Facilitation isn’t magic
By Mille Bojer, January 2020
“I see what you are doing, I can see that it’s effective, and I think it’s needed in the world. But it’s a complete mystery to me how you get senior people to go along with these exercises, and nothing you have said explains that to me clearly.”
These were the words of a leader at Brazil’s national school of public administration some years ago, when I was invited to share the work of Reos Partners with a group of their students. His words have stayed with me as I continue to work in creative ways with senior groups of stakeholders facing complex challenges, and as I reflect on what is needed and what is possible in these situations.
I had shown the Brazilian group a video of a project in South Africa called LINC: the Leadership and Innovation Network for Children. In 2007, 45 stakeholders, including Chief Directors of ministries, heads of national NGOs and corporate foundations, as well as leading academics and community workers, had come together in a social lab to look at innovative ways of caring for growing numbers of orphans and children in situations of vulnerability. In the video, the participants are seen doing a power-leveling exercise where they stick playing cards to their head, sitting in silent reflection by a river, engaging in “speed-dating” to find quick collaborations, and using modeling materials like playdough to design new initiatives to address their problematic situation. Their high level of energy and commitment shines through as does their willingness to engage actively with each other and with the process.
I have seen this over and over again in my work: “serious”, “senior” people finding value in unconventional forms of collaboration. Here are three principles to answer the question posed to me in the classroom in Brasilia.
1. Purpose
People engage with these “alternative” activities because they see the point.
As a facilitator, I always clarify honestly the intention behind an exercise before engaging in it, including making explicit how this relates to the purpose the group has set out for itself. Most times, people know that their classical business-as-usual meeting processes are not bringing out the best in themselves and their colleagues, and hence not generating optimum results. Generally, they are working on an urgent and complex problem, that requires a new perspective, and so there is an openness to trying something different.
But this doesn’t mean that anything different will do, or that just doing something different is sufficient. It’s not about downloading gimmicks that sound fun off the internet. If the participants are feeling like guinea pigs, the facilitator probably hasn’t quite gotten it right. While creative exercises are enjoyable, they should also have meaning, be fit for purpose, and be appropriately timed.
Once I was facilitating a workshop to develop scenarios for the future of civil society with a highly diverse group including senior NGO leaders, government officials, youth, community activists, and corporate foundations. In the group next door, there was a corporate team-building group doing all the classical team-building exercises. Towards the end of our workshop, one of the participants rolled his eyes and said to us as facilitators “thank you so much for not making us walk around blindfolded!” To him, the exercises of the group next door had seemed superficial and meaningless. In our room, the group had been building lego models of the future of civil society, giving each other feedback across the groups and diligently and creatively re-modeling them to come up with relevant, challenging, and plausible future scenarios. I imagine the group next door looking in at our activities might have found them meaningless too, and said to their own facilitator “thank you for not making us play with lego!” Each group was working with tools that served their purpose.
2. Trust
People engage with these activities when they feel trust.
If we want a group to trust the process, the condition is that the facilitator deeply and calmly trusts it first and trusts him/herself to be able to pivot and adjust if needed without rigid attachment to the planned design. People engage when they sense that the facilitator is experienced, has been in this situation before and generated positive results from previous processes. This becomes easier as the portfolio of successful past initiatives and past cases increases where other “important people” have done the same and come out satisfied.
Confidence is built from experience, but can also be transferred through story. I have my track record as a facilitator, but my track record feels even greater because I listen carefully to the stories of my colleagues and peers and learn from their experiences.
In addition to the experience and confidence of the facilitator, working in a physical space that has been curated with care also helps to generate confidence. This means for example ensuring comfortable furniture, natural light, plants, and good quality materials (such as flipcharts, markers, post-it notes, and modeling materials) that have been well prepared, laid out, and selected for the purpose.
There is a famous quote by André Gide that says “One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” Effectively, the facilitator is at times taking participants on a journey to discover new lands, and this may mean that they lose sight of the shore and feel uncomfortable. The facilitator needs to ensure that the group can trust that even in discomfort, even if we don’t know where exactly we are, we are in a boat that is sturdy, the crew is experienced, and we have enough food and drink onboard.
As facilitators, it is important for us to choose a boat that we are comfortable steering. There are always multiple options for tools and exercises to bring into a process. I find it is generally more effective to have a simpler tool being employed by a confident facilitator than a fancy ship being steered by a wobbly crew.
3. Agency
People engage with these activities if they are not forced to do so.
Even as we at times provoke and push participants out of their comfort zones, I believe a facilitator needs to have a deeply authentic respect for the participants’ freedom to act on their own behalf. In this sense the way the Brazilian leader articulated his question “how do you get people to do this” is not the right way to think. If you operate from a paradigm that you are “getting people” to do something, you will not send out an energy of free will to the group, and there will, rightfully, be resistance.
Respecting participants’ agency is not the same as making activities “optional”. When you explicitly make activities optional, you are inviting people to choose, in a more superficial and short-term way, whether they as individuals feel like doing something or not. With most group processes, it will serve the collective purpose best if everyone participates with presence in the whole process. But no activity, nor participation in the process as a whole, is forced. Generally, when people realize that they are being invited, not forced, they are more likely to accept trying something out.
The important thing is not the facilitation tool. The important thing is the intention and the presence of all those involved. If someone chooses not to do a certain exercise, or they are prevented from doing so for example due to a disability or cultural/religious restriction, it is useful to try and find an alternative way in which they might achieve the same purpose in a different way. For example, if the group is doing an exercise modeling with clay and someone refuses to work with clay, not because they want to be difficult but because they just can’t get themselves to touch it, they could choose to draw an image instead or to write in their journal around the same purpose for which the rest of the group is using the clay.
When we design workshops and decide on the facilitation tools and materials to use, it’s important to consider the cultural backgrounds of participants, and any disabilities that may be in the group, and consider where the limitations are. There are many different ways, that are equally creative, to reach the same purpose in a group process. That said, one doesn’t necessarily have to be too careful. I have found that people with disabilities often just want to be explicitly acknowledged and given an alternative or to work with someone who can complement them. For example, we worked with a paraplegic person in an education project where the group worked with lego modeling, and he was happy to do his model by looking at the pieces and telling a colleague to put them together for him. It turned out to be a beautiful, illuminating, and relationship-strengthening exercise, which simply demanded a bit of slowing down.
It can be helpful to consider in the facilitation team upfront what we will do if we meet resistance to a certain exercise, so as not to be caught off guard when resistance emerges. I usually ask people to observe the exercise if they don’t want to join so they are fully present and can engage in the learning. The point of view of the observers is often helpful.
Convenors who ask me to facilitate a process often say to me “I look forward to seeing your magic”. I always clarify immediately that facilitation isn’t magic. The idea that it is magic implies that it is not a normal way of operating, that people are somehow under a spell and hence unfree in the presence of the facilitator. I am not doing anything to them. I am working with them. They are the protagonists of the story, and they are fully free in that experience.
Illustrations by Toa Maes
