Let’s be honest, how comfortable do you feel facilitating workshops? Of course, there are ready-made facilitation formats for all possible aspects of domain modeling and software architecture. However, as a facilitator, you also have to deal with a group of individuals in the workshop who may want to contribute or enforce their own opinions or ideas. This can be frightening or even go as far as not daring to organize a workshop that makes sense in terms of content.

I felt the same way at the beginning of my career. Later on I worked as an agile coach for a few years and had to facilitate, I had to deal with the mechanisms and tension curves of workshops and was able to practice a lot. Today, I benefit greatly from these experiences in my work as a software architect.

In this talk I want to share my facilitation toolset and my facilitation philosophy with you. I will talk about my experiences - both good and bad. We will look at the role and responsibility of the facilitator, debunk facilitation myths and take a brief excursion into systems thinking to better understand how to guide a group to work constructively without ignoring the individuals and their personal perspectives.