A mural is a great place to collaborate asynchronously, but it’s also perfect for leading group sessions or meetings. If you’re in charge of leading one of these sessions, we call that “facilitating.” To make your facilitation fun and easy, MURAL gives facilitators a few extra tools called Facilitation Superpowers®. Here’s a brief overview of who can facilitate in MURAL and what tools they have at their disposal when leading a working session.

If you’re the creator of a mural, you’re automatically a facilitator in that mural. You can also designate other members or guests in your mural as facilitators. Visitors can’t be facilitators.

If you’re ever in doubt, you can see if you’re a facilitator in the top bar of the mural you’re working in.

For more on giving others facilitation privileges in a mural you own, see our Assign Facilitation Superpowers article.

When you’re leading a session, you should have a few tricks up your sleeve. MURAL’s Facilitation Superpowers are those tricks. Whether you need a way to draw people’s attention or want to see all the ideas in your mural organized sequentially, you’ll find a feature for that in your toolkit as a facilitator.

Most (but not all!) of the these features live in the top bar of a mural:

We cover each feature in more detail in our Facilitation Superpowers article. For now, here’s a quick description of the most commonly used features.

As the all-powerful one in charge, sometimes you’ll need to bring your collaborators together to one spot on your mural. You can do that by summoning everyone to your cursor on the canvas. When you summon participants, they’re immediately brought to where you are on the canvas.

When you’re running the show, you might add objects to the canvas ahead of time to help keep things organized. To ensure these don’t get moved around during your session, you can use facilitator lock, which means the objects can only be unlocked by a facilitator (that’s you or someone else you’ve designated a facilitator!).

With private mode, everyone in your mural can add content without others seeing what they’re adding. This adds anonymity to your session if you’re discussing something sensitive or planning a mural-based surprise!

A regular old cursor doesn’t do much to draw the eye, especially when a lot of your coworkers probably stare at their own cursor all day anyway. So why not turn your mouse pointer into a laser pointer! As a facilitator, you can do just that. When you have the laser pointer enabled, your cursor turns into a colorful trail your participants can more easily follow around your mural.

Whether you’re leading a five-minute icebreaker or a twenty-minute retrospective, it’s important to keep an eye on the clock. And with the facilitator timer feature, you can do that right in your mural. You can customize the duration of the timer and even choose the sound you most prefer to play to all of your participants once time is up.

The outline is one of the best things about being a facilitator because it lets you take all of the ideas in your mural and organize them in an order that makes sense for you—regardless of where they fall on your canvas. By setting up an outline ahead of time, you can ensure you move from one point to the next without missing a beat when the time comes to lead your session.

As a facilitator, you can anticipate what sorts of activities you’re going to lead your participants through. And that knowledge can inform what objects they’ll need access to. For example, maybe you know your participants will need sticky notes, but you don’t want them to be able to add images to your mural. With the custom toolbar feature, you can choose what your collaborators see in the left sidebar of your mural, removing any options that aren’t needed for your particular session. Think of this as full creative control to help keep your meeting on track!

Remember, this is just the start of what you have at hand when facilitating in MURAL. For more information, see our full Facilitation Superpowers article.