Facilitate mode is a way of working on a tab, made for running a session with your team: a retrospective, a town hall, a lean coffee, a planning workshop or a quick icebreaker. It puts the tools that run a room in front of you (timers, dot votes, polls, reveals, quizzes, stickers) and keeps them out of the way when you are drawing a diagram.
Facilitate is one of the five editor modes, beside Diagram, Draw, Illustrate and Plan, and it is on for everyone: there is nothing to turn on in Settings.
What Facilitate Mode Changes
- The palette offers Shapes, Draw (text, notes, tables and frames, then the pens and arrows), Icons, Stickers, Media and Data, then the session kit: Ask (votes, polls, quizzes, estimates and the Q&A board) and Session, which holds Tools, Record, React, Selection Mode and Navigate down its side, from the timer and reveal to the agenda, the reactions and the places Avatars walk to. Session's search looks through all of them. Draw keeps what a session uses, leaving out Page, Annotation, Shape Pen, Polygon, Mind node, Flowchart, Lane, Timeline and Sankey; search still adds any of them. See Collaborate.
- The bottom-right corner gains the Timer, Vote and Poll buttons, right after Undo and Redo. See Session Tools.
- Everything else works as in Diagram mode: selection, arrows, text, sticky notes, snapping, undo and shortcuts.
What Moved Out of Diagram
Diagram mode is for diagrams, so the session kit now lives here:
- The Collaborate elements and Stickers are no longer in Diagram's palette. Diagram keeps the Comment panel and the Action card in its Write category, since comments and actions belong to every mode.
- The Timer, Vote and Poll buttons are no longer in Diagram's bottom-right corner.
- Nothing on your tabs changes. Session elements already on a tab keep working in every mode: a session button still starts its timer, a reveal zone still reveals and a quiz still takes answers.
- The element search still finds them. Search for "timer" or a sticker from Diagram mode and it is still there, under Elements From Other Modes, and it is placed without switching mode. See Toolbar Layout.
Switching Modes
- Press the mode switch and choose Facilitate, or press Shift+D until you reach it. The switch sits beside the menu button at the top left.
- On a phone there is no mode switch: open the tab menu and open its Mode section and choose Facilitate.
- One mode for everyone: the mode belongs to the tab, so when someone who can edit switches it, everyone on the tab moves to Facilitate together, and Undo switches it back.
- Participants and viewers have no mode switch: they see the tab in its mode. Participants take part in everything that is running (they vote, answer polls and add sticky notes); viewers watch.
Starting a Session
- A new document: in the New Document wizard, choose Facilitate. The empty tab opens on Start Facilitating: the session templates grouped as Retrospectives, Meetings, Spaces, Quizzes & Games, Workshops, Planning, Strategy and Decisions, with Recommended first. Blank Session (or the ×) leaves one empty tab in Facilitate mode.
- Session templates open in Facilitate: the retrospectives (Retrospective, Start, Stop, Continue, Mad, Sad, Glad, 4Ls and Sailboat), Town Hall Q&A, Lean Coffee, Crazy Eights, Meeting Agenda, the Workshop Board and the Brainstorm Board, and the boards that come with a dot vote (Affinity map, Prioritization matrix and Risk matrix), so the vote is there to run from the Session strip. So do the quizzes and games: a Pub Quiz of timed quiz rounds with a scoreboard, Icebreaker Questions spun on pickers, Two Truths and a Lie and Would You Rather on live polls, and Find Someone Who Bingo. So do the spaces to walk round together in Avatar mode: the Virtual Office, a Coworking Space, a Team Pod and an All-Hands Hall. Team Retro stays in Plan mode, since it is a board of cards.
- Any tab: switch it to Facilitate when the session starts, and back to Diagram when you are done. Everything on it stays where it is.
Share a Participant pass with everyone in the session, so they can vote, answer polls and add sticky notes, and hand the facilitator baton to whoever is running it, so only they start and end the tools.
Take the Tour
The first time you work in Facilitate, a short Facilitate tour offers to show you around: the Collaborate categories, the Session strip and Share. It's optional, and you can replay it from Settings.
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