When facilitating a session, time is often the dimension that gets away from us and is the undoing of an otherwise wonderful event.

You are facilitating a session It’s an important topic – that’s why it’s on the agenda and has been allocated the time. You know how much time that is, because you are familiar with clocks, with the passage of time and with the agreement of how much time your session has been given. You know it would be disrespectful to take up more time, because there are other presenters and sessions to consider too.

So you won’t glance around the room at the organisers and participants and mutter, ‘I’m looking at the time,’ as if it were somehow running independently of what you have chosen to do with it. No, you know how time seems to go faster when it’s your session, so you have accounted for that in your design, and if things go slightly differently from how you expected, then you adjust. You are an improviser. It’s what you do. And that’s why you confidently state, ‘We have a full ten minutes for the next breakout group discussion,’ even though you know you’d planned for 20.

Are you an accomplished facilitator or new to running workshops? Do you want to get even better? We run several masterclasses every year and you’re welcome to join any of them. Contact us and we’ll tell you more about the upcoming workshops.