Facilitation is a useful skill for almost everyone to develop, but it’s particularly important if you’re involved in running Workshops & Brainstorming Sessions or any other sort of workshop (see Fundamental Workshopping Tools).
To understand facilitation, it's useful to compare it with some other related roles...
What is Facilitation?
The word facilitator comes from the Latin facilitas, which roughly means easiness, readiness or affability.
A facilitator is someone who works to make group interactions easier – a catalyst. The role isn’t about providing knowledge or ideas but helping participants make better use of the knowledge and ideas they collectively possess.
We do this by guiding the conversation and intervening appropriately. A good facilitator will melt into the background when things are moving in a useful direction, and course-correct quickly when they are not. They will also work hard to create the right environment (see How Learning Works ).
Core Skills
It takes a lot of practice and reflection to become a great facilitator. But no matter how much experience you have, it's impossible to facilitate well without some core skills...
1️⃣ Listening
The ability to really listen is crucial. This doesn't just mean listening to what's being said, it means hearing what isn't being said too. It means observing and sensing and "reading the room".
Some people call this deep listening, and the co-active coaching model defines three levels of listening 👉
As you become more skilled at this you'll be able to rely more and more on your intuition.
2️⃣ Questioning
We need to be skilled in asking questions to stimulate discussion and encourage personal and group growth.
3️⃣ Empathising
We need to be able to "walk a mile in another’s shoes". If we can't truly empathise with our participants we're unlikely to every really understand their needs.
4️⃣ Leading
We need to take charge and lead the group when appropriate. This often involves things like:
- Setting clear group norms and expectations.
- Knowing how to intervene most effectively.
- Keeping the conversation focused and on track.
- Leading from the front and role modelling with various activities.
- Firmly but kindly stamping on toxic, unhelpful behaviour.
- Inspiring interest and motivation through your example.
5️⃣ Adapting
We must be willing to adapt our plan to suit the participants. It's super common to arrive at a workshop with a carefully designed plan and find the group immediately wanders away from it. If our listening, empathy and intuition tells us that this is useful we should abandon or evolve our plan.
Some models of coaching call this dancing in the moment, which implies that a) folks take turns being the lead, b) it's a joyful experience and c) it's a shared experience. ❤️
Note: Something all these core skills have in common is the fact that it's impossible to do any of them well if you have too much ego. Ego is the Enemy, after all!
Guiding Principles
We cover a few practical tips and techniques elsewhere in this toolbox (eg. Fundamental Workshopping Tools), but it's also worth trying to define some core principles to guide your approach to facilitation. Here are some examples…
- Invite and request, don't insist and tell.
- Practice what you preach.
- Seek first to understand.
- Always be approachable.
- Inform, excite, empower, involve
- If in doubt, always be radically honest.
- If your requests and expectations aren't met, you didn't make them clear enough.
- Always assume good intent
What do these mean to you?
Summary
While we barely scratched the surface, we have defined the role of a facilitator in general terms and explored some core skills.
