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Facilitation and Process, LLC is celebrating its first year anniversary as a consulting firm. Over the last year, I have had the privilege of working with clients from the social sector including: nonprofits, philanthropic organizations and government agencies. This year confirmed for me that “change” is the new normal for the social sector and that, for many organizations, the old tired solutions are no longer strategic and forward-thinking. Those contacting me over the last year have often expressed frustration that they have been to “the local workshops,” attended the right “networks” and have tried cookie cutter templates and yet their organizations are stagnant with their resources and impact continuing to erode. The clear and consistent message is that those organizations seeking to make a difference are ready for the fresh, imaginative and objective. There is a need for Strategic Facilitation. Strategic Process. Together.
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The concept of facilitation and process was the genesis of my firm and during this first year my work with almost a dozen clients has made it increasingly clear that agencies need solutions in the space where nonprofits, philanthropic organizations and government agencies meet.
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So as my firm moves into its second year, I have partnerships with many organizations in our community and my work has given me a clearer focus. When considering the local the social sector, the common challenge of nonprofits, philanthropic organizations and government agencies is not simply the need to operate more effectively in an environment of less. Rather, the social sector is being challenged to fundamentally rethink assumptions about theories of change, leverage and scale. At this moment in time, there is an unprecedented need for nonprofit, government, and philanthropic organizations to work differently to achieve a more sustainable and systemic impact on the compelling social needs in our community. In helping you to meet this need, Facilitation & Process, LLC is your partner. Creating a better tomorrow. Together.
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Across the entire social sector, today’s strategy requires thinking differently and deeper. Expertise and experience. Strategic facilitation and strategic process. Facilitation & Process, offers leading-edge and future-oriented perspectives on social impact: vision, strategy, and leadership. As partners we offer you:
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Facilitation Services: Fresh and imaginative strategic facilitation services blending a range of theoretical foundations customized and tailored to your needs.
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Strategic Thinking: Leading-edge understanding and approaches to nonprofit strategy, collaboration, training, technical assistance and knowledge management.
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Cross-Sector Experience: Clarity and objectivity direct from the social service sector though real-time relationships and experience with community, government, philanthropic, and nonprofit agencies and organizations.
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Innovative Strategy planning and design services that are grounded on the frameworks of collaboration, social impact and social venture planning and rooted in theories of developmental evaluation, scale and replication.
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In the coming weeks I will be relaunching Facilitation and Process, llc – Version 2.0. I will be re-introducing my firm as a local brand that you can trust. My website will be redesigned and my blog will shift its focus to developing themes related to the local social sector ecology. Expect us to begin to present survey work, analysis, and advocate for change. I’ll be launching a series of l learning webinars and an electronic newsletter. And, as in my first year of practice, you can always count on quality services. Customized approaches for your success. Tailored to your needs.
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As always, your thoughts are welcome.
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This post is one in an occasional series to help guide those looking to hire a facilitator. Other posts in this series can be found here. If your questions about facilitation are not answered, please don’t hesitate to email me and I will be glad to help!
On more that once occasion in my consulting practice I have been called into projects somewhere in the middle of the process. At such times, I feel like the relief pitcher being called in when the arm of the first pitcher is failing. In these situations, clients often talking about the first facilitator’s wild pitches, consecutive walks or even the occasion “grand slam” error. The challenge of walking into a project in mid-process is that the psyche of the team is often shaken and the progress to date ranges from “behind schedule” to “disarray.” While this post does not present an exhaustive discussion of why facilitation fails, I would like to suggest four facilitator archetypes that can help guide the the hiring of a facilitator and prevent facilitation failure.
At the outset, let us be very clear. Facilitation is a totally unregulated discipline. No training, degree or certification is required for a person to consider him/herself a facilitator. Indeed, of the training and certification programs that do exist, many can be misleading as they often are bought for a price, have a nominal process of vetting of skills and are perpetuated by the mere payment of annual dues and/or training fees. Further, what actually constitutes strong facilitation skills is not very well defined. As a result, many portray themselves as a facilitator because they have dry erase markers and three books on their shelf. One book focuses on ice-breaker activities, the second focuses on team-building activities, and the third focuses on running effective meetings. In this context the due diligence for preventing facilitation failure becomes critical. One way to think about assessing potential facilitators is to consider the dimensions of Breadth of Skills and Depth of Experience.
Breadth of Skills: When interviewing potential facilitators it is important to ask candidates to describe their breadth of skills. Be cautious of facilitators who have trouble with this question. There are many facilitators who get stuck using one or two strategies. In these cases, the facilitator is like a carpenter who only has a hammer is in his/her toolbox. After a while of just carrying a hammer then everything starts looking like a nail. Facilitators should be able to describe with confidence a broad array of facilitation methods and models and connect their knowledge with actual clients.
Depth of Expertise: The second dimension in the vetting process is to explore the experience and expertise of the facilitator. Not all facilitation is equal. The complexity and the content of a facilitation process should drive the selection of a facilitator. The conventional wisdom is that facilitation is impartial and agnostic, however, it is my experience, that failure to account for the content expertise and technical knowledge of a facilitator can lead to mediocre outcomes –if not outright facilitation failure.
A useful way to think about these to dimensions is to place on a horizontal axis of low to high the dimension of Breath of Skills and on a vertical axis of low to high the dimension of Depth of Experience & Expertise. In this way, you create a two by two matrix. Each of the four matrix quadrants represents a different facilitation archetype that can be defined as follows:
Entrant (Low Expertise – Low Breadth of Skills): At face value one might ask themselves why they would ever consider hiring a facilitator in this quadrant. However, when the outcomes of the facilitation process have lower consequence or value and/or the facilitation process is predefined or routine, it might make sense to utilize a facilitator in this quadrant. For example, for routine team or staff meetings and agency might use inexperienced internal facilitators as a way to build the facilitation skills of staff or team members. Or in cases where the “stakes are low” but an impartial/outside facilitator is required to give some neutrality to the process, an agency might be able to hire an entrant at a lower consulting rate.
Generalist (Low Expertise – Higher Breadth of Skills): When meeting process and the accuracy of the proceedings are important outcomes then an agency might consider a generalist facilitator. A generalist can employ a variety of facilitation methods and tools to ensure a well managed meeting. Noncontroversial community dialogues, focus group facilitation, and operational planning staff retreats, might be examples of facilitation processes that require strong generalist facilitation skills to ensure process and narrative outcomes that are meaningful. Facilitators in this category should be able to substantiate experience in a range of facilitation techniques that represent inclusive and participatory facilitation processes as well as strong post facilitation documentation.
Specialist (Higher Expertise – Lower Breadth of Skills): While content expertise may not matter in the lower tier of the matrix, there are times when knowledge and content do matter. For examples, technology planning, executive transitions, implementing a capital campaign are facilitation processes that require more than an impartial facilitator. Such specialized facilitation requires knowledge and judgment in addition to basic facilitation skills. Hiring a facilitator in this quadrant values his/her specialized knowledge more than a broad range of facilitation skills. A highly customized and tailored facilitation process might be sacrificed for the application of knowledge and content to a more generic facilitation process.
Sector Expert (Higher Expertise – Higher Breadth of Skills): The final cell in the matrix is the combination of high expertise coupled with the deep breadth of facilitation skills. In my view the sector expert differs from the specialist in that the sector expert has cross disciplinary content expertise in addition to a deep range of facilitation skills. The sector expert has a handle on the facilitation tools and processes required to create a customized and tailored approach to facilitation. In addition, the sector expert has deep cross-sectional knowledge that can shape the content and knowledge base of the assignment. A sector expert brings expertise to such complex processes as strategic planning, public policy change, or partnerships and mergers.
These four facilitation archetypes are by no means complete or definitive but rather the the archetypes provide useful heuristics when considering a process of hiring a facilitator. While the “cost of hiring a facilitator” is a Google search term that drives a lot traffic to a couple of posts that I wrote on that topic (post 1 & post 2), it is my belief that considering the cost of a facilitator as a primary determinant is short-sighted. More critical to hiring a facilitator is the matching of facilitation skills, process, and content depth to the task at hand. To this end, considering the four facilitator archetypes is a useful frame for facilitator hiring success.
As always, your comments are welcome.
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One question that frequently comes up when potential clients contact me is “When do I need to bring in an outside facilitator?” If you ask three or ten different facilitators the same question one will get three or ten different answers. Early on in this blog I outlined some heuristics about working with consultants that partially answers this question from my perspective. However, in my interaction with clients, I am becoming more and more convinced of the key role an external facilitator can play is during periods of transition. Transitions can be difficult times for teams, companies and agencies. In fact, managing change is one of the key drivers of exploratory calls I receive from potential clients who recognize their need for help. I believe that there are at least five types of transitions where a facilitator can be useful including:
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Mergers & Acquisitions: Any organization that has experienced the blending of two organizations can tell you how complicated, emotional and volatile such a process of change is. By the sheer complexity, a merger or acquisition often includes a team of strategic advisors, lawyers, and a sundry of other consultants (human resource, accounting, real estate, etc). As part of this change team, a facilitator can bring a “process value” to help manage the complexity.
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Succession Planning & Leadership Change: Clearly when the leader of an organization changes, the ripples of that that change reverberate through an entire organization and, often, the extended community. There is fairly significant body of succession planning literature that can be used to guide succession planning and one of the core principles common to several references is the need for active management of the change. This management of change is a process of facilitation. I also suggest that facilitating the transition of leadership may not only be tied to the senior management positions. There are times when it is a good practice to facilitate change in the “lower ranks” of an organization. For example, the departure of a highly effective and volunteer coordinator in an organization that is dependent upon volunteer contributions might require the active management of the transition between coordinators to ensure the strength of the volunteer base.
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Crisis: A third transition where a facilitator can play a stabilizing and moderating role is during periods of crisis. I have consulted with organizations that have gone through messy human resource crises and one once was hired to direct a project that had been fiscally mismanaged and was reeling from the aftermath of divisive politics. My personal experiences with crisis helped me understand the role that an external and impartial facilitator can play in helping an agency to manage crisis.
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Shift in Culture: There are times when organization practice changes in a way that creates a shift in organizational culture. For example I once worked with an organization that created a new human resource job classification system to bring uniformity across several distinct business units. The implementation of the new classification system resulted in some employees being reclassified “upwards” and others reclassified “downwards.” In addition, the new classification system came with a new annual staff appraisal system. While the strategic direction and program of the agency remained constant, the shift in organizational practice required the use of a facilitator to assist in the cultural transition to the new system. Other culture shifts could include such things as the implementation of a new organizational performance management systems, the unionization of a workforce, or even an agency relocation into new space.
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Change in Strategic Direction: Organizations that are faced with a dramatic change in strategic direction can also benefit from an external facilitator. In fact, I would say that when strategy is at stake, the entire agency needs to be engaged in the process. An external facilitator makes that universal engagement possible. Examples of such strategic change might include an organization experiencing a sudden dramatic increase in revenue such as from a federal stimulus grant (or conversely the sudden lost revenue), an organization undergoing a major re-branding initiative, or organization developing an entirely new strategic or business plan. Each of these scenarios could benefit from the external perspective of a facilitator.
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While this list of transitions is likely not comprehensive it illustrates a range of issues that potentially require the use of a facilitator to manage the change. In addition to standard tools a facilitator would bring to the meeting and process management, transitional facilitation requires the facilitator to assume one or more of the following roles:
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Coordination: A facilitator can bring to a transition project a coordination role in complex processes of change. For example, an organizational merger, having an individual tasked with facilitating all the moving parts, frees up senior management to focus on leadership, content and diligence rather than ensuring meeting minutes are copied and distributed in a timely manner or that major meetings are not scheduled on top of each other.
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Communication: A second role that a facilitator can play in a transition is to be the communication link, ensuring that all of staff and stakeholders are informed. Uniquely, a facilitator that is external and impartial can also act as a ground wire, taking some of the charged current out of the communication messages. Communication might also involve such specific tools as interest-based problem solving or mediation to help keep everyone engaged, open, and transparent.
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Compassion: Related to communication, a facilitator might also serve as a reflector of compassion. Perhaps using tools like Nonviolent Communication techniques, a facilitator can help lead individuals and groups through a process of observing and feeling as well as identifying needs and requests. This humanizing role of facilitation allows space for hearing and for being heard at a relational level.
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Coaching: Increasingly, facilitation is also about coaching. Facilitator as a coach requires a depth of experience and expertise that helps empower individuals and teams in constructive ways. Being a sounding board, reflective mirror, and provocateur can help leaders move through transitional waters.
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Clarity/compass: A final role of a transitional facilitator is to weave together the other roles in a way that acts as clarifier and compass to the process. Far from being simple GPS system that tells the group when to turn left and right, being a compass requires the facilitator to explore and move through the transition as a guide that is confident of where the group will end up, despite detours taken along the way.
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In this context, my personal bias comes though once again, that facilitation is not about running good meetings but is fundamentally about performance improvement. Facilitation is fundamentally about managing change and assisting organizations in transition is likely one of the most effective use of a facilitators skills. Organizations seeking a competitive advantage will do well to consider the strategic use of facilitation and process.
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As always your feedback is welcome.
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As I speak to potential clients, it is not too infrequent that I have to say, “When looking for a facilitation consultant it is important to separate and keep separate the concepts of facilitation goals and facilitation tools.” To unpack this concept, let me illustrate with a personal story. At a couple of different times in my life, I worked in construction. On one project, I worked closely with Dan, a highly experienced finish carpenter, who became a mentor as he taught me finish carpentry. Our goal was clear, trim windows and doors so that the end result looked spectacular. The tools however, were varied. Table saw, miter box saw, levels, files, hammers, As I was learning how to work with power tools, a very nuanced process, Dan would ask a lot of questions, sometimes guide my hand and, at other times, would intervene and save me from wasting an expensive length of trim molding. Dan taught me a variety of alternative ways of looking at, what on the surface, is a simple process of measuring twice and cutting once. Finish carpentry, I learned was a craft that is executed best by those rich in a tacit understanding of the process as well as the tools. So what does this have to do with facilitation?
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Coming back to my opening sentence, I once was talking to a potential client who was describing his board’s interest in hiring a facilitator to help his organization create a new strategic plan. He waxed eloquent about how the board was looking for innovative approaches to the process of creating a strategic plan. His passion for innovation raised my eyebrows, because the written specs for the project clearly asked for a scenario planning process. When I suggested that “innovation” in creating a strategic plan might not involve scenario planning, the response was basically that a board member attended a scenario planning process and that is what they are looking for. To me, this is a great example of confusing facilitation goals with facilitation tools. In this one conversation the potential client was asking for both innovation as a goal and at the same time prescribing a single tool that might or might not be terribly innovative.
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When I heard that dichotomy being expressed, I remembered back to working with Dan. We needed to cut a corner piece on a complicated trim molding and Dan said, “How do we cut it?” I answered, “The finish table saw, set at 45 degrees.” Dan smiled, “Too complicated of a cut. Hand saw in a miter box at 47 degrees.” Dan’s method resulted in a near perfect match. Dan not only knew both what was needed to be done but also tacitly knew how it should be done.
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When facilitation goals and facilitation tools are confused, the best outcome is rarely achieved. So when seeking the assistance of a facilitation consultant one needs to clearly separate goals from tools. This is an important task and both clients and facilitation consultant have a role to play in the separation process. Here are some simple questions to help you think about this separation.
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Where do you want to be? The critical first step is to clearly figure out where you want to end up when the facilitated process is over. Rather than focusing on facilitation tool that will get you there, it is important to first clearly know where you are going. The goal is more important than the tool. “We want to develop a strategic vision,” or “We want to create an implementation plan for our strategic vision,” are clear goal statements. “We want you to facilitate a retreat,” is not so clear. Being clear about the goal helps you ask the right questions of a facilitator. If the goal is to create an implementation plan, then you know to ask questions about implementation planning. What is his/her experience in the area of implementation planning? What are his/her foundations of practice?
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Do you have strong feelings about how you get there? A second question reflects on the tools. Does the tool matter to you? If so, then you need a facilitator who has experience helping agencies with similar goals and has a deep content knowledge of the specific tool you require. If “doing a SWOT analysis,” or “facilitating scenario planning” are critical tools to use then be intentional about looking for a facilitator with expertise in using those tools. However, if you separate the goal from the tool then your preference for a tool might be influenced as the facilitator helps you reflect on the goal. A finish table saw is good choice to get the job done, but there are times when a miter box is a better choice. Keeping the goal and tools separate allows you to have a wider lens in assessing potential facilitators.
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What is the organizational fit? The third question is to consider how the facilitation goals and tools fit with your organizational culture and structure. Elsewhere, I wrote more extensively about cultural and organizational fit but the reminder in this post is to consider the impact of the facilitation process on your organization. For example, if you are a smaller grassroots nonprofit agency and you are seeking for someone to assess your organizational capacity, traditional capacity assessment tools likely have little relevance to your organization. In your case, capacity measurement needs to be forward thinking and aspirational rather than the use of a “present or absent” capacity checklist.
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Do you have the resources to make it work? The final question is to think about the resources available to make a facilitation process work. While this includes thinking about money, it may also be influenced by such factors and time and space. In some urban areas, the cost of a face-to-face meeting might include 60-90 minutes of commute time on top of meeting times. Such a commute might negate planning a series of face-to-face meetings. Commuting time becomes a geographic cost barrier.
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Remember that facilitation consultants should be able to help you untangle the differences between where you want to get to and how to get there. If you have worked out the four questions above, it is completely appropriate to discuss your rationale with prospective consultants and seek validation or invite alternate ways of triaging the context. Beware of the consultant who jumps too quickly to, “of course I can facilitate your retreat what date do you want me to do it?” Remember, hiring a facilitator is starting a strategic relationship that ideally is the beginning of a long-term partnership rather than a one-time event.
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Coming back to our example of the director looking for innovation in strategic planning but requiring the use of a scenario planning tool, his confusion of goals and tools was easy to reframe. This agency was looking for a facilitation consultant who uses scenario planning to develop a strategic planning process. There is nothing wrong with this intentionality because the process fit the culture and resources available. The point that needs to be made is that hiring a facilitator needs to consider the goal, tools, culture and resources and to the degree that you think through these four issues the process of assessing potential consultants becomes easier.
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The process of hiring a facilitation consultant is challenging. In fact, much of the traffic that comes to my site via search engines is often driven by variations of the phrase “how to hire a facilitator.” Hopefully, this post on clarifying facilitation goals and facilitation tools, along with other posts in this occasional series, will better equip your agency to find consultants that will not just “run a good meeting” but will significantly advance your organizational capacity.
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As always your thoughts are welcome.
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One of the common misconceptions that I encounter is that many people equate facilitation with meeting management. If meetings run smoothly they are considered successful and facilitated well. While running effective meetings does require facilitation, meeting management is the most rudimentary of facilitation skills. Virtually anyone can be trained to develop an effective agenda, manage time and decisions, and accurately capture meeting process but facilitation, as a process, means much more than running good meetings. The kind of facilitation that teams and agencies should aspire to is much deeper and richer than the foundational elements of meeting management. This brings us to the question of evaluating facilitation. Aside from stepping people through the process from meeting agenda to meeting minutes, what are the expectations that teams should have of facilitators. What does quality facilitation look like? I would like to suggest the following characteristics of quality facilitation.
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Process & Systems Thinking: A key difference between running a meeting and facilitation is the ability to keep the immediate process in the context of the larger systems view. I have discussed this concept before, so, for a present example, at a simple level, if a team is developing a new flex-schedule policy for their business unit, the facilitator needs to be able to help the group consider the larger agency human resources system of the organization. At the other end of complexity, a facilitator of a large community meeting where residents are advocating for community-level change, a facilitator needs to make room in the process to consider the political, media, and social systems and conventions that may influence their planning process.
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Valuing Diversity: A second characteristic of quality is found in the facilitator’s ability to recognize and incorporate the strength of the group’s diversity. Good facilitation ensures that participants work both cross-functionally and cross-culturally to maximize the differing perspectives and ensure power equity. The ability to create bridges between diversity strengthens team functioning.
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Managing Conflict: In addition to being able to use simpler tools of conflict management such as naming, redirecting, magnifying or distributing, a facilitator needs to possess skills in mediation and the insight to be able use, when called for, structured mediation or interest-based negotiation strategies to solve conflict.
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Visual Learning: Unfortunately, many facilitators feel that as long as stuff is written in multi-colored markers on chart pack paper that s/he is facilitating. Indeed, I have been in workgroups where progress was measured by the amount of wall space covered by chart pack paper. Quality facilitation should be measured by the effective use of visuals to support the process not by the mere quantity of paper used. Indeed, I believe that copious visual notes can be a sign that a facilitator has difficulty synthesizing big ideas and effectively summarizing. Facilitators should have formal training in disciplines such as concept-mapping, information-mapping, logic models, and flow-charting. Such training enables facilitators to not just write things down, but help teams learn and clarify visually throughout the process.
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Focusing on Performance Improvement: The ultimate goal of facilitation is to help teams “close the gap” between where they are right now and where they want to be. Quality facilitation draws from a wide array of empowerment and adult learning theories, organizational design theories, and systems theory to help strengthen a team’s ability to solve performance problems or improve performance quality.
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Documenting Process: A final marker of quality facilitation comes back around to where we started, in that, effective meeting facilitation does involve creating an agenda, managing a meeting and summarizing the event as meeting minutes. However, rather than sketch agendas, and rambling meeting summaries, quality facilitation uses the written documentation as a communication tool to reinforce and clarify expectations, action, accountability and progress. Documenting the process is a primary tool for orienting and moving teams forward and capturing knowledge so that organizational learning is strengthened.
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When taken as a whole, these characteristics describe quality facilitation. It would be a simple exercise to create a performance rubric or another evaluation tool as a way of measuring the effectiveness of facilitators. Taken together, they also represent a roadmap for training new facilitators or improving the skills of existing ones. In the end, the point that I want to make is that while meeting management is the basic foundation for facilitation, quality facilitation is the sum of advanced practice and skills in addition to meeting basics. Focusing on these advanced practices will help teams manage process more effectively with a higher return on the time invested.
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As always I welcome your feedback.
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