I agree with your view that the facilitator’s primary purpose should be to encourage, assist and enable healthy, free-flowing conversation around real business issues. I also agree that it’s easy to get seduced into using tools and techniques that artificially close down the very conversation that they ostensibly set out to foster. Or to use others that sacrifice meaningful conversation for the sake of packaged ‘fun’.

In my experience, participants enjoy themselves most when they are addressing real issues that they know about, care about and can do something about.

It’s perhaps telling that the word “facilitate” has the same Latin root as “facile”. Clearly, the shared meaning is intended to be around ease of accomplishment – either accomplished easily (facile) or made easier to accomplish (facilitated). Unfortunately, facilitation practices can too often be more accurately described by the alternative definition of facile; that is, shallow and simplistic.