Facilitation

FOREWORD to the First Edition By Michael Doyle

按：此文是团队引导创始人之一的Michael Doyle为Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making这本书写的导读。对于了解什么是引导，团队引导的目的，团队引导的历史，何谓“内容中立、程序主张”，以及什么是引导型个人、引导者、引导型领导者和引导型团体，都有定义上的阐述，非常值得细细研究。此书中文版也已经由台湾开放智慧翻译出版。

I see group facilitation as a whole constellation of ingredients:a deep belief in the wisdom and creativity of people; a searchfor synergy and overlapping goals; the ability to listen openlyand actively; a working knowledge of group dynamics; a deepbelief in the inherent power of groups and teams; a respect forindividuals and their points of view; patience and a hightolerance for ambiguity to let a decision evolve and gel; stronginterpersonal and collaborative problem-solving skills; anunderstanding of thinking processes; and a flexible versus alock-step approach to resolving issues and making decisions.

Facilitative behaviors and skills are essential for anyone whowants to work collaboratively in groups and organizationstoday. Facilitative skills honor, enhance, and focus the wisdomand knowledge that lay dormant in most groups. These skillsare essential to healthy organizations, esprit de corps, fair andlasting agreements, and to easily implement actions and plans.

Sam Kaner and the team from Community At Work have beendeveloping and articulating these tools to further democraticaction and to enable people from all walks of life to worktogether in more constructive and productive ways. TheFacilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making will givereaders additional tools and insights to enable effective,participatory action and the potential to achieve strong,principled results and positive social change. Anyone wantingto increase their understanding of group dynamics and improvetheir skill at making groups work more effectively will benefitfrom this valuable book.

The Purpose of Group Facilitation

Those who work with and lead organizations today havelearned two lasting lessons in the last twenty-five years ofconcerted action research in this field of organizationdevelopment and change. Lesson one: if people don’tparticipate in and “own” the solution to the problems or agreeto the decision, implementation will be half-hearted at best,probably misunderstood, and, more likely than not, will fail.

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The second lesson is that the key differentiating factor in thesuccess of an organization is not just the products and services,not just its technology or market share, but the organization’sability to elicit, harness, and focus the vast intellectual capitaland goodwill resident in their members, employees, andstakeholders. When that intellectual capital and goodwill getenergized and focused, the organization becomes a powerfulforce for positive change in today’s business and societalenvironments. Applying these two lessons has become a keyelement of what we have begun to think of as the learningorganization.

How do leaders and their organizations apply these two lessons?By creating psychologically safe and involving groupenvironments where people can identify and solve problems,plan together, make collaborative decisions, resolve their ownconflicts, trouble-shoot, and self-manage as responsible adults.Facilitation enables the organization’s teams, groups andmeetings to be much more productive. And the side benefits offacilitated or self-facilitated groups are terrific: a sense ofempowerment, a deepening of personal commitment todecisions and plans, increased organizational loyalty, and thebuilding of esprit de corps.

Nowhere are these two lessons put more into practice than ingroups. The world meets a lot. The statistics are staggering.There are over 25 million meetings every day in the UnitedStates and over 85 million worldwide. Making both our workgroups and civic groups work much more effectively is alifelong challenge as rich as the personalities that people them.Thus, what I call “group literacy” – an awareness of and strongskills in group dynamics, meeting facilitation and consensusbuilding tools like the ones in this book – is essential toincreasing the effectiveness of group meetings. They enablegroups to work smarter, harder, deeper, and faster. These toolshelp build healthier groups, organizations, and communities.

Facilitative mind-sets, behaviors, and tools are some of theessential ingredients of high-commitment/high-performanceorganizations. They are critical to making real what we’ve cometo think of as the learning organization. These skills andbehaviors are aligned with people’s higher selves. Peoplenaturally want to learn them in order to increase their ownpersonal effectiveness in groups and in their families as well asto increase the effectiveness of groups themselves.

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A Partial History of Group Facilitation

The concept of facilitation and facilitators is as old as the tribes.Alaskan natives report of this kind of role in ancient times. As asociety we’re starting to come full circle – from the circle of thetribe around the fire, to the pyramidal structures of the last3,000 years, back to the ecology of the circle, flat pyramids, andnetworks of today’s organizations. The philosophy, mind-set,and skills of facilitation have much in common with theapproaches used by Quakers, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr.,and people in nonviolence movements over the centuries.

More recently these include the civil rights movement,women’s consciousness-raising groups, some parts of theenvironmental movement, and citizen involvement groups thatstarted in the 1960s and 1970s.

Meeting facilitation started to appear as a formal process in thelate 1960s and early 1970s and had become widespread by thelate 1980s. Its proponents advocated it as a tool to assist peopleto become the architects of their own future. It evolved fromthe role of learning facilitators that emerged in the early 1960s.In learning or encounter groups, the facilitator’s focus was onbuilding awareness and enabling learning. These learning/awareness facilitators played key roles in the nascent humanpotential movement and the women’s consciousness-raisingmovement and continue to do so in today’s version of lifelonglearning situations where learning is seen as a dialogue ratherthan a rote process. Its pragmatic roots also include cognitivescience, information processing theory, sociology, psychology,community organizing, arbitration and mediation principles,and experience.

Task-oriented group facilitation evolved out of the societalmilieu of the last thirty years, especially in industrial andinformation-rich societies where time is a key factor. Weneeded to find methods for people to work together moreeffectively. Quality circle groups, cross-functional task forces,and civic groups were the early big users and advocates of thismethodology. Facilitation was an informal, flexible alternativeto the constricting format of parliamentary procedure andRobert’s Rules of Order. Group facilitation was also an approachthat was proactive, solving conflicts before they arose, as well asone that could handle multiple constituencies. It was a viablealternative to mediation-style approaches. Once participants ina learning group or consciousness-raising group raised their

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awareness, they wanted to take action. There was an expressedneed to put their new insights and knowledge to work – to takeactions, solve problems, plan, and make group decisions. Thusthe role of the task-oriented facilitator evolved to serve theseneeds as well as the new approaches to organizational changeand renewal that were developing in the early 1970s.

As two of the cofounders of meeting facilitation, David Strausand I were interested in giving people tools to architect theirown more powerful futures. That meant giving themframeworks and tools to make the groups they worked and livedwith much more effective, powerful, and productive. We sawgroup facilitation as both a social contract and a new, contentneutral role – a more formalized third party role in groups. Wearticulated the difference and power between “content” and“process” neutrality. Content neutrality means not taking aposition on the issues at hand; not having a position or a stakein the outcome. Process neutrality means not advocating forcertain kinds of processes such as brainstorming. We foundthat the power in the role of the facilitator was in becomingcontent neutral and a process advocate – advocating for fair,inclusive, and open processes that would balance participationand improve productivity while establishing a safepsychological space in which all group members could fullyparticipate.

The role of the facilitator was designed to help minimize wheelspinning and dysfunctional dynamics and to enable groups towork together much more effectively. Other key pioneers offacilitation in the 1970s were Geoff Ball and David Sibbet withtheir seminal work in graphic recording and graphicfacilitation. The core concepts and tools of group facilitationseemed to grow out of the tight-knit organization developmentand training community in the San Francisco Bay Area in the1970s and ’80s. It is great to see Sam Kaner and his colleaguescontinuing this rich legacy of theory and skill building.

Researchers at the Institute for the Future postulate that it takesabout thirty years for social inventions to become widespread.Group facilitation is one such social invention. Over these lasttwenty-five years, facilitation skills have spread widely in theUnited States and are being spread around the world. And now,organizations are coming full circle to where facilitators onceagain are being utilized in learning organizations to facilitatedialogue processes that surface deep assumptions and mental

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models about how we view our world. These existing mentalmodels are often the underlying sources of our conflict anddysfunction. By surfacing, examining, and changing them, weare able to work together in new ways to build new systemsthinking models that assist groups in articulating their corevalues and beliefs. These new mental models serve as thefoundation for organizations as they evolve, grow, andtransform themselves to meet the challenges of the nextcentury.

Expanding Definitions of Facilitation

These skills have become so useful in organizations that theyhave spread beyond the role of facilitator: to facilitative leaders;to self-facilitative groups and teams; to facilitative individualsand even facilitative, user-friendly procedures. Facilitation hasbecome part of our everyday language. The Latin root offacilitate means “to enable, to make easy.” Facilitation hasevolved to have a number of meanings today.

A facilitative individual is an individual who is easy to workwith, a team player, a person aware of individual and groupdynamics. He or she assists colleagues to work together moreeffectively. A facilitative individual is a person who is skilledand knowledgeable in the interpersonal skills ofcommunication, collaborative problem solving and planning,consensus building, and conflict resolution.

A facilitator is an individual who enables groups andorganizations to work more effectively; to collaborate andachieve synergy. She or he is a “content-neutral” party who bynot taking sides or expressing or advocating a point of viewduring the meeting, can advocate for fair, open, and inclusiveprocedures to accomplish the group’s work. A facilitator canalso be a learning or a dialogue guide to assist a group inthinking deeply about its assumptions, beliefs, and values andabout its systemic processes and context.

A facilitative leader is a leader who is aware of group andorganizational dynamics; a leader who creates organization-wide involvement processes that enable members of theorganization to more fully utilize their potential and gifts inorder to help the organization articulate and achieve its visionand goals, while at the same time actualizing its spoken values.

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Facilitative leaders often understand the inherent dynamicsbetween facilitating and leading and frequently utilizefacilitators in their organizations.

A facilitative group (team, task force, committee, or board) isone in which facilitative mind-sets and behaviors are widelydistributed among the members; a group that is minimallydysfunctional and works very well together; a group that is easyto join and works well with other groups and individuals.

I think you, the reader, will find this book very useful for yourwork in groups, whether you are a leader, a group member, or afacilitator. I especially recommend to you the insightfulchapters on understanding group dynamics, facilitativelistening, and the importance of values. Where this book alsomakes a real contribution is in the chapters on reaching closureand the gradients of an agreement. I enjoyed the learnings andinsights I received from this book, and I am sure you will too.

Michael Doyle

San Francisco, CaliforniaMarch 1996