kathleen_vincent

What is Facilitation?

Facilitation comes from the latin facile, which mean easy. In fact, the role of a facilitator in a group setting is to “make things easy”. It involves planning, organizing, and setting or supporting rules and goals within such groups. It is my goal here to collect and share many of the tricks, techniques and practices that facilitators use in their work.

Facilitation Patterns

Safety

• [Make Mistakes]
• [Lower My Status] – When there isn’t enough trust, people feel the need to guard their status, instead of working toward common goals. Lowering your status makes it okay for everyone else to lower theirs…
• [Present A Problem]
• [Temperature] – To get a quick feeling of where a group is individually or as a whole, take their temperature. Use [“On a scale of …”] to quantify this temperature.

State Of Mind

• [No Attachments] – Every situation is different, keep no foolish consistencies, if it doesn’t work, throw it out!
• [People Hear What They Need To] – When you don’t get the response you were expecting, you can can trust that they heard exactly what they needed to hear. Furthermore, you can use their reaction as a clue…
• [I Trust You] – Trust is a choice. As a facilitator you can model that choice for your team. Choose to trust them and you’ll be amazed at what happens.
• [No Personal Agenda]
• [Put Your Distractions On The Shelf] – Ask the group to each write down any distractions and put them in an envelope with their name on it. Put it on a shelf for the rest of the meeting…

Language

• [“What are you going to do about that?”] – A great question to ask.
• [“The purpose of the meeting is…”] – Start every meeting with the phrase “The purpose of the meeting is X”. This forces you to begin with the end in mind
• [I Language] – The word “you” is confrontational, don’t use it. As an added benefit, the word “I” forces me to put things in my own context.
• [“On a scale of …”] – Asking for answers on a discrete scale allows you to quantify, measure and even graph things that we often think of as intangible and hard to pin down.
• [Use Declarative Language]
• [“I see…, I feel…, I imagine…”] – When it’s hard to put something into [I Language], this pattern gives you a skeleton on which to do it. e.g. “I see you coming late to meetings, and I feel hurt,…
• [We Language] – Build team cohesion by using “We” instead of “I”. This is especially effective when talking about positive things like accomplishments.
• [Ask Questions With Answers] – Only ask questions that you actually want answers for. Instead of leading questions, ask open ended questions. Instead of “Did X happen?”, ask “What happened?”

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