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A very brief thought on Facilitation
ReplyDeleteFacilitation can be seen as helping people to achieve their goals and become self-directed. Put another way managing or training is no longer seen to be effective when you are relying solely on getting people to what to do and how to do it. The focus of the trainer or manager who uses facilitation is to help people be self-directed.
In my experience, when people come for coaching or a team needs input from a trainer what they want is someone to solve their problems, but what they may need is to become enabled to find their own solutions. Otherwise they become dependent on someone’s “expertise” and fail to develop their own capacities for personal and professional development.
This is difficult for a trainer or manager because success means giving up the easy pickings of finding a solution to a problem. It means working with people in a more involved way so that the interaction is more dynamic and challenging to both trainer or manager and a participant. Contrariwise, I am always worried when people are too enthusiastic after a workshop and more reassured when the feedback indicates that I have left people with something to think about. It means people will probably go on to develop their own ideas-rather than wait for another “amazing” workshop.
Will Schutz who developed a unique Team Building process for the American Navy writes in his book, “The Human Elements” of doing workshops which got very good feedback from participants, but ultimately were unsuccessful i.e. there was no substantial organizational change. He spent many years work reversing this trend.
I think Facilitation depends on a change in perspective. This is the play element. If we see things differently we act differently. To achieve this is a “hard skill”
I work with a number of important (for me) principles.
• Work is not really important, but relationships are.
• We may not see the whole jigsaw; others will be able to see what we can’t.
• Being self-directed means depending on others
• We probably have more choices than we think, but not as many as we dream of.
Eogain Gallagher