Defining Facilitation - Facilitation is Unlike Others

It is important that we understand the true nature of facilitation and the characteristics of a facilitator in order to differentiate this role from those of teachers, trainers, coaches, advisors, and consultants.

Only when we could define what facilitation is could we then be able to avoid doing things that could hurt the facilitated event and the final outcome arising from the event.

So, what is facilitation?

Bens (2005: Facilitating with Ease) suggests that 'facilitation is a way of providing leadership without taking reins'.

This is different from leadership. According to Smirich and Morgan (1982: Leadership - Management of Meaning) ‘leadership is about the 'management of meaning’, and that leaders emerge because of their role in framing experience in a way that provides the basis for action; that is, by mobilizing meaning, articulating and defining what has previously remained implicit or unsaid, by inventing images and meanings that provide a focus for new attention and by consolidating, confronting or changing prevailing wisdom.’

So, the leader gets involved in the conversation to lead the team while the facilitator stays out of the conversation all together but lead the team in another way.

And who is a facilitator?

A facilitator is someone who skillfully helps a group of people understand their common objectives and assists them to plan to achieve them without taking a particular position in the discussion.

The facilitator will try to assist the group in achieving a consensus on any disagreements that pre-exist or emerge in the discussion so that it has a strong basis for future action.

There is a discription of faciliation in Chinese.

Source: China Facilitation Network

A Reflection on Facilitation

Hock Meng, the IAF Singapore Country Representative (2009), FNS Forum Manager(2009) and IAF Certified Professional Facilitator has these to share about faciliation:

A chance meeting with a friend in Nov '08 led me to an opportunity to do some sharing on what I’ve been doing for the past year. Being open and receptive to facilitation, he invited me to conduct a 1 day facilitative training workshop for his fellow mates in his community.

I thought about it for over a week and decided to let the participants do a short exercise of Tai Chi as an opener. When asked about what the team has learnt, the participants responded with, “Fluid, Co-ordination, etc...”. I reflected on the experience and drew many similarities between Tai Chi and the skills of facilitation. Here are a few of them.

One, the root of the two skill sets is derived from “Ease”. Facilitate came from the Latin word “Facillis”, which means ‘make easier’. My experience with practicing Tai Chi Chuan tells me that the execution of the moves is to be completed using energy derived from the core muscles. When facilitation is well executed, the result is one where the group feels that they had cleared the obstacles of working together with ease and that they did it all by themselves. When Tai Chi Chuan is well executed, the master uses the ease of tapping the power of his opponent to defeat him.

Two, both art forms are fluid and they flow with nature. A master facilitator reads the situation as it develops and makes adjustments to the process agilely to adapt to the changing nature of the discourse found in facilitated session. The Tai Chi master transits seamlessly and effortless between moves. Both masters are equipped with a big inventory of “moves” and ability to improvise to extract the necessary response from those they interact with.

Three, coordination is a must for both. Facilitation is planned in such a way that the atmosphere generated by the set-up of the venue, encompassing nature of the facilitation methodology used, and expanding capability of the equipment deployed are coordinated to deliver the desired outcome. Tai Chi Chuan involves a lot of hand and leg movements that can be coordinated to deliver that killer strike at a moment of notice.

Lastly, both skills seek balance. Facilitation, in totality, involves two general processes - divergence and convergence. These processes provide the participants the space to hear the viewpoints from others before arriving at a consensus on a particular course of action. One flows into the other. Tai Chi has two interrelated parts - “Yin” and “Yang”. The moves, in general, are stable; the left-hand movement is balanced with the right leg movement and the right hand movement follows after the left leg movement. All moves are executed with balance in mind.

In summary, when a facilitated session is well executed, the group is at ease in handling issues together. The session is smooth, seamlessly coordinated and balanced.

So, what is the belief system of a facilitator? Here is an attempt by my trainees trying to answer this fundamental question:

This article was written by Anthony Mok on 28 Jul and Updated on 23 Oct 2008 and 5 Jan 2009.

The portion entitled 'A Reflection on Facilitation' was written by Hock Meng and edited by Anthony Mok.

Copyright 2008. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.