Learning map no. 11 Facilitation

Learning map no. 11: Facilitation

In Learning Map No. 11 you will find everything you need to familiarize yourself with facilitation as an art of consultation, support and leadership. The learning map is based on the practical experience of the Kommunikationslotsen, who are pioneers of facilitation in the German-speaking world. With just a few words and appropriate visualizations, you will learn about attitudes, basic assumptions and practices.
The term "facilitation" can be translated as "facilitation, support, paving the way". The aim of facilitation is to design ways and procedures to initiate paradigm shifts in organizations - towards more personal responsibility, self-management and initiative. Facilitation is a school of thought and life, a craft and an art. The essential task of a facilitator is to bring to light the knowledge and wisdom of individuals in a group and the potential of entire systems, to increase self-efficacy - and to get out of the way at the right moment.
The term "facilitation" was first used in 1985 in the Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICA). The ICA is a global community of non-profit organizations committed to the authentic and sustainable transformation of individual communities and organizations worldwide. The International Association of Facilitators (IAF) was founded out of the ICA in 1994. Today it has members in 45 countries.

Facilitation is a broad field.

"Over the decades, many people and their experiences have helped to expand and refine the methodological repertoire of facilitation. In doing so, they have drawn on some very old sources. One important source of facilitation is the circle setting. The circle is a powerful, archetypal form, the first social container that structured communication. The circle offers optimal conditions for successful dialog. In practice, this means: no strictly predetermined agenda, no frontal lectures, no profiling of individuals at the expense of the group process - but organized or emerging silence, trust in a superior leadership and community building as a basis for sustainable decisions.

Control what you can. Let go what you can't.

Own behavior: In order to have real choices and not just have to follow emotions, a high level of self-awareness is required. It is about learning to use your own feelings as clues to the process or the dynamics in the group. And it is about being able to deal with the feelings of others in such a way that those affected feel a safe framework for development and can thus unfold their full potential.
The planning phase is an effective lever for the success of facilitative approaches. It is about clarity of purpose and the creation of appropriate framework conditions. Even if the preparation creates the best possible conditions, things can turn out differently than planned. This then requires, among other things, the ability to let go of the prepared agenda and work with what emerges in the group at that moment.

Facilitation disciplines

Facilitation is at home in many disciplines. Learning card no. 11 describes 5 applications in detail:
Meeting facilitation
Change facilitation
Pioneer group
Facilitative leadership
Visual facilitation

Visual facilitation - making knowledge and dialog visible

Visualization is an important skill in the context of facilitation. In everyday organizational meetings and conferencing, dialogue and conference formats are increasingly being used in which participants can either doodle and draw at tables (e.g. the "World Café" method) or in which a process-trained draftsman has prepared something (e.g. info posters) and/or draws in real time on site (a so-called "graphic recording").
Working and project groups learn to put thoughts and inner images on paper with a pen. Putting a pen in the hands of those involved is a form of active participation. Visual dialogues, strategy pictures, project processes, storyboards, customer experiences and target groups (e.g. the "personas" known from design thinking) are visualized today. It doesn't matter whether you can draw or not, because almost every sketch obviously conveys something that cannot be expressed verbally. In this sense, images perform translation work: they support access to developmentally older areas of the brain that involuntarily translate physical and emotional aspects. The facilitator's task is to make process expertise effective at the right moment so that visualization is embedded in the process in a meaningful and purposeful way.
Visualization can be seen as a score of new forms of leadership and collaboration: People find it easy to immediately understand sketches that emerge in the moment. The complexities of much that is said and thought can be experienced and thus communicated. Visualization supports meetings, replaces PowerPoint, makes long minutes superfluous and helps with remembering, understanding and passing on through visual language. Ideally, a facilitator and a visual facilitator work together in meetings and workshops as visual dialog guides. Thanks to the integrated approach, the results are often surprisingly different: more emotional, more profound and more sustainable. Working with visualization is fun and makes sense!

Learning map no. 11