The role of the moderator - A.K.A. facilitator - business meetings

RELease 1.0, March 31, 1993

Moderating a meeting is like editing, but in realtime: It requires both skills and some understanding of the content. The skills are a sense of organization and sequence, an understanding of what matters and what to leave out, and the ability to tease out the underlying meaning in a Jumble of statements, opinions and contradictions. Hany moderators reject tools that presume to do their Jobs (Just as editors may reject fancy text tools). But the tools can help them do their Jobs, and should be so positioned.

Implicitly or explicitly, the process of a meeting does need to be managed. In a two-person meeting, control is usually implicit and shared, although some people always interrupt (and may unknowingly alienate their partners). In small groups, likewise. there may be no formal control, or there may be someone to whom the others defer informally. All members may make comments, shift focus, etc. (But individuals' ability to influence a conversation varies; certain people -- or types of people -- get listened to more.)

Large or contentious meetings usually have designated moderators, whether it's simply the leader of the group, the senior person present, or some outside, ostensibly impartial person who can manage the process while understanding but (in theory) not influencing the content. A moderator may also be a participant, with knowledge of the content involved, and perhaps a stated or unstated interest in the outcome.

The moderator's job is not Just to keep order and be fair, but to lead the group to achieving its purpose, whatever that may be. There's always a trade-off between impartiality and knowledge of the content, between discovering the will of the group and influencing it. A moderator new to the group is open-minded and impartial, but unaware of the underlying currents or even of the explicit content. The more the moderator knows, the better she gets at knowing who makes sense, who talks too much without saying anything, who needs to be drawn out, why Juan always ignores Alice's ideas. But the truly knowledgeable moderator can't help but form her own opinions, and perhaps even take sides. Shouldn't the moderator then Join the group, because she may by now be wiser than most of those in it?

A good moderator doesn't Just keep a list of waiting speakers, but knows who has been heard and who needs to be heard. Even a good moderator can't know what each person will say, and may have difficulty maintaining the thread of an argument: "Okay, Juan, that's off the topic; we'll come back to it later on." This is where simultaneous idea-entering makes a lot of sense; after all the ideas are collected and organized, the meeting moves to the sortingout stage. Then only a human can make sure a tough topic is wrestled to the ground rather than slid over; only a human can say, "Enough is enough; let's vote!" Only the boss can say, "Enough is enough; we'll do it my way."

A good moderator also needs technical skills to use the kinds of tools we describe here. The companies we profile by and large have not yet reached their goal to make meetings self-managing -- with tools simple enough to allow all the participants to use them, and with protocols that allow for simultaneous data-entry at almost all times. Items needing decisions -- such as agendas, shifting from one mode to another, closing a vote or moving from topic to topic in a synchronous meeting -- could then be handled by a group itself without the need for a moderator.