Using AI in Facilitation: 5 Powerful Ways to Successfully Align Ideas

Using AI in facilitation, if you facilitate workshops like me, you know that collaborative aligning of ideas can be a challenging yet vital part of a successful session. It’s one of those moments where participants come together to make sense of the creative chaos—a time when we take all the scattered thoughts generated during a diverging phase and work towards coherence, shared understanding, and meaningful insights.

But can AI truly help with this process? Let’s dive into using AI in facilitation, particularly in aligning ideas, and explore the reality behind the hype.

The Art of Aligning: Why It’s So Tricky

After a session of brainstorming or divergent thinking, we typically enter the aligning phase—the time to regroup ideas, find connections, and create meaningful alignments. Sounds simple, right? Well, as every facilitator knows, aligning is deceptively complex. It’s not just about physically grouping sticky notes or ideas; it’s about:

• Sense-Making: Uncovering deeper insights and patterns from a pile of raw ideas.
• Ownership: Allowing participants to feel that they are part of the journey, that they’ve co-created and owned the resulting insights.

The challenge lies in making sure that participants don’t just superficially group ideas but actually derive something meaningful—something that answers the focus question of your workshop. Many times, aligning activities fall short because there is either no clear strategy or the strategy used is weak, leading to shallow, uninspiring insights.

Enter AI: Can It Really Help?

The idea of using AI in facilitation has gained momentum in recent years, and for good reason—it’s fast, scalable, and efficient. Imagine having hundreds of ideas automatically Aligned and labelled in under a minute! It’s an exciting prospect, and it was one of the reasons I personally began exploring AI tools in facilitation.

However, using AI in facilitation has its limitations, and understanding these limitations is key to using it effectively.

The Double Failure of AI Aligning

Let’s cut to the chase. AI fails twice when it comes to aligning ideas in a workshop setting.

1. Lack of Ownership

If AI does all the work of aligning, where does that leave the participants? Using AI in facilitation isn’t just about producing results quickly; it’s about the journey—the discussions, the debates, and the moments of realisation that lead to ownership of the final output.

If you rely entirely on AI to align the ideas, you lose a significant part of the collaborative process. Participants miss out on that sense of contribution, of understanding why ideas have been grouped together, and of having a say in what makes sense to them. Using AI in facilitation might give us efficiency, but it often sacrifices human connection and ownership along the way.

2. Weak Aligning Strategies

AI, particularly tools like Chat GPT or Miro’s AI-powered aligning features, relies on something called “embeddings”—a way to convert the meaning of words into numbers and calculate their similarity. It then uses algorithms to align based on this “semantic similarity.”

While this approach can be helpful, it lacks the nuanced understanding that a skilled facilitator brings to the table. AI doesn’t inherently understand the deeper context of your focus question or the subtleties of workshop dynamics. The result? Alignments based on surface-level similarity, rather than a deeper, more strategic approach that connects with the workshop’s purpose.

How to Make AI Work for You in Facilitation

So, is there a place for using AI in facilitation? Absolutely—but only if you rethink how you use it.

Instead of replacing participants or attempting to automate the aligning process end-to-end, consider using AI in facilitation as a sidekick. Use it to assist participants, to speed up certain parts of the process, or to add another perspective that might spark deeper insights.

Here are four practical ways to use AI for what I like to call Power Aligning in facilitation:

Before the Workshop: Defining an Aligning Strategy

A key to successful aligning is having a solid strategy from the start—and using AI in facilitation can help with this!

• Use Chat GPT to Explore Aligning Strategies: Before your workshop, you can use Chat GPT to help brainstorm alternative aligning strategies. Feed it your focus question, and ask it to propose different ways ideas might be aligned to your goals. This can help you clarify your approach and prepare for the divergent and convergent phases of your workshop.

During the Workshop: Enhancing Participant Connections

Using AI in facilitation can also be a helpful tool during the workshop itself, but not as a replacement—rather, as a guide that participants can use to go deeper.

• Insight Extraction with AI: Miro’s AI features can be used to analyse ideas and highlight insights based on your chosen aligning strategy. Rather than letting AI align all the ideas for you, use it to prompt participants to think differently. For instance, ask the AI to reveal connections between certain ideas and let participants use these prompts as a springboard for their aligning discussions.

Labelling Alignments with AI

Another common hurdle in aligning is naming the alignments—a process that often leads to generic or uninspired labels.

• Leverage Chat GPT for Label Suggestions: Instead of relying on basic AI labelling, create a custom GPT prompt that takes your group of ideas and suggests labels that resonate deeply with your focus question. This approach works for both in-person and virtual workshops and ensures that the alignments are not only labelled but labelled meaningfully.

After the Workshop: When Time Is Tight

Sometimes, you have more ideas than you can manage in a reasonable timeframe. This is where using AI in facilitation can step in to save the day—carefully.

• Using AI for Bulk Aligning: When faced with hundreds of ideas and limited time, a tool like Airtable combined with GPT prompts can help extract insights from each idea and align them meaningfully. However, be mindful: this method sacrifices some level of participant ownership, so balance its use depending on your workshop goals.

AI in Facilitation: The Real Potential

To answer the question, can AI align ideas for real?: The answer is yes, but only if you reframe its role. Using AI in facilitation is not a replacement for human creativity and the collaborative sense-making process that participants go through during a workshop. However, it can be a fantastic support—a way to speed up certain parts of the process, uncover new perspectives, and enhance the depth of the aligning activity.

Rethink AI’s Role in Your Workshops

If you want to succeed in using AI in facilitation, here are a few steps to get you started:

1. Map Your Aligning Process: Understand every step of your aligning activities, from the initial design to the final wrap-up.
2. Identify Where AI Can Help: Pick a step and ask, “How can using AI in facilitation help me and my participants achieve Power Aligning here?”
3. Start Experimenting: Test AI as a pre-workshop assistant, as a real-time insight generator, or as a post-workshop aligning tool. Experiment, reflect, and adjust.

Remember, AI is a tool, not a crutch. The real magic happens when participants are engaged, involved, and feel a sense of ownership over the insights they help to generate. When you combine using AI in facilitation with the expertise that only a human facilitator can bring, you get the best of both worlds.

What Do You Think?

Have you used AI for aligning ideas in your workshops? How did it go? I’d love to hear your thoughts—whether you’re a beginner just exploring these concepts or an experienced facilitator who’s integrated using AI in facilitation into your practice.

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