Facilitation as an Important Learning Intervention

The main value a facilitator brings to any facilitated conversation is the affective and cognitive spaces that he creates to enable the sharing of ideas and springboarding of new ones amongst his session participants, the mirror he put in front of his participants to help them gain greater awareness about themselves and clarity of the issues they face, and the processes that he adopts and implements to access, widen and deepen the collective wisdom of the groups participating in the session.

It is for these superior qualities of the facilitated conversation that makes it popular as a form of learning and developmental intervention.

Inroads to Higher Collective Awareness is Inquiry

The gateway into the ingenious connective abilities of our brain is the question. Ask the question:

'Has safety been a consideration in the decision-making process?'

and the syntax of the question and its phonetic qualities push our usually homeostasis staved brain into overdrive. It draws on its mental and cognitive resources to hunt for the connections that may be synthesised into insightful answers.

Not all Questions Share the Same Qualities

We are chemically designed to generate insightful responses. So the facilitator need not have to worry about the lack of this biologically driven outcome.

However, his concern is one of asking the right questions so that he could intentionally navigate his participants through their individual and collective cognitive reservoirs to give them the access to their breakthroughs.

The challenge is to identify the kind of questions that is capable of creating this type of outcome. This is because each genre of questions has a unique way of focusing the brain and channelling its connective functions.

Questions like:

'Tell me the aftermath of leaving the consideration of safety from the last decision-making process?'

charge the interaction emotionally, and we become so dramatically embroiled in our own personal struggles that we are unable to take the conversation forward.

Questions like:

'Why is safety a consideration?'

overpower us with long calculations and contemplations that give us those elaborated justifications that fool-proof against all other competing interests. In doing these, little mental and cognitive resources are available to collectively bring the conversation to a brand new level.

Questions like:

'What do you think are the challenges of improving safety at the workplace?'

engage our mental and cognitive functions into examining the nature of the problem, and exploring its varied interpretations and manifestations. Here, our focus is the problem, and the feeling is one of stagnation and disempowerment.

Questions like:

'How should we go about seeing improvements in safety?'

organise our thoughts reasonably and logically around the collective actions or steps to be taken to obtain a pre-determined outcome, an act which may be too premature at times.

To know what are the right questions for the moment the facilitator has to distinguish mere expenditure of mental energies and deployment of cognitive abilities in expanding and deepening current thoughts and ideas from those used for creating new thoughts and ideas informed by laterally unknown connections and insights.

Questions like:

'Tell me the patterns you have noticed each time you think about the issue?'

force us to reflect on our thinking processes and thought patterns to uncover what is present and showing up to us.

In other words, by using these 'thinking' questions, the facilitator is inviting his participants to think about their thinking to explore the ways out of their current doldrums, and in the process get to their breakthroughs which are usually not available just by working hard on what they are current presented with.

Science of Asking Questions

Therefore, the skill of asking 'thinking' questions on the fly is an important competency asked of any facilitator. While the way the questions are created seems intuitive, crafting them for a particular moment is actually more of a science. This is a function of practicing the correct values, focusing the brain on the most important matter, and listening for the potentials of illumination.

Earlier, I have spoken much about the different ways questions channel our brain's connective abilities. Now, let me explore a bit more of the other two areas - values and listening.

The facilitator believes that each of his participants is whole and complete, and possesses all the capabilities and tools to be successful. So, he does not tune into the conversation to listen for opportunities to counsel but to catch instances of personal illumination - moments of insightful awareness, and invite its originator to explore these new thoughts and ideas out loud so that they are collectively owned by the larger audience.

In an actual facilitated conversation, we use our ears to listen into the conversation. As this is a written article, we will instead use our eyes to look at what I am going to share in a moment. Now, let's take a look at this recorded conversation:

'I would really like to be less stressed at work, but it just seems to get busier every week.'

By tracing our eyes on this segment of the conversation:

'Less stressed at work......'

The facilitator may question his audience:

'Could you tell me more about the stress you are facing?'

Or our eyes could follow this portion of the conversation:

'Just seems to get busier every week......'

and the facilitator may ask his audience:

'What do you think are the causes leading to this development?'

These are good questions. However, they are not great. They will overly focus the brain on the least important things - the in-depth examination of the problem and detail exploration of its causes. They depower the respondent since they cause the brain to focus on matters that are at best described as 'what is' or 'what was' rather than 'what could be'.

The true value of facilitation is in the creation of illuminations and leveraging on the energy they produce. The efforts employed in building new connections generate more mileage for the audience than those used for re-examining existing ones. The excitement generated at the spur of individual awareness is to be captured to further broaden and deepen the collective conversation to drive it forward.

Again, the facilitator can turn to the conversation for information about the 'thinking' questions that he could generate to create these two types of outcome.

Let's get back to our recorded conversation and shift our attention to:

'I would really like to....'

When the facilitator responds with:

'What has changed that had brought this matter to the forefront for you?'

He is constructing a clearing that invites his audience to reflect on the matter. His audience is dumbfounded. This is because he does not have the ready connections to respond to the incoming query, and he will struggle to locate one in his mind. After hanging the mirror in front of his participant, the facilitator steps back and stays out of his way so that he works out the solution in an uncluttered environment. The facilitator listens for the signs of illumination and brings on more 'thinking' questions to bear to speed up, enhance the quality or clarify the source of the illumination. These are the settings for illumination.

Facilitating with questions is like watching a facilitator doing a waltz with his participants. It is not ideal to construct the questions ahead of a facilitated conversation. One cannot anticipate the 'thinking' questions most helpful in moving the conversation forward. He has to listen for the markers in the conversation that may inform him of the ‘thinking’ question he needs to ask next. Therefore, to listen without agenda is an important ability. This is the art of the facilitated conversation.

This article was written by Anthony Mok on 1 Feb 2011.

Copyright 2010. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.

Consultative Roles of Facilitators

The facilitator is first and foremost a consultant at heart even though he is to lead generative conversations by their processes rather than through their contents during the facilitated sessions.

This means an effective facilitator has two roles to play. During the facilitated session, the facilitator uses the language of facilitation to mine the collective knowledge, experiences and wisdom of the gathered crowd.

However, outside of the session, he uses a suite of consulting tools to clarify the initiator's intentions before its execution and recommends strategies to fully leverage the session's outputs so that the initiator gets the most out of his investment.

While some clients may know what they want from the session participants on the outset, most do not. The facilitator could contribute the most value by helping these initiators establish the session's objectives and to uncover the means to correctly tap onto the collective wisdom of the crowd.

A facilitated event is like working with Google's search engine and its databases. When we use the search engine to query its databases with the most appropriate keywords, we get to the pages that most likely to give us the answers we are looking for. The reverse is also true. Google refers us to million pages of useless information when we become lax with our query syntax.

Like Google, the successful mining of the collective wisdom of the crowd depends on the accuracy of the questions we pose to them during the discussions.

When we asked the wrong questions, the participants will focus their cognitive energies in the wrong things, and ultimately we get the wrong answers. Unlike the search engines, which are tireless, human's stamina for prolonged cognitive function is limited.

Therefore, facilitators have to be very nimble with the questions used at such events. To achieve this goal, we challenge the dominant thought processes of the crowd. We call this mechanism the 'Challenge Statement', and let's spend a few moment to deconstruct this.

All 'Challenge Statements' share a common syntax stem that begins like this:

'In what ways might I or we ..........?'

This is the structure that put us in the space that calls us into action. Unlike a statement that describes a problem, which usually presents itself as an obstacle, the ''Challenge Statement' aggressively activates our cognitive functions and resources to create and locate the solutions that may resolve the issue at hand, which is the context. This is a powerful orientation and is

necessary for the successful mining of the wisdom that resides in the crowd.

So, 'not having enough of money' is disempowering since it forces us to focus on the problem, but 'in what ways might I increase my earning potential?' is not. It causes us to explore the different ways in which we could increase our earnings. It focuses our thought processes in solutioning rather than in justifying the reasons for being here and laying blame on others for our current predicament.

However, we must not be led into believing that the context portion of the challenge statement is a product of intuition. There is a couple of steps we need to follow to deliver this to us. There are two broad approaches here - 'Stretching' and 'Squeezing' the challenge statement. We will first explore the construct of the formal approach before examining the latter.

In 'Stretching' the challenge statement, we attempt to question the rationality of including the context in the statement to inform the initiator of the angles of attacking the issue.

So, if the problem was initially described as 'not enough of money' and the first challenge statement was defined as 'in what ways might I increase my earning potential?', we could stretch this challenge by questioning it in the following ways:

For the first challenge statement:

'In what ways might I increase my earning potential?'

Flowing from this statement, we could question the reason for exploring this line of inquiry by:

'Why do I want to increase my earning potential?'

Next, we attempt to answer this question with:

'Because the amount I am earning is below what my peers are having?', and we repeat the process with:

'Why are my peers earning more than me?', and

'Because they enjoy more opportunities than I do.'

We could finally end with:

'Why do they have more opportunities than me?' and

'Because they understand their superiors better than I do?'

When we 'eyeball' the 'becauses', we could create a challenge statement for each of these justifications in the following manner:

For the reason:

'Because the amount I am earning is below what my peers are having?'

The Challenge Statement is:

'In what ways might I match the earnings of my peers?'

For:

'Because they enjoy more opportunities than I do.'

The Challenge Statement could be crafted as:

'In what ways might I enjoy as many opportunities as my peers?'

And for the reason:

'Because they understand their superiors better than I do?'

We could reword this as:

'In what ways might I better understand my superiors?'

The facilitator could work with any of these Challenge Statements. What is the right statement to introduce to the crowd at the facilitated event will depend on the profile of the crowd and the needs of the initiator. By working with one, the challenges presented by it antecedent statements would also be addressed. You may like to download the working template for 'Stretching' the Challenge Statement by clicking on this icon:

Sometimes, when we want to look into the Meta aspects of the issue we may find working with 'Stretching' Challenge Statements inadequate. Now, let's us examine the construct of 'Squeezing' the Challenge Statement to address the limitations.

In 'Squeezing' the challenge, we apply the genre of 'fact-finding' questions to the issue to identify the list of Challenge Statements. Again, we will reapply the problem statement we have earlier identified in this article - 'not enough of money' to demonstrate the process. We could begin the 'Squeezing' process by using:

'Who', we could ask:

'Who else could I approach to help me gain a higher clarity of my issue?'

From this, we could construct the following Challenge Statement:

'In what what ways might I identify the people who could help me clarify my issue?'

'What', we could ask:

'What resources do I need to resolve the issue?'

By repeating the process, the Challenge Statements may look like this:

'In what ways might I identify the resources needed to resolve the issue?'

When we introduce 'where', 'when' and 'how' to the problem, our questions may look like these:

'When is the best time to resolve this issue?', 'Where should the issue be resolved first?' and 'How should the issue be dealt with?'

After converting these questions into Challenge Statements, they could be presented respectively as:

'In what ways might I uncover the best time to resolve the issue, begin solving the matter, and solve the matter?'

Again, the choice of focus will largely depend on the need of the initiator and the target audience from which the wisdom is to be drawn upon.

With the initiator, the facilitator conducts a generative conversation that helps him construct these Challenge Statements from the issue on hand, and to choose from these those that are useful for the workshop. You may like to download the working template for 'Squeezing' the Challenge Statement by clicking on this icon:

This article was written by Anthony Mok on 8 Nov 2010,

and updated on 1 Feb 2011 and 29 Sept 2011.

Copyright 2010. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.

Psyche of Facilitation

Understanding Facilitation

In adult education and training, the trainer is always recognised as the source of wisdom. In this one-to-many learning environment, the trainer is responsible for preparing and encouraging his trainees into accepting his body of knowledge, experience and insights.

The facilitation of group-based learning is very different. In this instance, the source of wisdom is with the participants. They are recognised to have the capacity to enrich and enlarge the body of collective knowledge within the group. The role of the facilitator is to provide the participants his skills of unlocking this wealth of individual experience, knowledge and insights, and transforming them into a collective one. He does this by reading the interactions and motivating them into exchanging their thoughts with each other, and helping them reach a consensus over what they want to do with their collective learning and insights.

To effectively accomplish these, the facilitator needs to know how the brain creates insights, understand the science behind the enrichment and enlargement of collective wisdom, and be aware of the predictable behavioural responses in group interactions. Armed with this knowledge, the facilitator is more capable in using the right questions to move the conversation forward, and applying techniques of paraphrasing and clarification to keep the participants authentic about their conversation. I call this aspect of group facilitation the ‘Psyche of Facilitation’.

Brain and Insight Creation

In his book - ‘Quiet Leadership’, David Rock outlines six key findings about the brain. They explain how the brain creates insights and responds to change. These are:

Brain is a Connection Machine

The brain has evolved to generate new links between unrelated points. It creates trillions of such new connections every day. Each new connection or insight produces chemicals that pleasures our bodies and energise us into action.

No Two Brains are Alike

Each brain has a unique set of connections that defines and controls how it perceives and judges the world. While one set of connections may greatly appeal to a group of individuals, the same set may turn the others away.

Brain Hardwires Everything

The ‘active memory’ understands the connections and operates our behaviours. While powerful, its resources are very limited. Whenever possible, we hardwire our thoughts and behaviours into our ‘long term’ memory, which resource is infinite. So, we largely leave our subconscious to manage our behaviours. Awareness and new wirings only take place when thoughts and behaviours are taken out from this sphere and are placed into the conscious-active memory.

Hardwiring Drives Automatic Perception

We always see things as they should be. Our perception of reality is driven by our hardwired heuristics, circuitries, and old habits. We do not automatically receive fresh data from our surrounding to see things as they are.

It is Practically Impossible to Deconstruct Our Wiring

By focusing on the problem, we are actually deepening the hardwired circuitries that keep it in place. Attention creates change in the brain and the more we are aware of the problem, the more we are driven to complain about it. The focus should be one of solutioning so that new wirings could be created.

It’s Easy to Create New Wiring

The brain creates new connections or insights all the time. Instead of dismantling old wirings, it is more effective creating new ones that support learning.

Enrichment of Collective Wisdom

Evian Gordon, a neuroscientist, suggested that the brain is a machine that ‘minimises danger and maximises reward’. When a person encounters a stimulus that is deemed as ‘positive’, he will become attracted to it and engages it actively for its rewards. The reverse is also true. When a stimulus is labelled as ‘negative’, he will disengage and avoid its dangers. This attraction-avoidance response is a mechanism for survival. It is designed to help us stay alive by quickly assessing and easily remembering what is good and bad in the environment.

David Rock proposed that there are five elements that could increase or decrease this attraction-avoidance response. These are:

Status

Status is the ‘pecking order’ of the group. We sense our status going up when we feel that we are more ‘superior’ to others. We form a mental model of our status in our group. This ranking system affects our mental processes.

Research has shown that when we experience a reduction in status, the region of the brain that lights up in the CT scan is the same as the one when we are experiencing physical pain (Eisenberger et al., 2003). Interactions that generate perceptions of increasing status amongst participants could create a strong attraction response to the group and with its members.

Certainty

The brain does not draw new data from the environment all the time. The brain predominantly draws on its memory for recognisable patterns to predict the future. Our brains only call us to attention when there is a mismatch between what our senses tell us and what our brains have expected.

Without the ability to predict, our brains must stay attentive at all times. This is not only exhausting, it also distracts us from our main goals. Interactions, which structures and formats are well understood by the participants, are more attractive.

Autonomy

Autonomy is the perception of our ability to exercise freewill over our environment. Interactions that generate the feelings of autonomy are rewarding and attractive. Interactions are stressful activities and when the stress is interpreted as escapable, we become significantly less destructive.

Relatedness

Relatedness measures the degree of how ‘in’ or ‘out’ we are with our groups. Naturally, we like to be in groups to experience the sense of belonging. Trust has significant impact on the relatedness in the group and our attraction towards the relationships within the group. Interactions that build trust amongst group members enhance the attractiveness towards each other.

Fairness

Fair exchange is intrinsically rewarding and unfair exchanges generate strong avoidance responses. When we perceive others as being unfair, we do not feel empathic towards them. In most instances, we feel rewarded when they are punished.

Behavioural Responses in Interactions

Dr. William Moulton Marston, an American psychologist, feminist theorist, and inventor, theorised that the way we perceive the favourability of our environment and the amount of power we could exercise to control it will impact the way we express our emotions and behaviours in our interactions with other people. Marston's Model of Behaviour was first proposed 82 years ago in his book ‘Emotions of Normal People’ (1928).

When these emotional expressions are placed along two conceptual dimensions, he created a 2 x 2 matrix showing four distinct but predictable behavioural styles - Dominating (D), Influencing (I), Steadiness (S), and Compliance (C). This provides a model that informs about the adaptive nature of interacting with people displaying these kinds of behavioural styles.

In facilitation, we need to encourage participation at the individual level. Therefore, how we communicate to encourage an individual’s contribution to the collective wisdom is important. Marston’s model provides insights into the ways we could be make the interaction more effective by suggesting approaches to flex our behaviours.

Here is a brief description of the four behavioural types:

Dominating 'D' Type

The ‘D’ type is full of drive. He packs his daily schedule with plenty of activities. He pushes himself and people around him to their limits, often achieving outstanding results. Some common adjectives used for describing 'D' type are, “decisive, direct, and driven". He is a self-starter, egoistic and bottom-line driven. If there is a challenge to overcome, ‘D’ type will be the first to attempt it.

Influencing ‘I’ Type

The 'I' type is attention seeking, persuasive, influential, and loves to be with others. He is known to be charismatic and capable of commanding and motivating the crowd towards a common objective. 'I’ type enjoys having fun and having others around him.

Steadiness ‘S’ Type

The 'S' type is steady, stable and loyal. Compared to the 'D' and 'I' types, he is more passive and reserved. He will prefer to listen more than speaking. While ‘S’ type is empathic, friendly and helpful, he is more comfortable being with a small group of closed friends.

Compliance ‘C’ Type

Some common adjectives used for describing ‘C’ type are "compliant, controlled, and correctness". The ‘C’ type is neat, detailed, accurate and systematic, and these characteristics are easily spotted. The 'C' type arrives at his decisions from facts and figures.

Reading Your Participants

Most of us will have one or two 'main' behavioural types. We do display a different profile at home, in a training course, and at work. To uncover the behavioural types of your participants, you could get them to complete the DISC Behavioural Type Profile before facilitating the interaction or they could play a game that you have designed to help you discriminate their types ahead of the facilitated conversation.

Facilitators could also read their participants using the following guide:

New Language of Facilitation

Not every participant in an interaction will respond in the same way to the facilitator. Some language of facilitation may attract the participants to the conversation. Others may cause them to stay away. So, by combining the sciences presented and described in this article, I have created a framework that provides a guide on how the language could be better fine-tuned to enrich the collective learning and wisdom of the group. Please visit this link to download this framework.

Here is the Slideshare for this article:

Psyche of Facilitation - The Language of Facilitating Conversations

View more presentations from Xiaohao .

This article was written by Anthony Mok on 17 Sep 2010.
Copyright 2010. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.

Facilitation is Not About Copying Others

It’s About Understanding the Science and Designing the Right Process

One major misgiving I have about facilitation in Singapore is that many of our facilitators are using processes of facilitation without actually gaining an understanding of the science that goes behind it. Without this grounding, many of our facilitators are copying processes instead of designing them. When we adapt processes without the help of the underpinning knowledge, our workshops will regularly need massive intervention by the facilitators to turn it around. This makes the workshops difficult to run and replicate. I have seen the worst of the lot; facilitated sessions that had become a farce that produced no real results and outcomes because the facilitators were too busy adjusting the processes that had failed to work instead of listening to the conversation and facilitating the interaction.

It is my hope that in sharing the following science of learning and motivation, it helps to improve the knowledge and confidence of facilitators in Singapore so that they could move away from copying processes to designing what is right for their target audience.

Gagne's Conditions of Learning and Nine Events of Instruction

In his book ‘Conditions of Learning’, which was first published in 1965, Robert Gagne had identified nine mental conditions for learning.

These conditions were derived from the Information Processing Model, which discusses about how information from the outside world interacts with the sensory registers of the human brain to build the different types of memory. From these mental conditions for learning, Gagne created a corresponding nine-step process called the ‘Events of Instruction’ to instrument the flow of information to encourage effective learning.

Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction provides the Facilitator the science for identifying a series of opportunities to design and develop the most appropriate set of actions and interventions to enable, encourage and sustain learning.

Keller's ARCS Model for Motivation

Motivation is rarely recognized as an important element in adult learning. It is always assumed that participants are excited to learn because of the information that is presented to them is useful to them. This is far from the truth. The responsibility to create the motivation to learn should be bore by the facilitator. Without this desire, retention is unlikely to happen amongst the participants and learning is just about strategizing to ‘survive’ the facilitated event and being seen to be participating.

Facilitators must strive to create a deeper level of motivation in the participants to help them gain insights at the facilitated session and transfer these back to the workplace as new behaviors.

The John Keller’s ARCS model was created as a problem solving methodology that helps facilitators identify, design and introduce motivational tactics at the most appropriate moments of a facilitated session to stimulate and sustain the participant’s motivation to learn. There are two parts in this model. The first is a set of categories representing the components of motivation. ‘ARCS’ is the acronym for four such components of ‘Attention’, ‘Relevance’, ‘Confidence’, and ‘Satisfaction’. These categories are the result of a synthesis of the research on human motivation. The second part of the model is a systematic design process that profiles the motivational characteristics of participants in a given learning environment and then design enhancements for the session that are appropriate in keeping the participants involved.

Maping Gagne's Nine Events of Instruction to Keller's ARCS Model for Motivation

Keller’s ARCS Model for Motivation is not intended to stand apart as a separate system for learning. It has been incorporated into Gagne's Events of Instruction to form a more comprehensive framework for designing facilitated sessions. The table on the left shows this mapping.

It is important to recall at this juncture that Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction discusses about how information gets into the different memories in the brain while Keller’s ARCS Model for Motivation talks about how individuals could be motivated to learn.

Therefore, when participants are motivated to learn, their sensory registers are more active and sensitive to the incoming information, and there is a greater tendency to keep this information stored in the long term memory.

Using these two sciences of learning, the design of a facilitated session could be more educated and scientific rather than intuitive and based on rules of thumb. The table in this link is a presentation of the various opportunities for action and application of Gagne and Keller’s model in facilitation. Feel free to download this for your personal use.

It is my hope that this article will help my fellow facilitators become aware that there is a science behind facilitation. Once you gotten it, sky is the limit.

Good luck.

This article was written by Anthony Mok on 27 Oct 2009

Copyright 2009 Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.