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Have you ever met someone who calls themselves a facilitator? It’s not the most common job, but they’re out there. For every facilitator you meet, you’ll meet a dozen people who don’t use the title but treat it a skill they pay attention to and develop over time. And for every one of these, you’ll find a hundred people who have no real idea of what facilitation is. When they have to run a meeting they fall back on boring, stultifying time-wasters like presentations, open discussions, and brainstorms.
Any gathering of 3 or more people is being actively facilitated, whether the hosts realize it or not. Whenever you’ve felt bored or disengaged in a meeting and had to sit there, that meeting was poorly facilitated. For a lot of us, ‘work is just meetings,’ so this adds up to a huge, frustrating waste of time.
Poor facilitation is everywhere and it’s terrible. No amount of happy crappy from an LLM chatbot or beautiful slides from a consultant can deal with this. It is a separate, deeply human thing that has to get sorted out if we want to solve problems and act skillfully as groups in the workplace. The meeting cost calculator is running.
And for the most part, meeting or workshop facilitation is not the main thing people want to deal with. They’re focused on the people, problems and decisions at hand.
So my question is—where do people learn this stuff? I’ve noticed three ways. People learn facilitation:
- informally,
- formally, and
- by practicing.
Let’s look at each. I’ll share my experience, some findings from an industry survey, and a few starting points or offerings.
How I got my facilitation chops
I got interested in facilitation as a grad student back in 2006, when I went to a niche web collaboration conference down in Portland. I thought I was going to hang out with pals and compare notes on nerdile web stuff on my department’s dime. But this conference was structured using open space technology and hosted by Michael Herman. After seeing how he worked, I wanted to do it myself. This is like saying you got interested in guitar after seeing Roger Waters play in a coffee shop.
I stuck with that interest. First, as a way to scoot through grad school—an environment where I saw a lot of very effective and very lousy facilitation in the classroom (teaching is a kind of facilitation). I survived many boring lectures by paying attention to what people were doing poorly, and wondering what they might do otherwise. Later, it gave me an edge in my technical consulting work. I could get people to a decision or a working consensus on what to do next.
I put together an invisible curriculum for myself, in three ways:
- Informally, by going to local conferences with demos and workshops on facilitation methods to see a variety of approaches as used by different people. This was during the initial heyday of Liberating Structures and Lean Coffee in the Seattle area, so these were easy to access.
- Formally, by getting training and certifications. In my experience, the best of these are the Technology of Participation series from the Institute of Cultural Affairs (more on this later).
- And most importantly, by practicing. The school of hard knocks. My consulting work by this time involved planning and hosting a lot of meetings—continuous improvement workshops, human-centered design activities, public engagement sessions for government agencies, and the like. So I had opportunities to practice, and get feedback. It’s one thing to get trained in a method. Another thing to try it out during training. Still another to run it over and over in different groups solving different problems until you know what’s what.
What I notice today is this. While clients don’t tend to hire me for facilitation, that’s a big part of how we end up getting the work done. I say ‘we’ pointedly here, because spreading facilitation practices, or leaving them behind after a project is done, is one of the most durable things I do for clients. It’s something people don’t know to ask for, but they sure appreciate when they see it, and they keep using it afterwards.
How most facilitators learn
Let’s turn to SessionLab’s “State of Facilitation” report. This is a vendor of meeting planning software I’ve never used; but they commission this free annual report which is super valuable.
From this year’s report, note that only half of the respondents have a formal accreditation or training certificate related to facilitation. And of those that do, there’s a pretty wide spread:
I don’t see this as a bad thing at all. Of our three ways (informal, formal, and practice), only the second is produced by training. More practice needs to be available, in addition to more training, because learning happens in the doing and teaching:
Brian Kerr
Another big opportunity people use to learn facilitation is feedback and evaluation. For the first time, this year’s “State of Facilitation” survey asked questions about evaluation. Here’s how facilitators say they’re measuring success:
Notice the weighting toward activity measures, which you could think of as ways to prove that the work got done. These are also the kinds of measures that provide quick feedback items for the facilitator to build into their future sessions. So they help with everybody getting paid, feeling good, and making improvements next time. These are all good things.
You have to get down to the 7th or 8th most common responses to get to anything related to measuring results or lasting impact for the organization.
General advice for performance measurement: you want a mix of both activity and results measures. I bet most of the evaluation shown in the chart above happens too quickly after a session to speak to impacts. And that is related to the “drive-by consulting” nature of much paid facilitation work.
Personally, I’ve only been able to tease out the impact of my facilitation work by going back to clients years or even a decade after the fact (hi Susan!) to learn what really took hold after my consulting team moved on. In some cases it was a specific habit for closing a meeting that they kept doing. In others, a way of documenting/arguing about a problem that stuck. Or in one case, a method for deciding how to schedule projects that our client’s boss liked and ended up using across her whole division. Facilitation is happening everywhere.
Three ways you can learn facilitation, starting today
(1) Informal ways
Seek out meetings, workshops, events, community gatherings, and the like. Pay attention to the facilitation as well as the content. Spend half your time looking at whoever is running the event, and half your time looking at everybody else. When are people bored? When does someone perk up? Who’s disengaged, and why? Who gets shut down early and doesn’t participate again?
(2) Formal ways
I whole-heartedly recommend the Institute of Cultural Affairs’ Technology of Participation (ToP) Facilitation Methods course as a starting point. You can take it in person around the world, or online. It is the only facilitation training I’ve taken that has not been a waste of time. And I use elements from it weekly.
(3) Ways to practice
And for practice, well, ya gotta practice. That’s not to say I can’t help you, though.
Over in the Continuous Improvement Studio, I have two items of interest:
- A free set of facilitation zines. You can print these and bring ’em into your next meeting to run a group check-in or a project launch.
- A fixed-price service that will make your next high-stakes meeting a delight. I love facilitating meetings, and this is where I get to spread the love by sharing the structure and confidence that helps people enjoy it as much as I do.
And here on the site, there’s plenty to browse through:
Brian Kerr
So my invitation is this. Find one activity in one of these three ways of learning and give it a shot. I’d be delighted to hear what you picked and how it went.
