Facilitation means different things to different people. Viv does a great job of explaining one view of facilitation she doesn’t subscribe to. Me neither.
…the group participants sit back and watch the facilitator do all the work. They leave the workshop singing the praises of the facilitator who did such a great job of pulling all of their ideas together and coming up with a plan of action (or some other ‘output’). The facilitator worked hard has great insight as to how the group works and takes away armloads of paper to type up into a report.
Another popular idea of facilitation is the TV model – where we’re expected to be some kind of David Dimbleby, acting as the conductor through which all ideas are to be channelled and interpreted. A related pitfall is to end up as the person frantically scribing everything on flipcharts, often a very bad role to be stuck with.
