Jofacilitator

Strictly speaking, this is not a story like most of the other posts.  It is an article I wrote in 2003 at the request of a journal that supports inter-cultural education.  They were using the term facilitation for participatory, experiential learning experiences.  The confusion between facilitating learning and process facilitation has been around for a long time, and I wanted to both address the similarities and the differences between the two.  There are a number of stories embedded in this article. When I discovered it again, I thought it might be useful to share.  

FACILITATION

A Tool for Evoking and Creating Wisdom

Facilitating Diversity

Several years ago, I was facilitating a workshop at a conference of multi-cultural organizations in Ontario, to demonstrate some practical tools of facilitation. I had made a point of sharing my “working assumptions” for facilitating groups, which include “Everyone has wisdom” and “We need everyone’s wisdom for the wisest result”. About 20 adults, representing a good cross-section of the world, were actively participating in envisioning what they wanted our multicultural society to look like, brainstorming and sharing their ideas on cards on the wall. My youngest son, then about 7 years old, had accompanied me as it was a Saturday and I hadn’t been able to find child care. He was quietly playing with his Legos in the back corner. Suddenly, one of the participants said, pointing at my son, “What does he think? After all, it’s the next generation who will benefit and continue this!”

I called out, “Tim, what do you want our multicultural society to look like in 5 years?” He thought for a moment, then said, “Can I have three colours of markers?” I said, “Sure”and handed them to him. He took a card and drew 3 stick figures of different colours dancing together.

The card went up on the wall and clustered with all the cards that said that we would be working and playing together in our multicultural society.

We were all astounded that a child’s spontaneous non-verbal contribution could add richness to the product of the adults, although in retrospect, we shouldn’t have been surprised.

What is Facilitation?

The word facilitation is used to mean many different things. Its roots are in the Latin “facil”, to make easy. A shoehorn that eases a heel into a shoe “facilitates” putting on your shoe.

There are two common meanings of the term “facilitation” as a way of working with groups. On the one hand, facilitation is seen as a way of guiding group activity so that active learning takes place, based on the knowledge and understanding that individuals bring to the training. On the other hand, process facilitation draws out a group’s already existing wisdom to solve a problem or create a solution that the group needs.

Facilitating Learning

In facilitating learning, the trainer has content objectives that s/he wants the group to know by the end of the session, and/or behaviour s/he wishes the participants to change. But the trainer starts with an assumption that s/he is not the only expert in the room. Participants have ideas and knowledge that are a starting point to build on. The trainer may guide the group to reflect on past experiences and draw out insight, through the use of carefully constructed questions that are both respectful and take people beyond their previous thinking.

Occasionally a talk, a video, or even a story may be the starting point. With experiential learning, the trainer provides an experience for the group first, then guides the reflection on that experience. That experience may be an exercise or activity the group does together.

In such an approach to education, the job of the teacher may become easier and harder at the same time. In many ways, guiding the students to build their own knowledge through reflection relieves the teacher of the burden of knowing all the answers. However, it also removes the “cookbook” approach of teaching, where there is simply data to be downloaded from the text and the teacher into the student. Instead, the teacher becomes a catalyst to a three-part dialogue (or trialogue) process between the information, the student, and the teacher. When students and the teacher reflect together, everyone learns.

Although this kind of facilitated learning is often referred to as using “adult learning principles”, my experience is that they are true for all ages, and provide for learning that translates into real-life behaviour and choices.

Wayne Nelson summarized some of these learning principles in this way:

People participate at their best when:

• They are comfortable
• An attractive, comfortable atmosphere invites participation.
• Emotional and social comfort help people participate.
• Modes of involvement that match people’s unique social style and learning styles, enable them to engage with ease.
• When people are able to express their perceptions, feelings and thoughts freely, they are more likely to become involved.
• Acknowledging, receiving and affirming people’s ideas allows them to share their deeper thoughts and feelings.
• When people are emotionally, intellectually and spiritually stimulated, they participate more readily.
• Things make sense to them.
• When the topic under consideration and the process builds on their own knowledge and experience, people can easily join the discussion.
• Understanding the stages of the planned group process gives people a way to see how their contributions fit in a larger picture.
• When people understand and are aligned with the purpose of the meeting, they can see value in contributing.
• Situations and processes that reflect people’s principles, values and ethics provide people with freedom to think widely.
• When the connections between people’s real, personal experience and the questions being raised are clear, participation is more likely to be grounded in reality. They believe they can make a difference.
• Topics related directly to people’s concerns, interests and hopes for the future stimulate their engagement.
• If the results will make a positive impact on their own lives, people are likely to participate positively.
• People who believe that their contribution to the discussions will make a positive difference in their situation and in the lives of others participate with creativity.
• When people are able to use their knowledge and experience to create new meaning, they participate with creativity and passion.
• When people know they will be involved in implementing the plans and decisions they make, they participate with commitment.

Guiding Reflection

In my practice, I find that the core skill that makes facilitated learning powerful is the capacity to guide the reflective thinking process that integrates people’s experience with their real lives. A very helpful process starts with questions that ask people to recall their observations of their experience, then questions that get out their immediate reactions, then questions that probe for meaning, significance, learnings and relevance, and finally questions that elicit decision and action. At each stage, the facilitator listens respectfully and actively to the responses.

The Institute of Cultural Affairs, a global NGO, has been developing and using this process, which it calls “The Focused Conversation Method”, for nearly 50 years with communities, education groups, and organizations.

One summer nearly 30 years ago, I was teaching a pre-school group at a summer camp. I had the four-year-olds recite the familiar nursery rhyme, “Little Miss Muffet”. Then we had a brief conversation on the rhyme, roughly as follows:

Objective Questions

* “What words don’t you understand?” (tuffet, curds and whey, which I explained)

* “Who were the characters?” (Little Miss Muffet, the spider)

* “What happened first? Then…Then…?”

* “What did Miss Muffet do when she was frightened?”

Reflective Questions

* “Where have you experienced something like this?”

One child said that his mother made him eat cottage cheese, and he hated it. Several children had stories of scary surprises, and their reactions.

Interpretive Questions

Then I asked,

* “What is this story all about?”

One little girl thought for a second, then her eyes lit up. “This is about … when you get scared, you can decide if you’re going to run away, or not!”

Decisional Questions

She finished up with “Next time, I will decide by myself what to do!”

I was astounded. This tiny child had seen far below the surface of this rhyme to a meaning that had relevance to her own life. Her capacity to abstract meaning, or to access a higher level of thinking, was empowered by the step-by-step thinking process of the Focused Conversation method.

This method facilitates learning, as it starts with the obvious and most easily accessed information and moves step by step through to higher levels of thinking, thus extending students’ capacity to think abstractly.

The following conversation on an experiential learning exercise is taken from “The Art of Focused Conversation for Schools”. It could be adapted to follow any group experience, such as a ropes course, or a cultural encounter.

Reflecting on a Group Experience

Situation

A group of young people has participated in an unusual kinesthetic experience called “The Dance of Peace”. Some were reluctant participants; others were deeply moved. After lunch, the trainer is leading the group in a debriefing of their experience.

Rational Aim

* To clarify what we did.

* To discover common motifs and themes.

* To identify the cultural origins of dance patterns.

Experiential Aim

* To experience the wonder of each culture’s contribution, and to feel the exhilaration of the dance.

Opening

Think back to the dancing we did this morning.

Objective Questions

* What movements do you remember?

* What did the movement look like?

* What dances did we do?

* What sounds do you recall? What instruments were used?

Reflective Questions

* How did you feel as you were dancing?

* At what point did you feel unsure, confused, or embarrassed?

* At what point did you feel excited, deeply moved, or peaceful?

* When did you really “get into it”?

* Where have you seen or experienced something similar?

* What did this remind you of?

Interpretive Questions

* What was going on in this dance?

* Why do you think the creator of these dances created them?

* What were they trying to express or communicate?

* What kind of experiences were they trying to provide for people?

What can we learn from these dances?

* How were you changed by this experience?

Decisional Questions

* To whom would you like to teach these dances?

* Where would you like to see them used again?

* Whom do you wish had been here this morning?

Closing

When we started, I felt silly. After it was over, I thought, “This was fantastic.”

When the facilitator crafts the questions carefully in advance, imagining what kind of responses the group will give to them, this reflective process will work well for any age group. Respectful questioning and listening are skills that can be nurtured and practiced by professionals and volunteers alike.

Group Process Facilitation

Facilitation at its best is the art of drawing out ordinary, everyday people’s wisdom. Then it helps a group acknowledge and understand differences and see the deeper patterns of similarity. That allows the group to create consensus and results that are wiser than any one person would have come up with alone.

This facilitation is “process” facilitation, which I believe is absolutely critical to building respectful understanding. In this kind of facilitation, the facilitator has no agenda except that which the group wants and needs. It is not training, though learning will also occur. The facilitator’s role is to guide the way the group shares ideas, listens, and processes information, so that the group comes up with the decision or result that it needs. The best facilitator is nearly invisible – the group believes it has accomplished its objectives by itself, and surely it has. But the facilitator has brought the tools, process, and presence to inspire the best from the group. A group without an assigned facilitator may well be able to manage its dialogue to come up with a well-thought-through consensus. But not every group can do that, and I know of no group who can do that well all of the time.

I believe this kind of facilitation has its roots in traditional consensus creation that emerged from small groups of people in different cultures. Many discovered that if they sat around a fire, or in a circle, and created opportunities for everyone to speak and really listen, they could make difficult decisions that everyone was committed to supporting. Some of us facilitate naturally, others of us yearn for it in difficult group sessions without knowing exactly what is missing.

In the last few hundred years, we have fallen into a pattern of seeing the world as dualistic: there is us and them, government and opposition, good and bad, right and wrong, black and white, “my way or the highway”, etc. When we see the world that way, our pattern of responding leads to argument, and to either winning or losing. Defense or attack results, and we get locked into our own pre-conceived positions. If we look at the world as a multi-faceted reality, like a diamond with many facets, we find ourselves looking to polish and illuminate many perspectives to find the wisest solution to a problem. The “what if we tried a third (or another) way of looking at this” question allows us to bypass argument about right and wrong positions. An even more radical way of processing differences looks for the synthesis of quite unique ideas to create a larger picture out of diverse pieces of the puzzle. Both of these ways of creating consensus contribute to real peace as they don’t gloss over differences, but rather build on them as creative stepping-stones to solutions and understanding.

The group process facilitator believes that the group has all the wisdom it needs to solve its own problems. It is important to have as many stakeholders represented as possible to make sure every angle of insight can contribute to the solution. Often this means examining all our categories of people who are “the enemy” or “can’t participate” for one reason or another. I recall a facilitated consultation nearly 30 years ago in an Egyptian village to plan its community development project. Men and women; non-literate village residents, highly educated urban Egyptians, and non-Arabic-speaking consultants from a range of different cultures sat down in the same room (well, tent) to pool their wisdom. Each of us had different ideas of what was possible or even necessary. Each of us had our reservations about what the others could contribute. All together we brainstormed our ideas, clustered them to see the patterns, and named what we had come up with. The villagers’ passionate visions were augmented by “expert” ideas. The abstractions and overly technical visions of the “experts” were made realistic by the villagers’ grounded ideas. The plan was “owned” by everyone present. Twenty years later, when I visited the project again, I could see how the village people and the outsiders had worked together to transform the community, and were still motivated and moving forward.

Preventing Conflict

Often I talk about facilitation as a relationship: “facilitation is to conflict resolution as health promotion is to medical healing”. Facilitation often prevents conflict, as it can be an intervention before a conflict exists or becomes entrenched. It honours all the perspectives and all the people to come up with a satisfactory solution. In the same way, facilitation can be a tool for healing conflict that has already begun. The culture of participation which facilitation supports has the capacity to transform how we treat each other, the feeling of having been heard and respected. One of the most often-repeated comments I hear after a facilitated event is, “I thought I was the only one who had those ideas! I know now I’m not alone!” Facilitating group participation also increases shared ownership and responsibility for decisions. If I participate in contributing to the naming of a problem and also to creating the solution to it, then I am already a part of the solution.

Conclusion

So whether you are building on the wisdom and experience of a group to extend their learning, or to create a product that they need, try spending most of the time asking the participants what they think. I have discovered a paradoxical truth recently: if you ask people for their wisdom and really listen, they think you are wise. And there’s even an extension of that: if you ask people for their wisdom and really listen, you all get more wise.

Brief Bibliography

Nelson, Jo, The Art of Focused Conversation for Schools: Over 100 Ways to Guide Clear Thinking and Promote Learning, Canadian Institute of Cultural Affairs and New Society Publishers, 2001.

Nelson, Wayne, “Meetings that Work” Training Manual, Canadian Institute of Cultural Affairs, 2000.

Stanfield, Brian, “The Magic of the Facilitator”,

Edges Magazine, Canadian Institute of Cultural Affairs, 1996.

Stanfield, Brian, The Art of Focused Conversation: 100 Ways to Access Group Wisdom in the Workplace, Canadian Institute of Cultural Affairs and New Society Publishers, 1999.

This article was first written for Interspectives, A Journal on Transcultural Education, Volume 19 – 2002-2003, published by CISV, Children’s International Summer Villages. Their website is http://cisv.org

Organizational Transformation through Facilitation

Once I had a client whose understanding of their mandate and mission was to fight the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed in the inner city. This was a foundational understanding for the group, based on their understanding of Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

The staff of this organization was in chaos. They had had 5 executive directors in 4 years. Several had left out of frustration, and their work was diminished because of all the infighting within the organization.

So the acting executive director asked if I would come in and facilitate a ToP Strategic Planning process to try to create some consensus on the directions they needed to move.

The Vision workshop was pretty easy – they had a common vision of where they wanted to go. Some of the rifts became smaller.

Then came the Obstacles workshop. Having a solitary brainstorm and time in pairs to write obstacles on cards allowed them to be pretty honest about what was going on. The cards clustered intuitively relatively easily. Then it was time to name the Underlying Contradictions. As I read the cards in the first column out loud, I could see a pattern, but left it to the group to struggle with the insight. It took a very long time. Suddenly, one person in the group said, “It’s, it’s that ‘us and them’ mentality that comes from the oppressor/oppressed thinking! We’ve turned it inward and it’s destroying us!” There was a gasp of recognition from the group, and then they quickly tried to escape the power of the insight. Eventually they named it and went on to create strategies.

A year later they asked a colleague of mine to come in to facilitate a review and re-planning session – they told her that that insight had been a turning point for the organization. They didn’t like the messenger, but the message had gotten through. After that they had the same director for a number of years – the organization stabilized and was able again to serve the community.

My learning from this experience was that a group can, with appropriate process, face and name its own underlying contradictions, which then open the door to transformation. Very often the basic values a group holds dear can be the contradiction that holds them back when they need to change.

This kind of facilitation is not just about getting a rational result or a product, although that is part of it. It is about providing the opportunity for a group to become conscious of its own behaviours and beliefs, and make the profound change it needs. It is about caring for the whole person, and the whole group – its experience and growth as well as its rational products. It requires integrity on the part of the facilitator to honour the group’s unspoken needs without imposing the facilitator’s own values and perspectives.

I post this for your wide sharing, especially at this moment for Nepal.  I also have it in French, and some other languages.  If you translate it, please send me a copy!

We would like to offer this conversation to people to use with colleagues, friends and
family to begin to process traumatic situations and respond to them productively.
This conversation is adapted from a conversation in Jo Nelson’s book “The Art of
Focused Conversation for Schools”, published in May, 2001 by New Society Publishers
and The Canadian Institute of Cultural Affairs, p. 155.
A group member can help the group guide its thinking with the following questions. The
sequence of questions is designed to gradually move from surface observation through
personal reflection, thoughtful interpretation, and resolution.
Debriefing a Traumatic Event
Aims of the conversation:
To talk about personal experiences of the trauma
To face reality and begin to deal with it productively
To move from shock to beginning to come to terms with the situation
Opening:
This event has shaken all of us. Let’s take a little time to reflect on what’s happened, so
we can come to terms with it. I’m going to ask some questions that will help us gradually
process what happened. I would like you to let everyone have their own answers – no
interrupting, arguing, or judging what anyone says.
Objective Questions:
Imagine you were a video camera recording what you have seen and heard happening
since the first events. What actions, words, phrases, objects, and scenes are recorded on
your tape?
Let’s get everything out – the first events, then everything that has happened since — so
we all have as full a picture as possible of what has happened to this point.
Reflective Questions:
What were your first reactions?
What shocked or frightened you most about this incident?
What images or previous experiences were triggered for you?
How else did you find yourself reacting?
Interpretive Questions:
What impact has this had on you personally? How are you different now?
How we different as a group or as a society as a result of these events?
How has our view of the world changed?
What might have been some contributing factors to why this happened?
What might be some of the underlying issues behind all of this?
What might we learn from this?
Decisional Questions:
What can we do to deal with the situation in the short term?
What are some things we can do to begin to deal with the underlying issues and prevent
events like this from happening again?
What can we do to help each other?
Closing
We will undoubtedly continue to reflect on this. If you need help, please be sure to ask
for it.
Hints:
Some of these questions are difficult to answer, so if there are few spoken answers, don’t
worry. The very fact of raising these questions and following this flow allows deeper
reflection later. It may be helpful to print out the questions for people to take with them
for later reflection.
Jo Nelson CPF, a professional group facilitator with more than 40 years of global experience, works  with ICA Associates in Toronto, Ontario. She can be reached at jnelson@icaassociates.ca. Her book Art of Focused Conversation for Schools: Over 100 Ways toGuide Clear Thinking and Promote Learning has nearly 200 sample conversations. It can be ordered through the ICA Associates website,

http://icaassociates.ca/Template/Publications/books.cfm#ToP

In the 1990’s, I had a client gig that I knew was going to be a challenging one.  Their director had spent 3 years strategically building consensus that they should have a consensus-building workshop!  So I decided that I needed to think through some ground rules to start with.  Now I have always hated ground rules.  They generally come to me as “thou shalt not”s, all negative energy about what you shouldn’t do.

So I created something that at first I called “Ground Rules”.  And then I realized that they were presuppositions — assumptions that I was making and expected the group to make  in order to work together productively.  But who wants a 5-syllable word at the top of a flipchart to start the day?  So I named them “Working Assumptions”. I have used them every since with most groups. I write a cryptic form of them on a flipchart (in bold below) and talk through a description of them with the group (in parentheses).

Working Assumptions

1. Everyone has wisdom. (This doesn’t mean everything that everyone says is wise. It means that behind what they say is wisdom, and we will listen for it.)

2. We need everyone’s wisdom for the wisest result. (In the same way that a diamond is more valuable when it is cut with more facets, what we come up with will be more valuable when we have illuminated more facets of what we are working with — we all come from different perspectives — some are near each other, some opposing sides, others in a totally different plane from the others, like the facets of a diamond.)

3. There are no wrong answers. (This doesn’t mean we agree with everything — I have never been in a room where everyone agreed — even if I’m the only one in the room!  Also,see number 1 — behind what may seem on the surface as a wrong answer — and I have heard some that were positively evil on the surface — there is wisdom, and that is what we will listen for. The corollary, of course, is that there are no right answers, only the best we can come up with given our limitations.)

4. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. (A cliche, yes, but points to consensus as creating a larger answer that is not identical to any one view, but includes the wisdom of many. I think of compromise as smaller than the sum of its parts, consensus as larger. Like a puzzle picture, which is the sum of the puzzle pieces and their relationships. All puzzle pieces are included, or there is a hole. I learned recently that Aristotle came up with this phrase.)

5. Everyone will hear others and be heard. (This doesn’t mean that everyone has to talk all the time — then nobody would be heard. It means listening to others as well as making sure your wisdom is on the table.)

I’ve recently concluded that Aretha Franklin would probably summarize the whole list with “R.E.S.P.E.C.T.”

I have never had a group reject these working assumptions altogether. Someone in the first group, however, did differ with the 3rd one.  As soon as I said “There are no wrong answers”, a lady at the back of the room pounded on the table and shouted “There are too wrong answers!”  And I thought really, really fast and replied, “And that’s not a wrong answer either!”  Everybody laughed. “There are sometimes wrong answers on the surface, but it is the wisdom under them that we are listening for.”   The group had a great retreat and listened to each other for maybe the first time in their history.

For number 4, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” I have had various people try to make this more clear.  Tim, one of my Cree trainees said, “You know, it’s like a band.  Each instrument — the guitar, the bass, the drums — makes a good sound on its own.  But when you put them together, the music they create is greater than any one of them could come up with on their own.”  I’ve used his analogy ever since and get lots of nods of understanding.

I’ve attached a link to the PowerPoint poster of the Working Assumptions.

Working Assumptions for printing

Once when I was young and naïve, I was a counselor at a summer camp. (Summer of 1972, Lake Geneva.) My “class” was a group of 4-year-olds. I had been using the art-form or focused conversation method in my teaching, so I decided to try to use it with these little ones.

I decided to use the nursery rhyme “Little Miss Muffet” as my starting point. First we said it all together:
“Little Miss Muffet
Sat on a tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey.
Along came a spider
And sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away.”

First I asked them who were the characters. “Miss Muffet and the spider.”
Then I asked them what words they didn’t understand and explained that a tuffet was something to sit on (like a tuft of grass), and that curds and whey were cottage cheese.
Then I asked them what happened first, then, and then….. They responded with the stages of the plot.

My next questions were “What does this remind you of? ” and “Where has something like this happened to you?” I got several stories of spiders and ants in their tents, and other scary surprises. There were also a few tough-kid stories of not being afraid.

Then I asked, “So what is this story about, for you?” There was a short silence. Little Dana Caruso looked blank for a minute, then her eyes lit up. “It’s, it’s about when something scary happens, you can decide whether you are going to run away or not! And, and, next time I’m going to think before I run away!”

I didn’t even have to ask the final question, “What will you do differently because of what you’ve learned from this story?” – she had answered it.

Now Piaget would say that 4-year-olds could not think at this level. But when you ask the questions in order, it is like peeling back the layers of an onion, and even small children can take a step deeper in understanding.

I use this story when I’m teaching the focused conversation to adults – I have them answer the questions as themselves (what it reminds them of often includes when a really scuzzy sort sits down next to them in a bar… or something similar) and then tell them how the 4-year-olds answered it. The power of the method to unlock deeper thinking becomes clear to them.

“We need everyone’s wisdom for the wisest result.” Sounds like a naive statement. But when the stakeholders in the results are participants in creating them, not only are the results better but the group itself has the potential to be transformed.

Once, sometime in the 1990’s, I was working with a client, a non-profit agency in a small remote community that served developmentally challenged people, to design a participatory strategic planning process. I asked them who had a stake in or were affected by their plan. They listed staff, board, and family members of developmentally challenged people. “Oh, and of course our clients.” I then asked who would be participating in the workshop. “Parents, staff, board… But not our clients, because this is an intellectual process.”

I asked them to reconsider, and they decided to invite several “higher functioning” clients, by which they meant “better behaved in a group”. One of these participants was Jacques.

We started with a vision workshop. The focus question was “What do we want to see in our community in 5 years, especially for developmentally challenged people?” I gave them time for individual brainstorm, then broke into small groups to write cards, with one labelled person in each group. While they were working, I went to the back of the room for a cup of coffee. Jacques, who was wandering around the room, came up to me and grabbed my arm. “Tree!” He said to me urgently. “You hear? You hear?”

“Yes, I hear, Jacques. Go on.” (He did have a hold on my arm, after all.)

“Tree! Forest! Fall down, die. Bring workshop, make furniture. You hear? You hear?”

“Oh yes, I do hear, Jacques. Come over to your group.” I gave him a green marker and a card and asked him to draw his tree on the card. I told the group what he had said, and they understood what he meant. What he meant was that people who were marginalized and considered dead and useless would be brought into the community and made a useful part of it. But he could only speak in metaphor.

When his card came up on the wall, it clustered with the other cards that were pointing to an inclusive community. The group was amazed that someone like Jacques could contribute meaningfully to their work.

The next workshop was Obstacles. The focus question is a bit more abstract — “What is blocking our vision?” Jacques wandered around through the whole small group work, and I thought we’d lost him. “Oh, well, at least he was able to contribute to part of this work.”

But then I started reading the obstacle cards out loud and putting them on the wall. Suddenly Jacques jumped up and shouted “Ring ring ring!” Everybody slumped down, thinking “there goes Jacques again.” But someone on the other side of the table said, “Oh I know what you mean, Jacques! You mean the fire drill we had last week!”

“You hear, you hear!” cried Jacques. “Ring, ring! Everybody go out! Cold! Can’t get back in!”

I gave Jacques a red marker and a card and asked him to draw the fire bell. What Jacques meant was that there were physical barriers keeping people excluded. His card grouped with others that pointed to physical barriers to inclusion in the community.

By this time the whole group was in awe at Jacques’ contribution, and started to understand how everyone has wisdom that is useful to the group.

Eight years later I had incorporated this story into my teaching about facilitation. I was asked to teach the course in the same community. I wondered if I should tell the story there, since it might have involved people in the room. I decided to use it, to see what would happen.

Sure enough, a woman came up to me at the break and said, “That happened here, didn’t it?” I nodded. She said, “I want to tell you what difference Jacques’ participation made. That was the turning point for a 180 degree change in our organization. Before that time, we created programs and slotted our clients into them. Jacques’ participation let us see that our clients knew what they wanted in their lives. It took us 5 years to change, but now we start by asking our clients what they want and creating supports around them. It still looks much the same to an outsider, but the starting point is completely different, and everyone, especially our clients, is much more satisfied.”

When you are designing a facilitated event, consider who all has a stake or will be affected by the results of the work, and include them as participants.  Examine your own first assumptions that someone cannot participate, and find ways around them.  Not only will the results be wiser, but the group or the organization just may be transformed by their participation.