Facilitating Breakthrough summary

Imagine that your favorite basketball team is having a really bad season. The players don’t get along, everyone’s frustrated, and it’s hurting their performance on the court. They have all the skills they need to win, but when it comes to communicating and overall teamwork, they’re terrible. And it’s causing them to lose games. So, to bring them together as a team, the coach brings in a facilitator – you. 

But, what is a facilitator exactly? Well, essentially a facilitator is someone who makes working in a group easier. And in the case of your basketball team, this means you have to bring them together as a team so that they can start winning. 

So, as the appointed facilitator, what can you do to start turning the situation around? 

Well, you could make the players listen to what the coach says. This is known as vertical facilitation, and it’s the most common approach to problem-solving. It’s a top-down, hierarchical approach that involves addressing the group as a whole. 

At face value, vertical facilitation makes sense. After all, the coach is important, because he‘s an expert. He has played and coached countless games throughout his career. So he knows a lot about Basketball. He has a strategy and tactics for the whole team. If nobody follows the strategy and the tactics, you won’t be successful. There will be chaos, and opposing teams will take advantage of that.

Another approach is horizontal facilitation. This method is bottom-up; everyone's on an equal playing field. People can choose when and what to contribute. With this method, you could make the coach listen to what the players are saying. At the end of the day, they’re the ones who have to do the actual playing. They may not have as many years of experience as the coach. But they still know a lot about what it’s like to play on this particular team. You can have the best tactics in the world, but if the players are unhappy, the team won’t be successful.

In both cases, it’s possible to start winning – a team can win purely on the individual strengths of its players, or good strategy from the coach – but only for a certain amount of time. Because the downside of only going with one strategy, however, is that one side inevitably gets ignored. And this will create a lot of frustration - nobody likes being ignored!

So, what to do? Well, here comes the solution: you should do both! As a facilitator, you make sure the players listen to what the coach has to say. But you also make sure that the players have their own say.

And that’s what’s called transformative facilitation. That’s a bit of a mouthful, I know, but it essentially means you talk to everybody and try to find out what the situation is like. And then you take action.

So, if you notice that the coach has all the power, then it’s time to listen to the players a bit more. And if the players are doing what they want without paying attention to the coach - Then it’s time to give the coach a bigger role.

As a facilitator, you do this over and over again until everybody feels heard. That involves a lot of listening and a lot of talking. It takes some time. But that’s what facilitators do: they listen to everybody, they talk to everybody. And by doing that, they make working in a team easier and more fun. And hopefully your team will start winning again.