Facilitation

Facilitation is the art of engaging participants and bringing people together to make change.

Good facilitation can be transformative whereas poor facilitation can be destructive. It is a professional skill set that takes individual dedication to develop. Yet it also cannot entirely be set alone, it relies on a social context.

Facilitation is a kind of leadership, perhaps more bounded in space and time than other forms of leadership. Like any good leadership it relies on purpose and passion.

To help understand facilitation, we have broken it down into five elements. Establishing the goal of the facilitation, ensuring the facilitative activity is designed to meet the goal, and that the activity is constructed of appropriate methods and techniques. This relies on more than technical knowledge, however, as the facilitator brings with them interpersonal abilities that are critical to success. These abilities themselves are interrelated with the facilitators social context. The social contexts of the group provide a boundary to what can be achieved. Yet facilitation, through enabling change, has the potential to bring about transformation to social contexts.

Facilitation brings people together to make change. It can mean that the sum of a group of people is greater than could be achieved by the individuals alone.