Meetings. We’ve been to them, and until you lock down that mythical job making money without any human interaction, they’re a necessity of doing business. But too many meetings drag on and on without any clear outcome. If you’ve ever been tasked with running a meeting, you’re a facilitator. And if you want to make the experience awesome (or at least not bad), then this talk is for you.

Yvonne Chen will share her experience, insight, and actual techniques and tips that you can apply to any meeting. What should you prep when you’ll be facilitating a meeting? What tools can you deploy during a meeting to make sure it stays on track? How do you wrangle someone who’s sucking all the oxygen out of the room? Come learn about how you as a facilitator can own a meeting and really mean it when you say, “Thanks, everyone – good meeting!”

Session Outcomes:
• Your role as the facilitator
o What IS facilitation? What is it not?
o When do you step in and when do you sit back
o 15 techniques on how to keep things moving along
• Recommended tools you should be using as a facilitator
• Recommended skills you should have as a facilitator

Session Prerequisite:
There are no prerequisites other than a desire to be a better facilitator.
This talk is aimed at helping us understand the various factors – whether physical, verbal, non-verbal, etc., – that will compel people to listen to what you have to say and move a group towards agreement.

Target Audience:
This talk is suitable for anyone who works with other people in a team and is open to all skill levels. On agile teams, scrum masters and BAs will specifically find this talk relevant.