How to Make Facilitation More Effective with Greg Jenkins | Monday August 11, 2014

Outputs from this session: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/tb3cxoa5zgc4l9h/AADdXW7nMeLlQTSlSOKS_S85a?dl=0

Facilitation in one form or another is ubiquitous in training rooms, seminar halls, workplaces, boardrooms, community and classrooms. Facilitation experiences range from brainstorming and small group work to complex multi-stakeholder planning.

Facilitation is used by a full range of practitioners from new to experienced and irregular to regular. Provided minimum standards are met, facilitation can be a transformational experience. Conversely, a poor facilitation experience can set back progress indefinitely. Even if the experience is positive and the facilitator is well received we invariably return to the workplace, community, boardroom or classroom only to find that nothing has changed.

After 60 years of evolution and variable experiences it’s not surprising that some people are either skeptical about or have a low expectation of facilitation.

How good is our practice? Are we up to date with the changes over the past decade? What are we doing to make our facilitation more effective?

In this session we will explore the following questions:

·       Facilitation has evolved over at least 6 decades from various sources including the advent of Brainstorming in 1953. What are the milestones of facilitation from the early days to now via the content, process and systemic phases and what does it mean for the effectiveness of our current practice? Are we up to date?

·       We use the term facilitation to describe a range of different events including meetings, workshops and conversations. It can be confusing for even the most experienced amongst us as very different concepts are blended into a single term. How could we be more effective by better classifying a range of methods to explain what type of facilitation we are doing and how we can improve?

·       Different people practice facilitation differently and to varying degrees on a spectrum either with content as an accompaniment to training, consulting and teaching or without content in visioning, planning and problem solving etc. How can the spectrum of facilitation be defined and in knowing our place on the spectrum make us more effective?

·       Learning about facilitation, whether a beginner or advanced, via books and courses is a mixed bag. Even the part time facilitator needs to keep up to date to be effective. What’s worked and what hasn’t and how can we continue to learn and develop ourselves as effective facilitation practitioners regardless of how much facilitation we do?

Guest Facilitator Greg Jenkins

Greg is has been convener of Sydney Facilitators Network for a decade. Greg’s practice is based on a systems approach that demystifies facilitation and makes it accessible to everyone whether regular, irregular, experienced or inexperienced facilitation practitioners.