How to run a great session
It's more than just good coffee.
Most people think the programme is the thing. The annual calendar, the ten meetings, the membership. It is not. A programme is just a stack of meetings, and a meeting is just a stack of sessions.
The session is the unit. It is the smallest thing that either works or does not, and if it fails, the meeting fails and the programme fails with it.
So if you want to get good at this business, you get obsessive about the single session. And every session is a patchwork of ingredients (i.e., people). It’s how you get everyone’s perspectives together in a way that is structured and coherent but still improvised in the moment. That is what makes a great session tick.
I’ve run enough sessions to hit a lot of “rinse, repeat” moments, and to get the patterns on what to avoid and what to look for. Balancing between structure and improvisation keeps it exciting. And how do you get an engaged session?
Well, first, there are many different types of sessions: something with 8-12 in the room or 25-30 in the room. In a larger forum, twenty or thirty people in the room, I want at least half of them to have actively said something by the time we finish. A small, high-candour peer group is different. There you want everyone to chime in, unless one of the participants says up front that they are passing on this one and the others accept the reason.
The format is a choice, not a default
The first mistake is treating the format as fixed. Speaker, then questions. That is the reflex, and it is lazy. A session is closer to theatre than to a lecture. You have a running order, a cast, a room to read, and a set of facilitation decisions about what to do: either structured beforehand or improvised in the heat of the moment.
Once you see it that way, the options open up. A classic presentation followed by Q&A. Or you lead the whole thing around two or three member commentators and bring in a domain expert afterwards as a stop gap or reflective perspective. Or you open with a five-minute framing off the cuff, followed by improvised group dialogue.
It’s like a film, actually. The James Bond film that opens with an action sequence. In the case of a session, the parallel would be to open with the case study on the table in all its rawness and novelty, and only afterwards unpack it and apply a methodology and some concepts to it.
People flatten all of this into three or four formats. It’s not a 1, 2, 3, or 4. In reality there is a 1A, a 1B, a 1C, and so on. There are many ways to switch it up, and the switching is most of the craft. More important is the specific context around the session:
Where is it inside the programme?
Who’s in the room?
How does the topic require a particular type of treatment?
What was any feedback given prior to that moment?
Guest stars can be useful and risky
Outside voices, consultants, experts, vendors, are worth having in the room. They fill the gaps the members are seeking. It’s a delicate balancing act between what the guest wants to say and what the members actually came for.
For example, a partner from a Big Four firm was speaking to a group of executives on post-M&A integration. He had a beautiful 50-slide deck, which he promised he’d go through quickly. During our briefing lunch, I suggested he just present slide 49. Slide 50 was blank with a “thank you” on it anyway, so that could be deleted. Slide 49 had the ‘10 do’s and don’ts’ of post-M&A integration. Slides 2-48 didn’t have to go into the bin, just moved to the appendix, to be flicked on screen if it was needed to reference any points during Q&A, unless I wanted to segue entirely into group dialogue, depending on whether the room wanted more clarifying questions or more experience-sharing among the participants. This is more applicable with thirty in the room than in a boardroom of twelve, and trimming his deck that way costs him nothing in how he comes across.
In a peer group session, you want to get straight to the gist of it. The expert is not the product. The peer exchange between the members is the product. You don’t want the guest speaker to make it seem you just provided an audience for their platform.
When you are not the expert in the room
You do not always have the expertise the room does. I ran finance sessions without being a finance person, and they worked, which surprised me at the time. Two things made that possible.
The first was a mental model my mentor gave me. Imagine the session is your living room and these are your guests. That’s all. Once I held it that way, I was comfortable, because hosting is something I know how to do, and the pressure to cover for my knowledge gaps as a non-CFO went away.
The second was what I called a stop gap. There was someone in the room from a bank talking about cash management. She was instructed not to sell her firm’s solutions, but she could jump in once we got to the more technical side of the discussion. That let me hover between the overview and briefly dip into a rabbit trail, then come back out and return to the main roadmap of the discussion.
A stop gap can take different shapes:
Someone sitting in the room as a commentator, expected to be called upon
Someone who leads part of the session at the start, or comes in later with their perspective
A co-chair or co-moderator, given real authority to take charge of the session
Two chefs in the kitchen actually work, in this case, if the dynamic between them is good and the preparation was sufficient. With that person in place, I could take an active role, ask real questions, even push into the substance myself, without the thing falling over, because the depth was covered.
There are many ways to design a session, and I can’t really do it justice in just one article. Again, it’s this balancing act between structure and improvisation. I feel a bit like a skipper in a rowing boat. Sometimes the boat drifts slightly off the line it should be on, so you let it go a little to the right or left. There’s momentum, and you don’t interrupt it. Maybe that’s how I visually make it work for myself.
Whether I was a skipper in a rowing boat or I was the court jester, you want to keep it real in the meeting. There’s enough digital content out there when people get together and interact in an asynchronous or synchronous moment. You want to make it as human as possible, which can even be done in virtual sessions.
Seeking the silence
The part you cannot put on the agenda is the quicksand moment. There’s a moment where you’re sitting in a room with 20 people, and it’s silent. Sounds like every moderator’s nightmare.
It could be that a profound thought is being digested by everyone. Could be the topic went a bit off. Someone rambled on. There’s a collective introversion.
Or people don’t know each other well enough and the session isn’t a pure peer group. For example, a quarter of the participants are R&D, a quarter is strategy, the rest are in different functional leadership roles plus a couple of general managers, and none of them arrived as a peer group. You cannot rely on the room to carry itself, because there’s no shared relationship to carry it.
So you intervene more. You stitch. You find the angle that makes one person’s problem relevant to the person across the table who does a completely different job. That stitching is a skill. Most facilitators panic in the silence instead and rush to fill it, going mechanically down a list of names. It feels like someone’s ticking boxes. That’s just the stuff of average.
So I learned to love the silences. The diversity of the room gives you an opportunity to switch perspectives and catch everyone a bit by surprise, so they don’t see the meeting running in a standard way. For this to work, you need a good deck of commentators and good planning.
One of the cards in that deck is my joker card. It’s someone I know well, whom I’ve called up before and asked to be a commentator, but who hasn’t been officially listed as one. I’ll prepare this person a few days ahead to make them like a hidden card for me, a commentator not on the pre-communicated agenda.
The joker card has two uses. If the room goes quiet, I can bring that person in casually, as if it were spontaneous, and often just having them primed changes the room before I even need to play the card: someone who’s been quieter suddenly leans forward, almost as if they feel they have to save the meeting, because the more extroverted, proactive participants have stopped jumping in. Or there really is silence, and that’s when I casually bring the joker card in. They were in on the game; everyone else thinks it’s a natural intervention.
This works well in larger forums. It’s not needed in smaller peer groups, because that’s a collective resource senior enough to manage on its own. And don’t forget the flip case: if your meeting is firecrackers and going really well, you still bring that person in, because they were prepared, and you use them to make a specific point or turn the discussion. Same card, two uses, depending on what the room is doing.
You are only as good as your last pizza
Here is the standard I hold all of this to. You can run the best forum or peer group in town, with the reputation and the members and the history, and none of it protects you. It’s like your favourite pizzeria that everyone loves: if the pizza is a bit less than amazing one day, everyone remembers.
Compare that to frozen pizza: made in a factory, shipped to the supermarket deep freeze, warmed up by whoever, however. It’s a different experience entirely from the pizzeria where someone made that pizza for you, that day, in front of you.
One session is the pizza. The meeting is the meal. If on any given evening, the antipasto was amazing, the dessert a real surprise, and the ambience was brilliant but the pizza was mediocre, then it’s the weakest link that takes down the whole experience. Get obsessive about the pizza. Get obsessive about every item of your guest’s evening at your restaurant. That’s the same thing with peer groups.