Facilitation

The Field of Facilitation

Organizational and community leaders convened groups in conversation long before the word facilitation came into common usage. Indigenous communities have met in circles and have used reflection and graphic thinking for centuries for planning, observation and community building. Facilitation has been influenced in more contemporary times by the 1960s and 1970s work of Kurt Lewin, Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal and the work in psychodrama and child drama, including the work of Brian Way, Peter Slade and Gavin Bolton. Theatre-based communication exercises such as improvisation and role play have also influenced and informed the learner-centred and experiential learning processes used in facilitation.

Functions of Facilitation

Meeting, task and conference facilitation engages groups to do the following:

• Communicate: Clarify viewpoints, articulate experience and emotion and find common ground
• Reflect: Observe, review, assess and plan
• Think creatively: Imagine, note patterns, generate ideas and explore alternatives and variations
• Work effectively as a team: Collaborate, share knowledge across disciplines and culture, share thoughts during times of conflict, navigate programmatic or organizational change, make decisions and strengthen networks and relationships
• Design and collaborate on tasks: Design products, programmes and systems and identify next steps and actions

The Facilitator's Role

Facilitators may be internal to an organization or community, or external—and they may work with participants face-to-face or virtually. Often a facilitator will be part of an arc of meetings. Because of their speciality in group dynamics, learning and communication, they can not only design and guide the meeting process and idea exchange but also inform planning, documentation design and other elements of the action research cycle. Some facilitators specialize in facilitator-directed or participant-driven processes, very large-group work or the use of multiple learning modalities.

There are different philosophies about a facilitator's role and different situations or methods that require facilitators to fit their role to a process. Facilitators may act as guides, orchestra conductors or universal translators—naming key thoughts or feelings, making observations back to the group or drawing out different individuals with a minority opinion or less power. Depending on the meeting's objectives and desired outcomes, they may instead take the role of witness more than interventionist, setting up the group's process and task and remaining fully present throughout—but not stepping in to help the conversations at all, even at times of passion or conflict. Particular methods allow for participant self-organization, with groups conducting their own discussions and generating their own documentation. In some methods, a facilitator's intervention can lessen participants' engagement, remove their responsibility or eliminate opportunities [Page 334]for participant skills building and interpersonal communication. Power dynamics can also affect learning, expression and inclusion. Furthermore, every group includes diverse individuals, such as reflective thinkers, quick responders, visual thinkers, kinaesthetic thinkers and relational thinkers. Therefore, the facilitator considers both role and process to fit the meeting objectives, the desired outcomes, the group culture and other elements.

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