Stephen Billing’s Blog

I have been talking with a facilitator friend of mine recently about how often people working in break out groups can get off lightly without really engaging. Participants can take an activity quite lightly, skirting away from aspects that are challenging. Then afterwards they can say, ‘Well, that wasn’t much benefit”. But you as a manager know that if they talked about real situations and challenged themselves then they would get a lot more out of the activity.

It strikes me that you could say that these facilitation techniques of breaking people into small groups to undertake highly designed interactions are attempting to get people to have meaningful conversations with each other where the facilitator is not involved.

In order to make sure the conversations are meaningful, they are designed by the facilitator, with parameters, time constraints, questions to answer or structured activities to do. In these activities, the participants, who are people like the facilitator, have to have designed interaction to achieve the facilitator’s outcome. These designed interactions are unlike any they have outside the workshop setting. Imagine a group of people having coffee saying "let’s tell a story one sentence at a time where you only give positive feedback".

In these small group sessions, the facilitator is not really involved in a serious moment-by-moment way with the interactions of the members of the group.

Some facilitators barely get beyond the role of "director of traffic" i.e. getting the participants organised into their activities and giving them instructions.

It seems to me that if we’re facilitating the making of meaning, then we do need to be making meaning WITH our participants. Not just setting up structured interactions where they make meaning themselves but the facilitator stays apart.

Why do I say this? Well, I want to link this to the feel of the interaction, which comes from the work of John Shotter.

He talks about learning to notice the feel of the unique and novel in a person’s action or utterance. If the facilitator is noticing the feel of the interaction, then he or she can draw attention to aspects of novelty that have relevance to the theme of the session. Essentially, if the facilitator is not involved in the conversations, then he or she will not have the feel of the interaction.

Therefore the facilitator will be less effective in facilitating change in these conversations.

Being involved (and detached at the same time, of course) allows facilitators to gauge the feel of the interaction and generate opportunities for change in that conversation. The conversations can then be quite different from what they would have been if the facilitator had not been there.

Think of facilitated sessions you have been involved with. I am sure you have experienced some who act purely as the "director of traffic," giving the instructions for the activities. Have you also experienced a facilitator who engages in the content of the group as well?

What is your opinion about the merits or weaknesses of each approach?