What is a quality facilitation process?

Read this Before You Buy a Facilitation Process

I have been asked many times about the quality of a facilitation process. Whether they should invest time and effort to learn it and bring it into their organisation. I understand why such a question has been asked. I have learnt that many HR practitioners have wasted large amount of time, effort and money to learn and implement a particular facilitation process only to find later, and after all the hypes, that it is too complicated to conduct and too difficult to generate the intended outcomes.

To these questions, I suggest three tests to determine the quality of a facilitation process:

• Predictability Test. Here we want to test if a facilitation process produces the outcomes as promised by those who marketed the process to us. So, if a facilitator says that the ORID approach will help the participants reach a decision on what they want to do when they are back in the office the following day, the approach must deliver this outcome at the end of the ORID session. It is important that our participants’ feedback and evaluation forms contain questions or statements that collect this type of data.

• Stability Test. A facilitation process that requires very little design intervention by the facilitator is a stable process. The more effort a facilitator needs to make modifications and adjustments to the process on-the-go usually means that the process may not be universally applicable to all types of occasions or situations as pitched by the service provider. Under such a situation, even if the outcome is predictable, the process has been manipulated and instrumented to create it, which suggests that the process is not stable at all. If we like the process, its use should be limited to its intended purpose.

• Replicability Test. In order that the process gets to permeate the organisation, it has to be localised and replicated by people in the organisation other than those who sold the process to us. However, we tend to learn the science of the process but seldom the art of using the process. In science, we learn about the stages in the process. This is easy. The tough part is the art of using it. Questions about when to move the participants forward in their conversation and how to summaries the conversation is usually not taught. These missing components are causing the difficulties HR practitioners face in conducting and generating the intended outcome from their investments. If our service provider is the only person capable of running the process, this means that the process cannot be replicated by someone else.

When a facilitation process meets these three criteria, they tend to be good processes because they are simple, direct and without the frills found in all those sophisticate processes found out there in the market. So, don’t let all those hype and marketing talk confuse you.

Here is a posting on the IAF Forum on doctoral and Masters research on group facilitation that you may be interested in:
http://www.iaf-forum.org/showthread.php?p=3615#post3615

This article was written by Anthony Mok on 22 Dec 2008.
Copyright 2008. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.