Hi Hans,
There’s not much point in repeating what I have already said in other posts. Certainly having 2 facilitators is better than one, and with 16 participants, you may end up working with 4 tables. With one client I had a project team of about the same number of people and we split them into two large tables of 8, until the end of the day, when they all came together, we physically put the tables together and the whole project team built a shared model and then we filmed the team’s story and played it to senior management at an executive dinner later that evening.
One thing that, as facilitators, we may sometimes forget, is that the “teams” we meet in the workshop room do not necessarily all work with each other on daily basis. The project manager may sit regularly with the financial director, the chief architect and the project assistant, but not necessarily with the foreman in charge of factory floor workers. Meanwhile the engineer, may spend a lot of time with the architect and the factory floor workers, but doesn’t deal with the financial manager or the project assistant. My point is that splitting up the team is not a bad thing to do and may well be recommended if you can force people who don’t work together on a daily basis to sit, chat, ponder and build together at one table and split up the people who sit in front of each other all day in the office.
What is great about sub-groups is that usually there are a lot of common themes coming about of the individual tables – this is a fantastic message to learn for all participants: “even when we work in our silos, we are still on the same page”.
In any case, good luck with your workshop preparation.
Eli
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