Effective Facilitation
- 2004 Jack Ricchiuto & Adele DiMarco Kious
What is Facilitation?
Facilitation is a process that leads individuals, groups, organizations or companies, from one state, condition or situation to another. Ideally, facilitation assists with the transition from a current, existing state or condition to a desired, envisioned state of what might be.
What is the Purpose of Facilitation?
The purpose of faciliation is to allow a community to experience a safe, catalyzing environment in which they can explore their passions, hopes, strengths and dreams and move toward manifesting them.
What is the Intention of Faciliation?
The intention of facilitation is to provide the safe, inspiring space that allows the collective wisdom of a community (family, organization, etc)to emerge so that become grounded in their sense of history and who they are and co-create a vision of their future to which they will communaly help manifest.
What does the Facilitation Process Involve?
The facilitation process involves leadership....artful, appreciative, inclusive, holistic leadership. Most often these leaders are referred to as facilitators. Facilitators lead a process that allows others who are participating in it to expressed the desires, hopes, dreams and fears. They create and nurture a space in which it feels safe to express these passions. The participants in a facilitated process are able to stay within their own boundaries and not be concerned about where the group is heading.
Is Everyone a Facilitator?
Ideally, every person on the planet has the potential to be an excellent facilitator. Like leadership, however, facilitation is an aquired skill that requires a great deal of self awareness, process consciousness, honesty, openness and willingness to not be attached to the outcome. Essentially, a facilitator is present to provide neutrality to any process so that the greatest outcome can emerge from the community; be that community 2,10, or 200 people. A person who is attacted to their own ideas about what outcome should manifest can not play a facilitator role as their are biassed. This bias removes neutrality from the group process.
What does Expert Faciliation make Possible?
Expert facilitation makes possible the best enagagement of people's strengths and passions in a process that is focused, collaborative, creative, and productive. Good facilitators are good leaders, coaches, consensus builders, theme identifiers, momentum builders, data hunters-and-gatherers, idea champions, creativity provokers, honesty and compassion models, network builders, process designers, common-ground developers, relationship nurturers, and community builders.
Are all Managers Facilitators?
Unless they are skilled in effective facilitation, good managers are unequipped for good facilitation. Expert facilitation is a specific competency that requires years of learning and mastery. Effective managers who are not expert facilitators do their best to engage expert facilitators when their group requires it.
What are the venues that call for facilitation?
Facilitation is needed any time a group needs to move from issues > understanding > ideas > consensus > action > success. This can be in the context of meetings, projects, retreats, planning sessions, and community events. Groups need skillful facilitation any time they have work they need to do together and usually in a context where the work needs to happen within limited resources and timeframes.
Who are the kinds of groups that benefit from facilitation?
There are many group scenarios indicating real value from facilitation. Here is a sample of the kinds of groups that benefit from good facilitation.
- Groups of people who have no success moving together from issues > understanding > ideas > consensus > action > success
- Groups of people who are used to being dependent on directive managers/leaders
- Groups of people who need to come to new levels of consensus on challenging opportunities
- Groups of people whose dominant culture is more deficiency-focused than appreciative
- Groups of people where diversity and differences are actual or potential obstacles to collaboration
- Groups of people where communication tends not to be open, honest, or compassionate
- Groups of people who are tackling new, sensitive, or complex issues and opportunities
- Groups of people where there are significant levels of caution, conflict, or mistrust
- Groups of people who know or believe that the leader has personal or hidden agendas
- Groups of people who have significant discomfort with ambiguity, uncertainty, or change
What happends when groups don't have good facilitation?
When groups don't have good facilitation, they can easily splinter into:
- People who do most of the work and people who do little or no work
- People with high commitment and people with low commitment
- People who participate in the setting of agendas, priorities, and invitations and those who don't
- People who claim ownership over a "one right way" of seeing or doing things
- People who are information haves (the cluefull) and those who are information have-nots (the clueless)
Skillful facilitation helps people in the group share responsibility, passion, information. It keeps people aligned, respectful peers and partners in the process.
What does a good relationship between a group and a facilitator look like?
Expert facilitators are partners and work collaboratively to craft the best process possible for the deliverables, givens, and constraints at hand.
They need to be engaged early on and throughout any group process - in all phases of planning, logistics, evaluation, and follow-up. Groups engaging facilitators need to understand both the scope and limits of the facilitator's content expertise, since all facilitators bring some kind of content expertise from their professional experience and development. Many facilitators are published experts, coaches, teachers, speakers, and researchers who can bring a wealth of complementary competencies to any process.
Although groups share responsibility with facilitators for the quality of the process and outcomes, the group hold ultimate responsibility for everything it does, decides, and achieves. No skillful facilitator will diminish this power from any group. The role of facilitator is to help inspire passion, discover opportunities, and engage strengths in service of the group's intentions in and for the process
The role of facilitator is to invite engagement in the SocialEcology
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