The basics of framing issues in facilitation

I've had a stretch of private reflection columns, so maybe I'll write something more business-y.

I often take the facilitation role in meetings, so here are the minimum issue-framing steps you should do in any meeting.
In a few recent meetings I was reminded again that getting issue-framing wrong is dangerous — hence this post.

In most meetings the goal is to set next actions, so I'll take that as the premise.

① Framing the issue
② Solutions (actions)
③ Decision criteria

As information, you need those three.

① Framing the issue
When deciding actions: what should we decide now?
Matching the purpose, decide which scope to discuss.
In spoken conversation content tends to diverge, so you need to set the granularity as appropriately as you can.

② Solutions
First put out the solutions that come to mind on the spot, and narrow to about three.
Sometimes the action ends up being "do research to raise the granularity of the solutions" — but even then you need a hypothesis, so put out solution options first.

③ Decision criteria
Make clear what the decision criteria are for choosing among the solutions in ②.
This feels missing in a lot of cases.
Clarifying it raises everyone's buy-in when acting, and it's useful when you look back after the action.

Also, when judging by decision criteria, you need information on where and how far the actions in ② reach in impact.
If that impact goes beyond one segment — other departments, for example — you need to check with those owners too.
(Otherwise you get "We weren't told," "Don't decide on your own" trouble later.)

By the way, in that sense, finishing everything in text alone often feels hard from experience (it can actually raise communication cost).
And for ③, if you take time and you're a small, high-context organization with strong coordination, it might be fine — but I suspect that's hard.

In many companies, ①②③ don't always proceed logically and fairly — political force can twist them.
When the people discussing prioritize self-preservation over purpose, useless actions get born, speed drops, and you end up pushing actions everyone already knows are meaningless.

That's all.