Unlocking the Magic of Facilitation Read online

  Unlocking the Magic of Facilitation:

  11 Key Concepts You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know

  By Sam Killermann & Meg Bolger

  Unlocking the Magic of Facilitation:

  11 Key Concepts You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know

  This work is uncopyrighted by the authors, 2016

  This work is contributed to the Creative Commons under the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. For more information about Creative Commons, and this particular contribution to free cultural works, visit https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/.

  Published by

  Impetus Books

  Austin, TX

  www.impetus.pw

  Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by schools, corporations, associations, and others. Book is available in both print and E-book formats. For details, contact the publisher using the above website.

  ISBN-10: 0-9897602-3-5

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9897602-3-2

  Cover photo by Juskteez Vu

  Cover design, layout design, and all illustrations

  by Sam Killermann

  Published January 2016

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3

  to the wary and the passionate

  Table of Contents

  “It’s still magic even if you know how it’s done.”

  – Terry Pratchett

  Preface

  Introduction

  Understanding Facilitation as a Nuanced Skill

  Facilitating vs. Teaching vs. Lecturing

  Being Neutral

  How to Read a Group

  Both/And > Or/But

  The “Yes, And…” Rule

  Asking Good Questions?

  Safe Space for Vulnerability

  Triggers

  Learning from Emotions

  Role Modeling Continuous Learning (or the Myth of the Expert)

  Conclusion

  Acknowledgements

  About the Authors

  Preface

  “Thrown over a precipice, you fall or else you fly.”

  – Margaret Atwood

  In the fall of 2015, we were brought into a small town in rural Washington. It was the type of town where you meet welders – and they introduce themselves to you as welders. We were training facilitators at a local university, and we were also asked to facilitate a town hall meeting for the community at large. The town hall was intended to be an educational session about diverse genders and sexualities, in response to the university’s efforts to be more inclusive of folks of all gender identities (and transgender students in particular).

  Minutes into the open forum, after we had just barely had the chance to define what is meant by the initialism LGBTQ, a welder sitting in the back of the room raised his hand. He was sitting in the middle of the back wall, with his legs spread wide, leaning back in his chair with his arms firmly crossed. The look on his face was equal parts disinterested and impassioned. We knew he was a welder, because it was one of the first things he said when we called on him. He continued to say something like the following:

  “I just don’t understand why any of this matters. It shouldn’t matter. I’m straight, and I don’t ask people to make a big deal of my sexuality. Just mind your own business, and I’ll mind mine. Some people these days make big issues out of nothing, putting, like, gay bumper stickers on their car and stuff. It seems like they just want attention. You never see any straight pride parades. I don’t have any straight bumper stickers on my truck. Everyone gets it. We get it. I mean, it’s starting to feel like it’s harder to be a straight, White, man nowadays, than anything else.”

  Without looking at one another, or exchanging a word, we both had the same series of thoughts, and we know this now because we debriefed the entire town hall.

  “When that welder guy first spoke,” we said to each other, did you think: (1) Dang, this escalated quickly; (2) Did that guy just play All the Hits[1] in one rant?; and (3) Do we engage with this comment, knowing that doing so will likely redefine the entire town hall, and anything we planned to cover is susceptible to being devoured by the discussion that would follow? (4) If we engaged, where do we even start?

  We chose to engage, and the next hour flew by. A clear dichotomy presented itself in the room: those onboard with inclusion of marginalized genders and sexualities, and those opposed. These factions represented their views loudly, and we did everything we could to keep the conversation productive, civil, and more “Town Hall” than “Wild West Saloon Brawl.”

  We used every trick we had up our sleeve.

  We engaged compassionately with the welder and his comrades throughout the event – hearing their concerns, their realities, and then providing alternatives that they could consider. We affirmed the folks who were frustrated with the lack of inclusion, or lack of “progress” in the town (The phrase “…in two-thousand and fifteen…” was peppered into a lot of statements. “How are we still having this pushback in two-thousand and fifteen?”).

  At a turning point in the discussion, the welder revealed to us a time that he stumbled into a gay bar (“One of their bars,” as he put it) by accident, and knew immediately he wasn’t welcome.

  “I could just feel it,” he said. He wasn’t welcome there, and he didn’t like that. It didn’t feel fair to him. But that’s just how the world is, he implied.

  We asked, “What did it feel like when you didn’t feel welcome?”

  “It sucked.”

  We let that sink in, then replied, “That’s a terrible feeling, to not feel welcome. And it’s that feeling that we – in this town hall, and in the work that the university is doing – are trying to prevent. There are lots of people who, right now, feel that way in the majority of spaces they enter. Because when you’re not the default, to not be explicitly included is to be implicitly excluded.”

  His entire body language transformed. He leaned forward in his seat, uncrossed his arms and propped himself up with his elbow on his knee, and his face softened. He didn’t reply as much as he simply acknowledged. And this change shifted the energy in the room.

  Both of us saw it, felt it, and did a telepathic “High-five” when it happened. We know this, because we debriefed it after. Did we telepathically high-five when the welder engaged in the conversation?

  After the town hall, the welder came up to us, and did something that, for us, is emblematic of facilitation magic: he apologized-thanked us.

  “I’m really sorry that I wasn’t getting it. To be honest, there is still a lot I don’t get. But I hadn’t thought of things the way that I’m thinking of them now, about all this stuff. Nobody talked with me that way before. Thanks for that, and for doing what you’re doing.” And then he shook our hands before heading out back into his life.

  The next morning, we had the second day of our facilitator training at the university. A few of the participants were at the town hall and word had spread about what happened. The first question on everyone’s mind was, “How did you do that at the town hall last night?”

  ***

  When we work to train others to be effective facilitators, we never get to everything. And sometimes it feels like the more ground we cover, the more aware the folks we’re training are of how little they know. With that realization comes anxiety and doubt, and the irony is not lost on us: in some ways, our trainings make facilitators feel less competent as facilitators.

  No matter how long a train-the-trainer visit is, we never have enough time to explain and share all the nuanced choices we make as a facilitators, how we choose when to engage with antagonistic participants, or everything that is going through our minds the
entire time (all the decisions we don’t make, as well as the ones we do).

  We never get to all the magic tricks.

  This is an ever-present frustration for us, because we don’t take our responsibilities in facilitator training lightly. We see facilitation as a powerful wand, that in well-trained hands can achieve wonderful, healthy, positive outcomes; and that in untrained hands can lead to disaster and pain. In trying to leave a group with all the techniques they need to be more effective facilitators, to not get to something that we know will make a difference in their future trainings is discouraging.

  Writing this book was about creating that resource that we could hand to folks and say, “Hey, we didn’t get to everything, but never fear: we wrote it down for you.”

  We have found that most facilitators spend a disproportionate amount of their time learning the content material they’ll be communicating, instead of how they’ll be communicating it. In some ways, that’s a good thing: facilitation is a difficult thing to teach, and is often better learned by experience, so folks focus on what they know they can learn from reading. But it’s not impossible to learn from reading, and in creating this book we are rising to that challenge.

  When we aren’t given as much time as we prefer for train-the-trainer visits, it’s generally because those folks simply can’t afford the extra time to spend on facilitation training. We didn’t want to create a book that presented the same barriers.

  ***

  In drafting what we wanted to cover in a book about facilitation, we came up with over 40 important, “can’t live without these” things-turned-chapters. Our first draft of a manuscript was trending toward a 400+ page book, which formed into four distinct sections: power in group dynamics, key concepts of facilitation, elements of a training, and developing a facilitation style. This book is that second section, reworked, distilled, and polished: the 11 key concepts we think you should know.

  We’re hoping to encourage people to step into the arena, and also provide support for those already seasoned by experience, by providing an easily-digestible, quickly-helpful resource to enhance learning about the technique of facilitation.

  And in doing so, we recognize that (like in our train-the-trainer visits) we are leaving out as much as we are putting in. So while this book is self-contained in its learning and mission, we’re also going to publish the other three sections – plus the section that became this book; indeed, an attempt at collecting everything we’ve learned into one book -- as A Guide to Facilitation: The Social Justice Advocate’s Handbook.

  We are two passionate social justice educators who believe in the power of facilitation. We’ve spent close to two decades trying to sort through this style of engagement, and we want to share what we’ve learned so far with you.

  Introduction

  “Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called the Pledge. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man…. The second act is called the Turn. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret, but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call the Prestige.”

  – Cutter, in The Prestige

  You, like us, believe that facilitation is important. That didn’t take a mentalist to divine: it’s why you’re reading this book, and why we’re writing it.

  You’ve witnessed the magic of facilitation. Maybe it was when you realized you were signing up for classes based on the teacher, instead of the subject. Or after a day-long training where you found yourself saying something like, “I feel like we’ve only been together for an hour, and at the same time like we’ve learned enough to fill two weeks.”

  Or maybe you’ve noticed the absence of magic. Going to a workshop you knew you were going to love, and leaving unsure of how someone made you feel so ambivalent about your own passion.

  If you’ve had experience in front of a group, you know some of what goes on behind the curtain. If you haven’t, you can still draw on what you know from being in the crowd. You’ve seen the effects of facilitation, and in this book we reveal the secrets behind our favorite tricks. Before we get to that, let’s make sure we’re on the same page when talking about “facilitation.”

  What is Facilitation?

  In this book, we use “facilitation” to describe a style of engaging others toward a goal. We generally assume that goal is learning, which we use in the broadest of ways: learning content knowledge, learning about oneself and others, or unlearning (our favorite type of learning).

  In facilitation, there are two key roles: the facilitator (or facilitators) and the participants. The facilitator is the person responsible for guiding the learning process. We often describe this as being “in the front of the group.” The participants are the folks who are expected to be doing the learning.

  It can be helpful to think of the facilitator as the captain of a ship. And you can think of the participants as the crew. Now, the members of the crew, together, have what they need to work the ship without the captain. They should know how to hoist the sails, and turn the rudder. Perhaps some of them are newer to this, but the older crew members could fill them in. Without a crew, a captain is unable to maneuver a ship. But a crew would be lost without the captain. It’s the captain’s vision, coordination, and guidance that enable the crew to work seamlessly together toward their common goal. And the goal is to move the ship from one point to another, avoiding any sandbars, tide pools, or icebergs along the way--and leaving no crewmember behind.

  When You’re in the Presence of Magic

  While there are countless ways to be a great facilitator, there are common threads that link all of the magical facilitation we’ve experienced:

  Time flies. Almost every time we’ve ever been participants in a workshop where the facilitators were on their game, we’ve wondered where the time went and wanted more.

  Everyone stays engaged. A great facilitator works in a way that keeps everyone present, learning, and in the work. There may be moments where participants check out, or don’t show up for the work that day, but great facilitators pull those participants back into the moment like a rabbit from a hat.

  Everyone grows, even the facilitator. Facilitation is about actively involving participants in their own learning process, and when that’s done well, it means there are plenty of opportunities for the facilitator to learn from the participants.

  To do the above seems easy when you’re the participant, but requires a deft hand as a facilitator. All of the concepts in this book, in one way or another, will help you facilitate experiences where time flies, everyone is engaged, and everyone grows.

  Who is This Book For?

  This book is for people who, in their professional or personal lives, find themselves responsible for engaging a group of people in a process. Over the years, we’ve found that a lot of folks we would describe as facilitators don’t use the moniker for themselves. We wrote this book for facilitators of all stripes, whether they wear the badge “facilitator” or not: outdoor educators, teachers, social workers, social justice advocates, orientation guides, coaches, group counselors, and other people who find themselves regularly, or occasionally, responsible for helping a group get from point A to another point.

  This book is for ourselves ten years ago, when we would have benefited one thousand fold from having access to the learning we’ve collected since then. Similarly, it’s for anyone who identifies as a facilitator, and hasn’t had the opportunity to have any formal training, learning, or conversations about the craft.

  Facilitators are generally passionate about their content area. Occasionally, we let that passion obstruct our view of the fact that we all have a foot in two fields: whatev
er our content area is, and facilitation. This book is content agnostic and process intensive. It’s all about the latter: how do you best engage a group around learning a topic that is dear to your heart (or integral to your job).

  What This Book Isn’t

  This book is not a substitute for experience, practice, finding your groove, being in the front of the room, or a passion for people. It’s a complement for all of those things, and all of the other things required of great facilitation; a catalyst that will augment your learning from those things; and a source of support and mentorship. This book, in and of itself, is not sufficient to make you a great facilitator, but we don’t know many great facilitators who haven’t mastered the key concepts espoused here (even if they wouldn’t use the same language to describe them as we do).

  What This Book Is: The 11 Key Concepts

  Over the years we have been training trainers (i.e., teaching folks how to facilitate), we have noticed themes that consistently emerged. These themes were irrespective of content area or cultural trends, universal and evergreen. The 11 concepts introduced and described in this book are, to wit, the highlights of the learning of all those train-the-trainer experiences.