Dear Facilitators,
Welcome to our third quarterly newsletter dedicated to all-things facilitation!
In the previous newsletter back in January 2022, you learned about the importance of crafting good invitations to set your gathering up for success. Now we invite you to turn inwardly and focus your awareness on your role as a facilitator and the responsibility that comes with it.
We recommend grabbing your notebook to jot down your thoughts as you read through.
The role of the facilitator
An “easy” question to warm up: What is your understanding of the role of the facilitator? How do you define the key features, responsibilities, and boundaries of this role? Take a moment to jot down any key words, images, and ideas that you connect to this role.
There are multiple definitions out there and we are not here to suggest that one is right over another. If you are struggling to come up with your own definition, you might find inspiration in the following ones:
- Priya Parker, author of “The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters”, defines a facilitator as “someone trained in the skill of shaping group dynamics and collective conversations.” It is their “job to put the right people in a room and help them collectively think, dream, argue, heal, envision, trust, and connect for a specific larger purpose.”
- Adam Kahane, author of “Facilitating Breakthrough”, reminds you that the “word facilitate means ‘to make easier’, and facilitation enables a group to work together more easily and effectively.” (We will dedicate one of the upcoming newsletters to explore his concept of transformative facilitation as it is quite juicy!)
- The Art of Hosting promotes an approach to facilitation that has the capacity of letting the collective intelligence of the group emerge. Tenneson Woolf and Chris Corrigan explain it is focused on “improved, conscious, and kind ways of growing a capacity to support a deliberate wisdom, unique to being together”.
Facilitation at ChangemakerXchange
What about ChangemakerXchange? How do we understand the role of the facilitator inside our community?
The facilitator at ChangemakerXchange serves the cohort of changemakers, helping them explore ideas and move forward into action to achieve the purpose of the summit. The facilitator holds a safe yet stimulating space that encourages the group to engage actively with the four core pillars of CXC (human connection, peer-learning, collaboration, and wellbeing), to embrace the richness of diverse perspectives, and to optimise its resources to collaborate and create, sustain, and scale positive change.
In summary, the facilitator unlocks the collective intelligence of the group, strengthening the potential of the ChangemakerXchange community.
Do any of the definitions above resonate with your understanding of the role of the facilitator?
Facilitation and power
Now that you have more clarity, we have a second question for you. This time we are not even going to pretend it is an “easy” one: What is your relationship to power as a facilitator? What kind of facilitator are you? Are you someone who likes to be in control of everything or do you opt for a more laid-back approach? Again, you might wish to take a moment to reflect before reading on.
There are of course different types of facilitators, but all must come to term with the (sometimes uncomfortable) question of power. Why uncomfortable? Because we have noticed that in many changemaking circles, perhaps to counter authoritarian facilitation, facilitators tend to adopt an attitude of “chill”. They want to look cool and low-key and be perceived as non-invasive.
However, Priya Parker points out the problem with chill:
“Hosts assume that leaving guests alone means that the guests will be left alone, when in fact they will be left to one another. Many hosts I work with seem to imagine that by refusing to exert any power in their gathering, they create a power-free gathering. What they fail to realize is that this pulling-back, far from purging a gathering of power, creates a vacuum that others can fill.”
The thing is, facilitating is inevitably an exercise of power.
Now, how you exercise that power (and what for) is another question.
•••
And here comes our invitation.
We would like to invite you to join a one-hour call on Thursday, 26 May 2022 at 2:00–3:00pm GMT+2 to explore that question (and whatever questions might emerge during the session). We will use the fishbowl format to engage in a lively conversation and to make the most of our time together, we invite you to reflect ahead on how you exercise that power (and what for). Do you use power to protect your guests? Do you use it to temporarily equalise them?
The call will take place on Zoom (link here) – we will shortly send you a calendar invite which you can accept, tentatively accept, or decline. This will help us get a sense of how many participants to expect. Please note this call is open to anyone who attended one of our online ToT summits. This means that you will also have the chance to meet and exchange with other facilitators from our extended community of practice.