Here's how you can address resistance and skepticism from participants during large group facilitation.

I love the suggestions that are here already. I like to engage with my audience and get involvement, so I find asking questions helps and I use an approach where you look for the alternative view or the 'no' voice. By raising the scepticism or making the opposite view overt, you can talk about it, address it and help the audience feel more comfortable and buy in. It's also OK, in fact it's good to have the sceptics. So welcoming them and being OK with the scepticism is also key from a facilitator mindset perspective. I try to practise neutrality as much as possible when facilitating as that alps helps me remain more open to other views and less attached to my own agenda.

From the very beginning you can create an environment of trust by walking around the room to greeting participants and playing welcome music. Other techniques I use are providing clarity about the agenda, intentions behind the session, and creating a culture agreement for each session. Each participant should introduce themselves, preferred name, and pronouns. The main intention here is make sure every participant feels seen and heard from the very beginning of the session. Creating a psychologically safe environment will enable conversations, questions, and experience sharing to happen more openly.

A powerful way to build trust with a group is by sharing your story, including details that the audience wouldn't know at first glance. In other words: the details that make you human. Consider your storytelling as the moment to disrupt first impressions and break through the preconceived ideas that a person could have about you or the conversation. When the audience receives information that defies their expectations, their resistance often naturally shifts into curiosity.

When facilitating large group sessions, I anticipate at least one person being skeptical or resistant to the content. By anticipating where there might be resistance or skepticism I can mentally prepare to address those concerns. As a facilitator, emotional intelligence is key here so that I can listen without taking the resistance personally. If it seems like its becoming a debate I go back to our team agreement for the session to ensure we stay within the behaviors appropriate for the organization and session.

Often, resistance and skepticism are protective mechanisms, approaches that leaders have developed to sustain in competitive environments. When I have an existing sense of contentious points, I'll proactively thank the skeptics for their unseen commitments. These unseen commitments could be daily behaviors like showing up everyday, meeting their performance goals, upholding ethics, etc. Through genuinely thanking people for their commitments, I am acknowledging and validating the "why" that underlies the resistance. Additionally, as the facilitator, change your expectation from having everyone agree with your perspective to having everyone consider your perspective. You lessen resistance in the room by reducing your own expectations.

One of the ways that I facilitate dialogue in a group setting is to make the content I am presenting on personal to the day to day experiences of the audience. Pairing up audience members to share about a personal experience that they have had to overcome in connection to the concepts implicitly communicates that their voices and perspectives matter and are welcomed in the space. This also increases the energy level of the group and spurs more subsequent dialogue between them and to me on the topic.

One of my favorite types of facilitations is to come into a space where I have no or limited experience because that way I can create space for the collective wisdom in the room to shine. Small group discussions can enable knowledge sharing then large group sharing so everyone can learn together.

To diffuse any resistance I use case studies, industry related examples, and data on why this content is relevant to the audience. This provides clarity on what we are trying to learn or solve for in the session.

A facilitator should be able to read the room and recognize if there is a break needed, take more time on a certain concept or move forward quickly if needed. There have been several instances where I planned a session along with the organizer/requestor but once the session started I uncovered a need that was not addressed and needed to completely pivot in another direction to care for the needs of the group before moving on with the content. Flexibility and anticipating having to adapt the content is important to have a successful session.