Written by Alan Shapiro
What does the word ‘facilitation’ mean to you? If you’d asked me this question a year ago, I would’ve been hard-pressed to come up with a simple answer. I might’ve replied that facilitation is the process of leading a conversation. That a facilitator is a person who steers and supports large meetings and consultations. Or that facilitating is a sort of ‘conversation traffic control’, helping to avoid collisions and enable the smooth flow of interactions.
It’s not that any of those definitions are wrong. It’s that they’re only the tip of the iceberg.
A year ago, facilitation was still very much unfamiliar territory for me. I had some experience wearing facilitator hats on environmental projects and in science communication workshops. I’d even thought about pursuing formal facilitation skills training. But try as I might, I had yet to find a resource that could help me build a foundational understanding of facilitation, and particularly one targeted towards young environmental professionals.
Experience is undeniably valuable, especially in a space where skills such as relationship-building, genuine listening, and emotional and cultural intelligence are of great importance. But to hold experience as the only avenue for professional development presents a too a narrow view of facilitation and limits young professionals’ ability to learn this much-needed skill. Luckily for me, I got a chance to receive the training I had been searching for and see a different side of the story.
The work of a facilitation team begins with clarifying the purpose of a gathering and preparing the space and participants.
In September 2018, I joined a cohort of young water leaders from around the world in Kingston, Ontario for Waterlution’s Water Innovation Lab #WILCanada, a ten-day intensive leadership and innovation training program. Water Innovation Labs have been run in seven countries over the past nine years and have trained more than 700 emerging leaders in collaboration, creativity, global engagement, complex problem-solving, and impact-oriented thinking on water issues.
The training program included a four-day course on facilitation (H2O Global Leader training), specifically targeted at young environmental professionals. The training was co-designed and co-led by Waterlution and Chris Corrigan from the Art of Hosting Community, an international network of experienced facilitators and communities of practice working to enable conversations and harvest knowledge.
The Art of Hosting and the H2O Global Leader training draw on a range of collaborative methods that extend far beyond the traditional notion of facilitation, into the territory of “hosting”. The curriculum teaches facilitators to understand how participants can effectively work together and to identify how the outcomes of a conversation (the “harvest”) can support problem-solving or project planning. The work of a facilitation team begins with clarifying the purpose of a gathering and preparing the space and participants. It ends once the group’s knowledge has been harvested in a form that can be effectively translated into action.
Conversations are not just random by-products of putting people in a room together. They are meticulously planned, often through well-developed questions, and are designed around themes that enable genuine, creative, and meaningful discussions. For H2O Global Leader participants, these techniques were used to facilitate meaningful conversations around complex water issues. Even a local planning process such as the protection of a lake or wetland involves multiple stakeholders, often with pre-existing tensions, differing views, and competing priorities. Enabling collaboration between researchers, stakeholders, government, indigenous knowledge holders, and non-profit organizations are critical in such complex landscapes.
I had a chance to apply my facilitation skills with the Connecting Environmental Professionals Vancouver mentorship program. Every year, the program matches emerging and established sustainability professionals in Vancouver. Mentees coming into the program, often students and early career professionals, face many shared challenges, from securing jobs to advocating for themselves within their organizations. To help participants share their experience and draw on each other’s knowledge, I facilitated a World Café, a flexible format for hosting large group dialogue. The World Café enabled participants to problem-solve around their shared challenges and to validate their own experience through conversations with others facing similar obstacles.
Without a doubt, many of the outside-the-box, game-changing solutions to water and environmental issues will come from engaged, knowledgeable, empowered, and energized youth.
I also worked with Waterlution on the Great Waters Challenge, a school education program that raises awareness and builds the capacity of youth to better steward and protect Canada’s waters. My role involved leading water leadership workshops in schools across British Columbia’s Lower Mainland. The goal of the workshop was to increase water literacy (helping students understand terms like “watershed” and “groundwater”) and to enable conversations where students could openly brainstorm, share ideas, and channel their creative energy to educate others and combat water issues in their community. The Great Waters Challenge offered a perfect opportunity to apply my new-found facilitation skills.
Standing in front of a class, I had to remind myself more than once that “educator” and “facilitator” are two very different roles. The students I worked with were eager to share their voices, and my job was to give them the space to express their ideas within the context of their new water knowledge. One idea that stuck in my head came from a third-grade student, who suggested that we could increase awareness about water issues by putting water facts in fortune cookies!
Without a doubt, many of the outside-the-box, game-changing solutions to water and environmental issues will come from engaged, knowledgeable, empowered, and energized youth. Even as I write this article, one of the largest coordinated climate change rallies has just taken place around the world, organized and largely attended by students and youth.
Stop having conversations and crossing your fingers that they lead somewhere. Take a step back, look at the bigger picture, and start facilitating.
What has struck me the most since my facilitation training is my new sensitivity to conversations where real facilitation is lacking. We’ve all had experiences with unproductive meetings, polarizing conversations, and lost feedback opportunities. People want to share their ideas but often don’t know how. Leaders want to hear from their communities but often aren’t able to inspire genuine contribution. Conversations end with no clear outcomes. Participants return to their own lives, and the ideas and inspiration generated through their collective voice lose its momentum. A facilitator can change this, by harvesting the outcomes of the conversations and continuing to support participants as they work towards action!
Whether it’s in professional settings or personal ones, we can all benefit from learning to host people and create safe spaces, and gaining abilities to facilitate much-needed dialogue. No matter the size of a group or the nature of the issue, it helps to ask a few simple questions. What kind of conversation is needed? How do you give participants a safe space to express themselves? How do you effectively harvest the knowledge and turn it into actionable form?
Stop having conversations and crossing your fingers that they lead somewhere. Take a step back, look at the bigger picture, and start facilitating.
To learn more about our programming, https://waterlution.org/