. There isn’t one. A retro is one of the cases where the conversation genuinely is the output.

Question 5 of 8

A team has been quietly resentful for six months and the sponsor wants a session where people finally say the hard thing out loud. Forcing a deliverable onto that would make it worse. What is the honest position?

Set the objective as “everyone feels heard”, and accept that this one is a feeling. It still has an artifact, it just is not a spreadsheet: each person has said the thing they came in carrying, and the group has named the two issues it will work on next. Refuse it. Without an artifact it is a conversation, not a workshop. Run it without an objective. Some sessions resist the framework and this is one.

Question 6 of 8

A sponsor hands you a half-day agenda with five objectives on it. It reads as thorough. What is the mechanical problem, and what question cuts the list?

Nothing is wrong with five as long as each has its own timebox. Five objectives will confuse participants; ask the sponsor to combine them into a single overarching goal. Each objective needs its own divergence, convergence, decision and commitment, and a half day fits one — so ask: if we only got this one thing and nothing else, would that have been worth everyone’s day? Five is too many to fit; ask which three are most urgent.

Question 7 of 8

You have the objective. You are building the invite list. Which question decides who has to be there?

Who came to the last one of these? Who could quietly unwind this two weeks from now? Who would be offended to be left out? Who has an opinion on this?

Question 8 of 8

You ask the sponsor: “It’s five o’clock, the session went badly, what happened?” They say, “We’ll spend the whole morning on the easy stuff and run out of time before we get to the money.” Why does the past tense get you that, and what do you do with it?

It tells you the sponsor lacks confidence in the group, so you should raise the concern with them separately before designing anything. Past tense is a rhetorical trick; the useful part is simply asking about risks at all. Add a risk section to the agenda. It tells you the session is too long. Cut it to two hours so there is no easy stuff to spend the morning on. Past tense feels safer than predicting failure, so you get the truth — then the money goes first, before lunch, and the easy items go at the end where they can be cut.

0 of 8 answered

Setting the Objective

A letter for facilitators who give a damn.