A guide to facilitation
Stories and methods for an authentic practice
My teammate Charlotte and I wrote this book in 2023, bringing together our experience co-designing and leading virtual and in-person engagements.
My favourite parts are the stories. Each chapter opens with an anecdote that finds me in a facilitation jam of some kind.
This book was written under the "publishing house" label of my own company, Co.school. The book design and layout (cover and interior) is by Tracey Falk.
Book Description:
"Facilitation is one of the most needed skills in today’s environment; it can bring people together to understand each other better, identify challenges, and create inclusive, effective solutions. But it’s also one of the most challenging and elusive skills to teach or learn.
In this guide, two experienced, sought-after facilitators share their stories, methods, and hard-won insight. Learn how to co-create experiences that resonate, accomplish meaningful goals, and bring equitable collaboration. Learn how to plan, design, and host deeply thoughtful engagements—while sustaining your energy and wellbeing. This robust guide includes specific tips for online and hybrid facilitation, as well as advice for scaling engagements to serve different purposes. It’s the book our practitioners wish they had when they started the journey."
The opening pages
Here's how the book starts.
I might be one of the worst facilitation students out there.
I dropped out of the most recent virtual facilitation course I participated in, after session three of eight. The last straw was when the instructor performed the macarena live on camera during the session. I just took my headphones out, shook my head, minimized the screen, and started drafting my goodbye letter.
One of the last times I participated in in-person facilitation training, I left the class after lunch on day three and put on an absurd, aggravating, hour-long 90s-music mashup that is purely for novelty listening. I spent the entire lunch hour blasting this nonsense into my ears, trying to recover from the frustration I felt pent up inside the classroom. Better to be deluged by irritating, grating, tortuous music loops than to be trapped in a condescending learning environment.
Participating in facilitation training exhausts me.
Like, drains-my-tank-to-absolute-desolate-emptiness. There’s a picture my classmates took in another learning experience: I have lodged myself lengthwise onto the tiny bottom shelf of a bookcase in order to achieve full-body compression and silence, in order to recover from the overstimulation of being forced by a facilitator to move through an overly-regimented pace of activities.
Occasionally, I wonder—is it just me? There are factors I’ve experienced that make this kind of thing hard for me. I was homeschooled for my foundational years, so if it’s not a self-propelled, hands-on, quiet, project-based learning experience, I react as if I’m being forced to stand inside a walk-in refrigerator with an active lawnmower. I’m clawing the walls to get out, even without the macarena.
The thing is, I happen to be a very good facilitator.
This is partly due to the same set of factors that makes group activities hard. I learned from a young age that the quicker I could read a room, the more likely it was that I wouldn’t be ostracized or mistreated. Thus, I built strong spidey senses without even knowing it: adapting to survive in overwhelming social situations by quickly making sense of a situation finding a role to play, and creating meaningful connections. (In grade 11, as a guest to a district-wide student ambassador meet-up, I was accidentally elected President thanks to overly-effective lunch-break socialization. I politely resigned once I realized that it involved Actual Duties.) This baseline of empathy and sensitivity is the backbone of facilitation: a skill that has enabled me to improvise my way through uncomfortable, challenging, and surprising facilitation situations over the past twenty years.
Through this work, I began to see that the power of the collective is massive. There is more genius and possibility that gets unlocked when we choose to share our intelligence then when we keep our notions separate.
And I began to see (as you likely see too) that the problems we’re facing in our organizations—and our society at large—won’t be solved by ones, or ones-and-zeroes. Solo individuals individually geniusing won’t be the way we move through crisis. And even the brightest AI engine (and I’m a huge fan) won’t be able to fuse the creative and spiritual energy of a community to draw out a shared possibility. That work is uniquely set aside for groups, consciously participating in collective creativity. That’s the work facilitation enables.
Sadly, it would seem that the only way we can meaningfully move forward is by learning to work together.
I say “sadly” because this ain’t easy. And I’m starting to understand I’m not the only one who feels that way.
Learning it isn’t easy. Facilitation training tends towards the pedantic, and few of us have the patience for that.
Doing it isn’t easy. Facilitation practice asks the facilitator to function as a sieve or colander: receiving everything people throw at you, maintaining firm boundaries, retaining what’s useful, and letting go of what doesn’t serve. That kind of function is, by definition, draining.
Yet, I really believe we need to learn these skills. Not in a stilted or scripted manner that denies our personhood and paints over it with a veneer of zestiness. We need to learn facilitation in a way that fully embraces the unpredictability, humanity, and wildness of the act itself. And we need to know how to work in a trauma-informed, sensitive manner as facilitators.
There is a semi-spiritual aspect to this idea. Henri Nouewn calls it the “wounded healer”: the idea that at the place of our greatest weakness lies the lessons we need to learn—and to teach.
Facilitation has brought me face-to-face with my own limitations, challenged the stories my ego tells me, and propelled me forward into a process of unlearning that has helped me find myself.
It has the potential to take you there, too.
I hope that this resource helps to open the door to your unique learning experience, by offering some authentic stories of the failures, walls, curveballs, obstacles, challenges, breakthroughs, and flops that can be found in the world of facilitation. These true stories illuminate alternative ways forward. It’s the book I wish I had the chance to read when I was getting a start.
As facilitators, we don’t need to tax our personal energy and patience to the point of total depletion; we can take our own needs into account.
We don’t need to attempt this art from a place of survival, where our existence depends on our ability to read the room; we can ensure we are safe and cared for.
We can recognize that facilitation is a crucial way to move through complex situations, without elevating the art to life-or-death stakes.
If you—like me—need a companion on this journey who helps acknowledge your humanity, protect your energy, and do the good work of facilitation without feeling like it’s an epic drama, I’m hoping these stories can help. I’d like to offer you a different way to learn this craft. A few promises:
- I respect your intelligence. I believe you are a smart person, who can learn well, figure things out on their own, read widely, and make up their own mind. I will try to not be pedantic or condescending.
- I won’t do the macarena. There’s a place for fun and games and humour, but you are here to learn, and you’re bringing intentionality. So will I.
- It’s going to be self-paced. Move through this at the pace that works for you.
- We’re going to use stories. There are enough practices, principles, rules, agendas, activities, workbooks, playbooks, guides, and steps you can follow. Again, read those. But you need to learn from failure, from stories. And if you’re going to spend time reading, let’s get you into stories from the brink of catastrophe.
- Please get practice. Embarrass yourself. Facilitation isn’t safe. You gotta make mistakes and have major flops. The work of facilitation can’t be done through books and video learning alone.
Ready? Let’s begin.