Effective Facilitation Workshop
by Janine Carmona & Steve Stormoen

What is facilitation, why is it important?

1. Intro: Round. The word ‘resistance’ – what does that mean to you?
   1. We just demonstrated our first facilitation tool – a round.
   2. Shows that the ways we express ourselves vocally depend on our upbringing, socialization, and personal life experience. Each person has their own way of expressing their ideas and conceptualizing a problem. There is enormous potential in group communication and decision-making because we all have different experiences, ideologies, and world-views; we can take the best from everybody.
2. Facilitation is a method of group communication built on this idea – that everybody’s voice is essential to coming up with the best decision or having the best conversation. With this in mind, everyone’s voice must be equal in order for everyone’s voice to be heard. Facilitation can be used to…
   1. Encourage new and creative ideas from all people in a space.
   2. Make inclusive decisions that meet everyone’s various needs.
   3. Deconstruct internal hierarchies and norms within groups.
   4. Build mutual understanding in a participatory and revolutionary way.
3. History
   1. This has been working since the 17th century
   2. Quaker response to hierarchy
   3. Native tribes
   4. Use for the practice of social justice in the 60’s and 70’s in nonviolence movements.
4. Some things to know about facilitation
   1. Impartiality: The facilitator serves the group as a whole, not individuals. As such, the facilitator should stay out of decision-making conversations and focus her or his self entirely on process.
   2. Observation: Your job is to open the space to all ideas and viewpoints and to identify the needs each person has for a solution or idea.
   3. Intrusion: Sometimes you need to take an active hand in facilitation to help spur discussion or direct it towards convergent thinking. That’s okay.
   4. Not so much of #3: There is a natural flow to conversation and people will often find their own convergent viewpoints. Remember that chaos is the prelude to creativity and only step in when it’s necessary or if there are time constraints.
   5. Help the group follow the rules it has created, in respects to time, agenda, etc.
5. A good facilitator…
   1. Appreciates the fact that we are all individuals with diverging points of view
   2. Can converge ideas – we’re all taught/very good at making divergent ideas, converging them is entirely different. More on this later.
   3. Has faith in the process
   4. Includes different viewpoints and needs

Facilitator Fundamentals

1. Practice! These are all skills, and like any skill they need to be practiced. You’ll intuit a fair amount from being in meetings, and trainings help, but nothing beats practice.
2. Stack – Facilitation tool #1! Most of your meeting will be in Stack format.
   1. Definition: the practice of keeping track of the order in which people raise their hands to speak, and using that list to determine a speaking order.
   2. Usually sequential, but not always – ex: 5 people are on stack, and the first four have talked a few times, but the last one hasn’t said anything yet this meeting. As facilitator, you can and should bump that person up!
3. Encouraging full participation: Fostering divergent, creative thinking.
   1. You can’t force people to speak, but you can take steps to ensure they feel comfortable speaking.
   2. Possible problems:
      1. Some people in the group aren’t speaking. Maybe they feel silenced by a group dynamic or maybe they’re just shy. But they probably have ideas.
      2. No creativity: there’s one proposal on the floor, and people don’t seem particularly excited by it, but nobody is proposing anything else.
      3. Everybody seems bored, or people’s attention is drifting away from the meeting or the present conversation.
   3. Some tools/structures/thinking activities that can help
      1. Brainstorm something specific.
      2. Ask for x number to speak for a proposal and x to speak against.
      3. Split group into partners or smaller groups of any size
      4. Go-‘round
      5. Give people x minutes to write down thoughts first, then share
      6. Anonymous slips of paper
   4. Promote mutual understanding

1. The point is for everybody to voice an opinion, be understood, and step back so others can talk and the group can make a decision.

1. Often, the same person or group of people will keep defending a particular viewpoint endlessly. This is called a fixed position, and can be very intimidating. Two fixed positions against each other can turn into a debate, which may never resolve, and can destroy an entire meeting.

2. As demonstrated in our original exercise, we all have different meanings for every word – understanding is incredibly hard.

1. When somebody makes a complicated or obtuse point or presents any proposal, try to summarize it back to them, ask if your summary was accurate, and have them correct you if it was not.

2. Keep track of what people say, especially when they make proposals. Nothing is more disempowering than having a group completely ignore your proposal.

3. Solve two problems at once! Encouraging full participation usually aids mutual understanding, too.
4. Tools
1. Taking stack!
2. Interrupting stack
3. Reflective listening/summarizing difficult points
4. Encouraging/making space for quiet people
5. Using the clock – (“We only have x minutes so let’s hear from someone else/wrap up this discussion and come to consensus”)
6. Calling for responses
7. Pointing out, or asking others to point out themes of a discussion
8. Deliberate refocusing
1. This is a lot to take in, but you aren’t alone!
   1. Two co-facilitators are common, especially to fill gender balance and give an inexperienced facilitator a chance to learn in an active skill-sharing process. Often, one can take stack while the other handles most of the facilitation, and the two can switch off during the course of the meeting.
   2. Other roles in a meeting people can volunteer for include note-taker, timekeeper, vibes-watcher, and someone to write on blackboards/whiteboards/any other public documentation tool.

• Advanced Facilitation Techniques

1. Combating Hierarchy

1. Ask: who has seen a dynamic within an organizing group they are a part of that they are uncomfortable with?

1. (Ask someone else to facilitate discussion of dynamics, help them use tools from C.2 if people aren’t responding. This is a great time to break into diads.)

2. Notice gender and race dynamics in meetings and in conversation. People from privileged backgrounds (men, white people, etc.) are generally socialized to speak more prominently and seek power or influence in a decision-making process, often by using a fixed position.

1. Actively check yourself in meetings. Do you find yourself interrupting people? Defending yourself? Verbally showing support to others, as if your approval validates another’s opinion? It’s creepy when you notice yourself exercising privilege, but noticing privilege is the first step to fixing it.
2. Don’t be embarrassed or ashamed when somebody else checks you or calls you out. Learn, and move on.
3. When facilitating, if a conversation is being dominated by a certain group, ask for other voices, interrupt stack, and use tools from before.
3. Informal hierarchies are prominent in organizing spaces – built along ideological lines, “radicalism,” organizing experience, groups of friends, and familiarity with a group or its process, and can be just as disruptive as formal social hierarchies. If a group of friends is all backing each other up over and over again, you can say something to the effect of, “we know how you guys think; let’s hear from someone else.”
2. Fostering inclusive solutions and encouraging convergent thinking.
1. A good facilitator helps search for innovative ideas that incorporate everyone’s point of view – the group must also be skilled at weaving together perspectives into proposals
2. Combats the “either my way or your way” idea of solving conflict
3. Tools
1. Parking lot – a visual reminder of a discussion point or proposal you will return to, but is not part of the discussion at hand.
2. Paraphrasing – try to find out what the most essential part of a proposal is to the person who proposed it, and try to accomplish that.
3. Tracking conversations, proposals, and amendments.
4. Ask if proposals are mutually exclusive, and find ways to combine those that aren’t.
5. Look for common ground in philosophy, goals, etc., and build from it.
3. Tips for action planning:
1. Keep goals, tactics, logistics, messaging, and publicity as separate discussions.
1. Goals: include both short and long term. Decide as a group which are the most important and let those inform your tactics.
2. Tactics: As a broad view, what sort of action will accomplish these goals the best? Can require hardcore facilitation both for drawing out creative ideas and bringing in convergent decision-making.
3. Logistics: The nitty-gritties. How are your tactics going to be accomplished?
4. Messaging: Another theoretical discussion – how do you want to characterize your action? Is this a direct action or are you appealing to a certain demographic – i.e., media, regents, public, other students, etc.
5. Publicity: How will you get the word out?
2. Come up with a list of tasks for logistics and publicity, and don’t move on to the next part of the meeting until every task has volunteers and bottom-liners.

Maintaining a sustainable movement.

1. Keep a history of what the group has done that people can draw inspiration from.
   1. A website or some other storehouse for photos and press clippings is good.
2. Set goals, keep track of them, evaluate their progress, and party together when they’ve been accomplished.
3. Student movements are limited by activist life-span. You only get somebody for four years, tops. Also, more new voices can mean better, more creative decisions. So, making a movement accessible to new people is necessary
4. Outreach is important, but not crucial. The most committed will often find you on their own.
5. More important is making new folks comfortable in your group and in your meeting space so they’ll stick around. Some ways to do this are…
1. Explaining role of facilitator at the beginning of each meeting, explaining stack and briefly explaining consensus process.
2. Planning the agenda as a group or asking for additions to it at the start of the meeting.
3. Use of inclusive statements
4. Specifically asking new members to volunteer for “leadership” tasks, or volunteering along with them to teach them by doing.
6. Make space for discussing group dynamics and sharing skills.
   1. Retreats are neat! Fun, informal space for the group to self-evaluate, discuss dynamics, share skills, and hang out.
   2. Men’s and women’s discussion groups also help to create a safe space.
   3. A very serious problem can be brought up for discussion in a meeting, but this can also limit peoples’ willingness to discuss or call out an individual.