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Facilitation Skills: Lead Groups to Better Decisions
633 students
Facilitation Skills: Lead Groups to Better Decisions
facilitation skills | group decision making | meeting facilitation | OKR | team alignment | problem solving | workshops
Last updated 9/2026
English
English [Auto],
What you'll learn
- Prepare a session properly: the goal, the participants, the agenda, the timing
- Open a session so the group works rather than waits for you to talk
- Keep a group focused, and handle the person who dominates every discussion
- Close with named owners and dates instead of general agreement
- Frame a problem with 5W1H and SCQA so the group solves the right one
- Break a question down with a MECE tree so nothing gets missed
- Prioritise with Pareto and an impact-against-cost matrix
- Run structured idea generation with SCAMPER, six hats and TRIZ
- Keep alignment between sessions using an OKR cycle
- Learn alongside Mike's 1.6 million students from 185 countries
Explore related topics
Course content
14 sections • 38 lectures • 16h 55m total length
Requirements
- Responsibility for getting a group to a decision, formally or not
- No facilitation training required. Everything starts from the beginning
- One real upcoming session you can prepare using the material
- English at intermediate level or above, since all lessons are in English
- Willingness to talk less in a meeting than you currently do
Description
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
The meeting went well. Everyone agreed. Three weeks later nothing has changed and nobody can quite remember what was decided.
What actually happens in the room
Two people talk for most of the hour. A third has the objection that matters and does not raise it, because raising it would take twenty minutes the group does not appear to have. The question on the agenda is a symptom rather than the actual problem, so even a good answer to it will not help. And at the end there is a general nod, which is not a decision — it is the absence of disagreement, and those are different things. Nobody leaves with a name against an action, so the next meeting starts by reconstructing this one.
What this course covers
Thirty-six lessons across four layers. The session itself: what the facilitator's role costs you, formulating a goal precise enough to reach, selecting participants as a decision in its own right, opening, keeping focus, gathering and generating, choosing priorities, closing with named owners, handling the dominant participant, reaching genuine alignment, timing, online formats, large rooms and international groups. Then how a room behaves: Dale's cone, group norms, the four phases from acquaintance to closing, resistance, facilitation against moderation, and metaphor as a working device. Then who is in the room: MBTI, DISC, PAEI, Belbin's roles, the Hogan assessment and the Big Five, including how to read a type in conversation without any test. Then the quality of the decision itself: framing with 5W1H and SCQA, MECE trees, five whys and Ishikawa, confirming a cause is real, Pareto and the theory of constraints, impact-against-cost prioritisation, structured idea generation with SCAMPER and six hats, TRIZ, morphological analysis, and a full script for running a group from analysis to plan using the nominal group technique and Delphi. Finally the part most facilitation training omits: the mechanism that holds alignment between sessions, through a full OKR cycle with real company cases.
A note on the last block
The final lesson of the goal-setting block covers how objectives connect to performance review, multi-source feedback, pay and development — organisational systems rather than facilitation. It is there because those connections are what usually distort goals in practice, and knowing where the distortion comes from is useful even if you never own those systems yourself.
Who is teaching this
I am Mike. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.
What is included
Lifetime access to all 36 lessons
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
A Udemy Certificate of Completion
Working models: the preparation stages, 5W1H, SCQA, MECE, five whys, Ishikawa, Pareto, the decision matrix, SCAMPER, six hats, TRIZ, nominal group, Delphi, the OKR cycle
Real implementation cases from Google, Intel, Preply and iDeals
Where to start
Take the last decision your team made in a meeting and check whether anyone's name is attached to it. If not, it was not a decision. Enrol now and start today.
Who this course is for:
- Managers whose meetings end in agreement and produce no change
- Team and project leads aligning people who do not report to them
- Consultants and internal advisers running workshops for clients
- Product and operations leads deciding with cross-functional groups
- Founders whose team defers to them and calls it consensus
- Anyone running a strategy session for the first time
- Facilitators who can hold a room but cannot keep alignment afterwards