Opening Strong and Giving Instructions

01 Title

On screen "Opening Strong and Giving Instructions" · Module 5 · Facilitation Foundations

Christmas, a few years back, and we're playing a board game my brother-in-law had brought.

About forty minutes in, and I'm losing badly, my nephew puts a card down and does something I hadn't realised you were allowed to do. And I said, 'wait. You can do that?'

And he said, 'yeah, it's in the rules.'

And it was. It had been in the rules the whole time. He'd read them. Nobody else had. My brother-in-law had explained the game in about ninety seconds while handing out the pieces, and every one of us had been playing a slightly different game ever since, and losing to the one person who actually knew what was going on.

Nobody cheated. Nobody was stupid. The rules were fine. They just got explained badly once, at the start, while everyone was busy doing something else.

Hold onto that game.

02 The activity that died on the instruction

On screen a room of confused tables, one person going table to table

Here's the workshop version.

You've designed a good exercise. Genuinely good, right for the block, right for the outcome. You explain it, you say go, and you watch three of the five tables start doing something that isn't what you asked for.

So you go round and re-explain it, table by table. By the time everyone's on task you've burned six minutes of a twelve-minute activity, and the two tables that got it right have gone quiet and are on their phones.

The exercise didn't fail. Your instruction failed.

Nobody teaches this, because it isn't glamorous. There's no framework in it. It's being clear, which sounds like advice you'd give a child.

But two things decide whether any activity works, and neither is the activity. Whether the room knows why they're there. And whether they understood the last thing you said.

That's the whole module. The first is the opening, the second is instructions, and between them they waste more workshop time than every other failure in this path put together.

03 The first ten minutes buy you the whole day

On screen ten minutes at the start, and the day it pays for

Everything in the first half of this is about the cheapest time you will ever spend.

Frame properly at the start, and every instruction afterwards gets the benefit of the doubt. People know where the day is going, so a strange-sounding activity reads as part of a plan rather than as you improvising.

Skip it, and you spend the session re-earning permission. Why are we doing this? How long is this going on for? Do we really need to write it down?

None of those are hostile. That's what a room does when it doesn't know the shape of the day. And you'll read it as resistance and push harder, which makes it worse.

0:45 · then: four unspoken questions

In the first two minutes, every person in that room is silently asking four questions, and they won't ask any of them out loud.

Why am I here specifically? Is this going to be a waste of my morning? Who's actually deciding this? And is it safe to say what I think?

If your opening doesn't answer those, people spend the first half hour working them out by watching, and they don't participate while they watch.

04 IDOARRT, and what it sounds like

On screen I · D · O · A · R · R · T, with the seven lines filled in

A complete opening in seven lines. It's called IDOARRT, an ugly acronym I've never once forgotten, which is probably the point.

Intention. Desired outcomes. Open, meaning what's in scope and what isn't. Agenda. Roles. Rules. Time.

Seven lines, ninety seconds, on a flipchart before anyone walks in, so you're reading it rather than remembering it. Here's what it sounds like for a real session.

Intention: onboarding drop-off has gone from twelve percent to nineteen and we don't agree on why.

Desired outcomes: a written, prioritised list of the top three causes, with a name against each.

Open: in scope is the first two weeks of the customer journey. Out of scope is pricing, and anything needing headcount we don't have.

Agenda: ninety minutes, twenty generating, forty narrowing, twenty deciding, ten to close.

Roles: I'm running the process and deciding nothing. Priya has the final call. Tom's capturing.

Rules: phones down during the silent bits, one conversation at a time.

Time: we finish at half eleven, and I'll finish on time.

Notice how much of that is boring administrative detail. And notice that boring administrative detail is exactly what a room needs to relax.

05 The two lines everybody skips

On screen O and R, circled

Two of those seven get dropped almost every time, and they're the two doing the most work.

Open, the scope line, is the one that prevents the tangent. Without it, at eleven o'clock somebody raises pricing, it's a fair point, and you have no basis for parking it except your own authority. With it, you point at the flipchart and it's a decision the room already agreed to.

And Roles. Without it, the room spends an hour working out whether you're secretly the decision-maker, and whether Priya will overrule whatever they come up with. That uncertainty makes people cautious, and cautious people give you their second-best thinking.

Say who decides. Out loud. Even when it's obvious, and especially when the answer is 'not me.'

0:49 · then: a flipchart on the wall, all day

Then leave it visible. All day. Flipchart on the wall, a slide you can flip back to, or pinned in the shared doc if you're remote.

It becomes the thing you point at instead of the thing you argue about. 'That's a good question, and it's out of scope, look.'

Pointing is easier than debating, and it moves the authority from you to a thing the room already agreed. You'll use it four or five times a day.

06 Working agreements

On screen a flipchart with three handwritten lines

Related move, and it takes about seven minutes.

Ask the room what has to be true for today to work. Take suggestions. Write them up in their words, not yours. Three to five is plenty, and more than five is nobody remembering any of them.

And you must let them write it. Not you.

Facilitator-written rules get ignored, because they're your rules and you're a guest. Group-written rules give you something to point at, and here's the part that matters: when you point at it, it's the group intervening, not you.

Three almost always earn their place, if you need to steer. One conversation at a time. Phones down during silent work. And disagree with the idea rather than the person.

0:48 · then: "One conversation at a time. That's yours, not mine."

Seven minutes is real time, so here's what you're buying.

Halfway through the morning, a senior person talks over somebody more junior for the third time.

Option one: you tell them to stop interrupting, in front of their team. That's a career-limiting move in a lot of organisations, which is why you won't do it, and why it happens a fourth time.

Option two: you point at the flipchart. 'One conversation at a time. That's yours, not mine.' Light, slightly wry, a reminder rather than a rebuke.

Same intervention. Completely different risk. That's the seven minutes.

07 Opening a room that doesn't want to be there

On screen folded arms, back row

One harder case, because it will happen. You open and the room is visibly unwilling. Arms folded. Somebody says 'so is this another one of these' out loud in the first minute.

Don't fight it and don't out-enthusiasm it. Enthusiasm against a resistant room reads as not listening, and it makes things worse.

Name it instead. 'I get the sense some of you have been in sessions like this that went nowhere. Fair enough. Here's what's different today, and if by half ten you think I'm wrong, tell me and we'll change it.'

Then be specific: the outcome is written down, the decision-maker is in the room, and here's what happens to the output on Monday.

You can't talk a room out of scepticism. You can acknowledge it and earn the first twenty minutes.

08 The check-in round

On screen "One word: how are you arriving?"

One more opening move, worth the two minutes it costs. A check-in round. Go round, one at a time, and ask something small. 'One word for how you're arriving today.'

Three jobs, and only one of them is warmth.

It gets every voice into the room once, early, on something safe. The first time you speak in a group is the hardest, and after that the barrier drops, so get it out of the way while the stakes are nothing.

It tells you who's distracted, which you'll want at eleven o'clock when somebody seems disengaged.

And it makes the room a group rather than an audience.

Keep it strictly to one word, and model it yourself first, or it becomes six minutes of updates.

09 Opening when you're not the senior person

On screen "Borrow the authority before you need it."

A situation you will absolutely be in: you're facilitating a room that contains people more senior than you.

Don't pretend the hierarchy isn't there, and don't try to out-rank it. Both fail.

Borrow the authority instead, out loud, in the frame. 'Priya's asked me to run today, and she's asked me to keep us to time, so if I cut anyone off, that's why.'

One sentence, and every intervention you make is now sanctioned by the most senior person in the room rather than by you.

Arrange it beforehand. Two minutes with the sponsor: 'Can you say at the start that I'm running the process and you're not deciding until the end?' Most say yes immediately, and it's the most useful thing they can do for you.

Then use it once, early, on something small, because the first time you hold a timebox against a senior person the room finds out whether your authority is real.

1:02 · then: cameras, chat, the shared doc

Remote openings need three things the in-person one doesn't.

Every voice in the room in the first three minutes. Someone who hasn't spoken by minute ten usually won't speak at all, so the check-in round isn't optional online, it's structural.

Say how you want the room to work. Cameras or not, and mean it either way. Chat or hands up. In a room that's obvious from the furniture. On a call nobody knows, so everybody waits.

And share the doc or board straight away, so people look at the work rather than at each other's faces.

10 The re-explain tax

On screen the explanation + the rescue + the lost momentum

Now the instruction itself, and I want to name the cost properly, because people think a fuzzy instruction costs a few seconds.

It costs three things. The time explaining it the first time. The time going round rescuing the tables that started wrong. And the momentum, which is the expensive one, because the tables that got it right have stopped, and you cannot get that energy back by asking for it.

So every unclear instruction costs you the activity twice, plus a chunk of the room's attention. Across a full day that's easily half an hour, and it's half an hour that feels like the room being slow rather than like a thing you did.

11 The 20-second framing

On screen WHAT · HOW LONG · ALONE OR TOGETHER · WHAT YOU PRODUCE

Here's the fix, and it's a fixed order. Four things, twenty seconds, before any context at all.

What we're doing.

How long you've got.

Whether it's alone or together.

And what you should have in front of you at the end.

That's it. Four things, always in that order.

0:19 · then: context, crossed out, moved after

And the order matters more than it looks.

People need the shape of the task before they can hear anything else about it. Open with two minutes of context and they spend it wondering what they're about to be asked to do, and they miss both.

So context after, if at all, and usually you gave it in the frame anyway.

The fourth item goes last because it's the one people leave out, and it's the one that does the most. 'What you should have in front of you at the end' tells people when they're finished, and a room that knows what finished looks like works twice as fast.

12 Before and after

On screen two versions of the same instruction, and five ways instructions fail

Same activity, two ways.

Here's the bad one, and I have genuinely said this: 'So, thinking about what we discussed earlier around the customer journey, and bearing in mind the constraints Priya mentioned, I'd love us to sort of capture some thoughts on where the friction really is, maybe in pairs, and then we'll see where we've got to.'

Nobody knows how long.

Nobody knows what to produce. 'Sort of capture some thoughts' means nothing, and 'maybe in pairs' makes the next ninety seconds furniture.

The good one: 'Three minutes, on your own, in silence. One friction point per sticky note. Five to ten of them by the end. Go.'

Twenty-two words, and nobody has to ask anything.

Five failures live in that bad one, so you can hear them in yourself. Hedging: 'maybe', 'sort of', 'if you want', and every hedge hands a decision to a room that doesn't want it. No number, because 'spend a bit of time on this' is not a timebox. No artifact, so they stop when the talking stops. Two instructions at once, so they do the first and forget the rest. And burying it inside ninety seconds of talking.

13 Demonstrate, don't describe

On screen a facilitator holding up one completed sticky note

For anything with more than two steps, stop describing and show one.

Hold up a single sticky note with a real example on it. Do one round of the thing yourself, out loud.

Ninety seconds of demonstration replaces four minutes of explanation and lands better, because people copy what they've seen far more reliably than what they've heard.

And do it badly on purpose. If your example is beautifully written in neat handwriting, everyone slows down to match it. Make it scruffy and you've set the standard at 'quick and rough', which is what most divergent activities need. The example you show is the quality bar, whether you meant it to be or not.

14 Check it landed, then stop talking

On screen "Does that make sense?" crossed out · "Say go. Then be quiet."

Now a habit worth breaking. 'Does that make sense?' cannot get you useful information.

Everyone nods. Nodding costs nothing, and saying no in front of eleven people costs something. So you get a room of nods and three tables doing the wrong thing.

Two better options. Ask somebody to say it back: 'Marcus, what are we doing for the next three minutes?' Slightly bold, entirely normal once you've done it twice, and it catches the ambiguity instantly. Or ask for the question rather than the confirmation: 'What's unclear about that?' It presumes something is, which gives permission.

Then say go, and stop talking. That's the hard part. Don't add the helpful clarification. Don't add the reassuring aside. Don't add 'and don't worry if you can't think of many.'

Every sentence after 'go' competes with people actually starting. And those additions are the vaguest sentences you'll say all day, because they're improvised, so you're diluting a clear instruction with an unclear one at exactly the wrong moment.

1:06 · then: a count to seven

And when you ask what's unclear and nobody answers, don't fill it: count to seven, because that silence is people checking your instruction against what they're about to do, and somebody usually goes at four or five.

Silence as a way of getting participation is module six's job. Here it's just how you find out whether the instruction landed.

15 When the instruction has already failed

On screen three tables doing three different things

And the recovery, because this will happen even when you do everything above.

You've said go, and it clearly hasn't landed. Two tables are talking about the wrong thing and one is looking at you.

Stop the whole room. Don't go table to table, which is the instinct, and which costs six minutes and tells each table separately that they got it wrong.

'Hang on, stop a second. That was my fault, I wasn't clear. Here it is again in one sentence.' Then the twenty-second version cleanly, with the artifact line added.

Taking the blame is accurate, because it was your instruction, and it keeps the room willing to admit confusion later.

Then give the time back. 'Three minutes from now.' A room that's had a false start needs the clock reset, or it rushes, and rushed output is worse than no output.

16 The practice

On screen This week's practice · three instructions to rewrite

Here's your one thing. Three instructions, all real, each bad in a different way.

The first rambles. 'Okay so what I'd like to do now, if that's alright, is get you thinking a bit about the risks, we touched on some earlier, and maybe jot a few down, or talk about them with the people near you, whichever works, and then we'll pull it together.'

The second is the customer journey one from a few minutes ago, with 'sort of capture some thoughts' in it.

The third sounds competent and never says what the group is meant to end up with. 'Right, let's spend the next ten minutes on this. Get into your groups, have a proper conversation about what's actually blocking the release, and be as honest as you can. I'll come round, and then we'll hear back from everyone.'

Rewrite each as a twenty-second framing. What, how long, alone or together, what you produce, in that order.

Then read all three out loud. On your own, in a room, properly. Not in your head.

Anything you stumble on is something the room won't understand either, and you'll find at least one. Everybody does. The stumble only shows up out loud.

17 Callback close

On screen the board game, rules card face up

Nobody cheated at that game. Nobody was stupid. The rules were fine.

They got explained once, badly, in ninety seconds, while everyone was busy doing something else. And then four people played a slightly different game for the rest of the night, and lost to the one person who'd read them.

That's a workshop with a weak frame and a fuzzy instruction. Everyone's trying. Everyone's playing a slightly different game.

Read the rules out before you deal the cards.

0:31 · then: Next: Module 6 - Creating Participation

The room now understands what you're asking. That's not the same as everyone actually contributing.

Because the default state of any group, in every room, on almost every day, is that three people talk and everybody else waits. That's module six.

## The practice (recap)

Three supplied instructions, each bad in a different way: the rambling one about risks, the customer journey one with "sort of capture some thoughts" in it, and the ten-minute group conversation that never says what the group produces. Rewrite each as a 20-second framing: what, how long, alone or together, what you produce. Then read all three out loud, on your own, in a room, properly. Anything you stumble on is unclear.

## Callback

The rules were fine. They got explained once, badly, while everyone was doing something else, and then four people played a different game all night. Read the rules out before you deal the cards.