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.
