and the art of facilitation
Transcript of this video:
A few months ago, I went to see my friend Rob in Oxford.
And when he opened his door to me
and asked how I was, I surprised myself by saying, “Oh,
I’m really bored of facilitation.”
It’s one of the few times I’ve said anything to Rob
where he’s looked genuinely startled by what I said, and,
and I realised I said something a bit unexpected…
I think you must have had this experience.
I don’t really, I didn’t really mean it.
What I think I meant was, “I’m, I’m really bored
of bad facilitation.”
and I’m often really bored
of facilitators talking about tips and techniques.
I think there are few things more tedious than a bunch
of coaches and facilitators banging onto each other about
their favourite process.
I wanted
to share a wonderful quotation I’ve been thinking
of recently by the French writer, Antoine de St Exupery,
just saying his name is kind of fun.
And it goes like this. “If you want to build a ship,
don’t drum up the men to gather wood,
divide the work and give them orders.
Instead teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
I have a kind of facilitation
and coaching equivalent of that, which is that, yeah,
I do training at facilitators,
and yes, we do share techniques,
but that for me, that isn’t where the real action is
my equivalent of yearning for the vast,
and endless sea is my instinct for trying
to find the aliveness in any conversation
and what goes on in a group of people.
I think we are so prone in this modern technological world
to coast along saying conventional things to each other,
doing what is comfortable
and not actually generating any friction or excitement
or creativity.
And what I think after years
and years of practice I’ve got increasingly good at
is having a good sensitivity for when things are
boring in a not-very-useful way,
and seeing if I can do something just sufficiently
disruptive to provoke something interesting.
And that in my view,
because I think facilitation is very much an
art and not a science.
The core of the way I do it is,
and I can’t put it better than this, a restless yearning
for the aliveness that’s possible in a group of people.
After watching that back
and having a little bit of a walk, I just wanted to add that
what I do with the restless yearning is also important.
Um, it’s no good if I just immediately act on it.
A a lot of the skill of my work is knowing when
to do something with it and when to let it percolate,
stew, ferment before doing something.
