The Five Words that Unlock Amazing Facilitation Potential (Facilitation Friday #36)

Effective facilitation dispassionately observes and reacts to what happens in real-time and makes it easier for participants to do the same.

Five words.

Would you believe that’s all you need to unlock powerful facilitation potential?

If not, set your skepticism aside and try them on for size:

Attend to what is happening

This is all it takes to accelerate results. Sort of lol.

The mindset embodied in these five words is the basis for almost all of the sound advice offered in Advanced Facilitation: Facilitation with a Gestalt Focus, a powerful 65-page book from Trevor Bentley and Howard Boorman. It is worth adding it to your resource library.

I encourage you to operationalize these five powerful words in/for all of your facilitation efforts: attend to what is happening. When I do, my brain begins processing a flood of questions simultaneously:

• What is happening right now?

• How long has this been happening?

• How is what happening affecting the work we are doing and those doing the work?

• What might be the reasons this is happening?

• What might need to happen next?

• What is the least intrusive action I can take to help make that happen?

• What might I need to start doing?

• What might I need to do less?

• What might I need to do more?

It can be easy to focus only on negative things when they happen. Be sure to attend to the positive as well.  Understanding why good things are happening in a meeting or workshop may help our facilitation make more of that possible.

Attend to what is happening

I’d probably add “and invite others to do the same” since I deeply believe that anyone can—and everyone should—make facilitative contributions.  When you commit to facilitate with restraint, attending to what is happening means you may also invite participants to:

• reflect on their conversations

• surface and share their observations and insights

• make connections and meaning from they now notice

• identify what should happen moving forward and what that might require

When participants help attend to what is happening, more diverse interpretations often surface … about what is happening, what it might mean, and what should happen next.  As a result, more informed choices can be made and participants’ ownership of their relationships and achieving the session’s outcomes may increase.

Bottom Line

Meeting agendas and workshop content outlines are draft roadmaps to help achieve a set of intended outcomes.  No matter how much planning and preparation a facilitator does, we can’t know in advance that the journey will unfold as anticipated.  Effective facilitation dispassionately observes and reacts to what happens in real-time and makes it easier for participants to do the same.

Getting in Action

1. Think about a recent facilitation experience.  How well did you attend to what happened?  What contributed to your ability to do (or not do) so?

2. In what facilitation situations might you find it most difficult to attend to what is happening?  Why might that be?  How might you work around this?

3. The next time you participate in a meeting or workshop, try to periodically look at it through a facilitative lens, exploring some of the “attending questions” in this essay.

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