Unique Challenges When Facilitating FMEAs

“Interdependent people combine their own efforts with the efforts of others to achieve their greatest success.” Stephen Covey

If you’ve been reading the FMEA facilitation series, by now you understand the primary facilitation skills. Studying and applying these skills will help you achieve excellent results in FMEA applications.

Here are links to previous articles in this series:

Facilitating FMEAs

Facilitation Skill # 1: Encouraging Participation

Facilitation Skill #2: Controlling Discussion

Facilitation Skill #3: Asking Probing Questions

Facilitation Skill # 4: Asking Thought-starter Questions

Facilitation Skill # 5: Active Listening

Facilitation Skill # 6: Making Decisions

Facilitation Skill # 7: Managing Conflict

Facilitation Skill # 8: Brainstorming

Creativity and FMEA

Challenging FMEA facilitation problems and how to remedy

Sometimes, in spite of the best intentions and training, facilitators run into difficulty getting the team on the right track. Two of the more difficult facilitation problems follow, with brief advice on how to remedy. Other common facilitation problems are covered in my book, Effective FMEAs.

Someone dominates the meetings

During FMEA team meetings, sometimes there is one person who continues to dominate discussion. If the problem persists, here are a few possible remedies.

1. Ensure that every effort has been made to balance discussion according to the principles of “encouraging participation” and “controlling discussion,” and referring to meeting norms.
2. As facilitator, make sure that you understand the most recent point made by the person who is dominating the meeting discussion. Tell this person that you understand the point they are making and ask them to listen while other team members can provide their input to the discussion.
3. If this does not remedy, take a break and talk over the problem with the person. Make sure they understand the need for balanced input from all meeting participants. In most cases, this will resolve the problem.
4. If all else fails, the person dominating the discussion will need to be replaced. The success of the FMEA depends on balanced input from all team members.

Ineffective or weak facilitation

Learning facilitation skills requires a combination of learning the various facilitation techniques and learning how to lead groups of people. Group leadership skills can be learned; however, the path for someone who has difficulty being assertive or tends to be overly quiet in front of a group of people is more challenging. Assertiveness and leadership skills take time to develop. Where facilitation students have difficulty leading FMEA teams, the following are suggestions to enhance their group leadership skills.

1. Review each of the facilitation techniques to be sure they are well internalized and can be applied in theory.
2. Request help from fellow students or practitioners to role-play each of the facilitation techniques. The facilitation student needs to practice leading groups with various scenarios role-played by colleagues.
3. Identify which scenarios are most challenging to the facilitation student, and those specific techniques should be further drilled and practiced.
4. Assign an experienced FMEA facilitator to team up with the facilitation student to co-lead a series of FMEA projects. Feedback will be important to identify areas of weakness for further practice.

Continue this process until the facilitator gains confidence and is able to assertively and successfully lead FMEA teams and apply each of the facilitation techniques without difficulty.

Tip

Good team facilitation requires “eyes on the team” to see who is participating and to work with the team to encourage participation. It is often helpful to use a “scribe” to enter FMEA information into the FMEA software. This allows the facilitator to focus on the team members, rather than on the FMEA entries. If you use a “scribe”, be sure the person understands FMEA basics, to avoid wrong information being entered into FMEA columns.

FMEA Facilitation Quiz

Scenario

You are facilitating an FMEA meeting, and the group is having trouble developing effective recommended actions for a known cause. The best facilitation tool to address this scenario is . . . (Select all that apply.)

1. Use conflict management techniques to find and address the obvious conflict that is holding up the group.
2. Use active listening to try to understand better what the group is saying.
3. Use brainstorming to open up the flow of ideas.
4. Use probing questions to solicit more participation from everyone in the group.

Solution

1. Use conflict management techniques to find and address the obvious conflict that is holding up the group.

False. Conflict management should be used when there is visible conflict, not when the team has bogged down.

2. Use active listening to try to understand better what the group is saying.

False. Although good listening is helpful, it is not the best tool to find solutions to difficult problems.

3. Use brainstorming to open up the flow of ideas.

True. Brainstorming can open up the flow of ideas, resulting in list of creative solutions.

4. Use probing questions to solicit more participation from everyone in the group.

True. Probing questions may be helpful, although the best solution is brainstorming.

Next Article

It is increasingly important to manage the time of everyone who is involved in FMEAs. The next article addresses time management skills and provides tips on how to keep the FMEA team moving as quickly as possible towards the overall FMEA objectives.