book review: art of facilitation
Dale Hunter
(2007).The Art of Facilitation Revised.
© Random House NZ:
The published book available from April, 2007.
Excerpts from
Part 1 Chapter 1,
The role of the facilitator
In an earlier book, The Zen of Groups, Dale Hunter describes the role of the facilitator as a leadership role in which the facilitator’s job is to guide the group process towards the achievement of the group’s agreed purpose.
Dale Hunter notes that to facilitate means ‘to make
easy', therefore the group facilitator’s job is to make it
easier for the group to do its work and, as described by Sam Kaner,
author of the concept of the "groan zone" where divergent
thinking is worked through to enable highly participative
decision-making:
The
facilitator’s job is to support everyone to do their best
thinking. To do
this, the facilitator encourages full participation, promotes mutual understanding and cultivates
shared responsibility. By supporting everyone to do their best
thinking, a facilitator enables group members to search for solutions and
build sustainable agreements.
—
Sam Kaner
Additionally, Roger Schwarz, a leading contemporary writer on
facilitation, takes a group- centred approach and informs that:
Group facilitation is a
process in which a person who is acceptable to
all members of a group, substantively neutral, and has no decision-
making authority, intervenes to help a group improve the way it
identifies and solves problems, and makes decisions, in order to
increase the group’s effectiveness.
Roger
Schwarz divides facilitation into basic and developmental
facilitation.
The two approaches imply different roles for the facilitator. In basic
facilitation, although the group may influence the process at any time,
in general it expects the facilitator to guide it using what he or she
considers effective process. In developmental facilitation, members
expect to monitor and guide the group’s process, and expect
the
facilitator to teach them how to accomplish this goal.
Roger
Schwarz also stresses that facilitation is value-based, and that these
values guide effective group behaviour, and effective facilitator
behaviour.
He lists the key values as i)
valid information (sharing and understanding
information), ii) free
and informed choice, and
iii)internal commitment
to
these choices (people being personally responsible for the
choices they
make as part of the group). In 2002, in a new edition of his book The
Skilled Facilitator, Roger Schwarz added a fourth core value,
iv) compassion.
Facilitators
enable groups to improve their process by helping them to act in ways
that are consistent with these core values.
In developmental facilitation, Schwarz finds that over time the group
members develop the ability to identify when they have acted in ways
that are inconsistent with their core values, and to correct their
behaviour — without a facilitator’s help. In basic
facilitation, the
group uses a facilitator to help it act consistently with the core
values, temporarily, while working with the facilitator.
On a different tack,
Harrison Owen, the inventor of the facilitation
method known as Open Space, describes the facilitator’s role
as
facilitating the journey of spirit using mythos (story) as a key.
"Form
follows spirit. Spirit cannot be bought, ordered, directed. It
responds positively to a very different treatment called inspiration."
Harrison Owen
An excerpt from Part 1 Chapter 1 : The role of the facilitator
Dale Hunter (2007).The
Art of Facilitation Revised.
© Random House NZ:
The published book will be available from April, 2007.
