Facilitation is a team sport. A good facilitator has one eye on the people dynamics, one eye on the session’s purpose, one eye on process and timing, and one eye on whatever surprises come out of left field. Yes, great facilitators need more than two eyes. That’s why we often show up in pairs. At our best, we show up like athletes, well-trained in techniques and ready to catch and pass the balls thrown at us.
As Facilitation Service Line Lead at Environmental Incentives, I train, support, and manage our bench of meeting masters, workshop wizards, and learning event leaders. Recently, I designed and implemented a series of trainings for advanced facilitators supporting USAID’s Improving Design, Evidence, and Learning project. In this role, I learned a lot about how to support advanced practitioners (of facilitation or other complex sports) on their path to sustained excellence. Four lessons stand out:
1. Facilitators are like athletes—they need to play to learn.
Most of our learning happens as we play the game. Excellent facilitation literature—like The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures, The Art of Gathering, and the Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision Making—has impacted how I do my work. However, most of what I know as a facilitator, I learned by doing. And I learned the most from overcoming challenges and working with colleagues who were willing to share, reflect, and be vulnerable. When designed with intention, trainings can be important spaces to facilitate learning by collaborative doing.
Whenever you bring people together in a training, ask yourself: What can we do together that we could not do alone? When training facilitators in a specific tool, if their only objective is to learn the steps for using it, they could easily read process instructions on their own. However, a training enables facilitators to experience the process from both the participant and facilitator’s perspective. They develop a visceral understanding of what each tool does and how it impacts outcomes.
2. You play how you practice.
Your ultimate performance mirrors what you learned while practicing. As part of our advanced facilitator training, we invited participants to draw from their own lived experience while experimenting with facilitation tools. When exploring the Circles of Control, Influence, and Concern concept, they reflected on what they could control, influence, or adapt to in their current situation of facilitator cohort in project start-up. As a result, they learned a tool, experienced what it felt like to apply it to something that matters, and started building understanding and connections about their shared experience.
3. Be a coach, not a teacher.
In any given room, an individual’s knowledge is so much less than the group’s collective knowledge. As the facilitator, if you hear yourself talking a lot, you are only tapping into a small percentage of the knowledge in the room. Instead, take on the mindset of a great coach: invite participants to play, while giving them occasional pointers about how to improve. Use structures that bring out the knowledge in the room, connect different experiences, and provide frameworks and inspiration to build new insights on collective knowledge.
4. A team that learns together wins together.
When selecting participants for the advanced facilitator training, we followed clear rules of inclusion. Our cohort included experienced facilitators working on the same project, with no beginners, facilitators from other projects, or flies on the wall (as Priya Parker would say: “No Bobs”). This meant that every breakout group, plenary conversation, and post-it collection benefited from the participants’ existing facilitation mastery. We went deep, fast without the risk of losing our less experienced colleagues. That doesn’t mean that rookie facilitators are left out of trainings—rather, we segment sessions so that each team member gets what they need.
This training wasn’t a one-off experience, after which participants returned to their “real life.” Instead, it was one step in a process of creating and maintaining facilitation excellence. Overall, this process includes:
- A series of three advanced facilitation trainings spread over several months (focused on Design, Activity Startup, and Pause and Reflect facilitation).
- Opportunities to apply what participants have learned together in project implementation.
- One-on-one facilitation advisory services for facilitators as they plan specific workshops.
- A consistent culture of After-Action Reviews after workshops ensures facilitation teams keep on learning as they go.
- A learning agenda with questions around the utility of different facilitation tools and regular learning events with IDEAL facilitators and clients to answer these questions.
Embracing the Messy Middle
Now that we’ve gotten the ball rolling, it’s important to remember there’s always another practice session, game, and season in the complex sport of facilitation. When I’m facilitating an intricate group process or leading a training, I often remind folks that the magic happens in the “messy middle.” Learning is an ongoing journey, and we form stronger bonds and become more effective facilitators in that messy middle of experimenting with new approaches, practicing skills, failing, and trying again. Designing and leading this class taught me just that—whether a player or a coach, we improve by trying—and keeping our eyes and ears open as we do.
Lead photo of the ASEAN Education for the 21st Century Workshop in Bangkok by Richard Nyberg for USAID.
