Guy W. Wallace’s PACT Facilitation Guidelines: # 10 – Be Legible on the Flip Chart

I call these “The 12 Rules and Guidelines of Proactive/Confrontational Facilitation for the PACT Processes for T&D.”

They are:

1. Go Slow to Go Fast. 2. Be Declarative. 3. Write Stuff and Post It. 4. Be Redundant by Design. 5. Use the Four Key Communications Behavior Types. 6. Review and Preview. 7. Write It Down and Then Discuss It. 8. Use Humor. 9. Control the Process and the Participants. 10. Be Legible on the Flip Chart. 11. Beware of Group-Think. 12. Assign Parking Lot Valets.

The 10th of these is covered in more detail in the following text.

Read them. Practice them. Reflect on them Adopt and/or Adapt them. Use them.

10. Be Legible on the Flip Chart
Another of my favorite rules is: “Neatness does not count; legibility does.”

Maybe it just suits my personality best, being somewhat messy.

Those who know me usually think differently. I’m a very structured person―I love structure and hate chaos. But once I get on a roll with the group, or more importantly, once they get on a roll, I don’t take a lot of time to write down their inputs so carefully that I slow them down.

I try to write fast. To keep up with them!

In fact, I write so fast and furiously that I have to make sure I don’t violate the legibility rule that means so much to whomever has to word-process my work afterward. Even when I have word-processed my own charts later, I have found that I was not always able to recall what the words were in my attempt to clean up my own mess. Or it “took a while” to do so.

So if you can’t do both, at least be legible if not always neat!

Close Enough?

I also try to walk around the room to “see” from the vantage points (or disadvantage points) of the attendees – what do the flip chart pages look like from their seats? Am I writing large enough? Do they have a pray of readuing my writing?

And then I adjust as necessary.

That often means pulling their tables/chairs closer to the action – my writing in response to their answers/statements to my questions. Whatever can be done to increase their visibility of the written words and line drawings.

Summary
Think about your attendees. Can they read what you write? Can you move them closer to the flip chart easle? Can they hear what you say – if they cannot get close enough (are there too many in the room for easy viewing?)?

In the future we’ll cover the remaining 2 rules/guidelines one-by-one!

Cheers!

– Sourced and edited/embellished from Appendices C of: “lean-ISD” – a book by Guy W. Wallace – available as a free 404 page PDF in 2007 at http://www.eppic.biz/

Book cover design by the late Geary Rummler in 1999.

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