Name: Facilitating Breakthrough
Rating: 4.2 (32 reviews)
Author: Adam Kahane

What’s in it for me? Discover how to harness the power of transformative facilitation.

How do you bring together a diverse group of people and help them collaborate despite personal differences or any issues they may have with one another?

Adam Kahane addresses this pervasive problem by offering a simple solution: an approach he calls transformative facilitation.

This method fosters collaboration by taking away all the hurdles standing in the way of natural facilitation. Kahane has an analogy to explain this. He says, You can’t push a stream to flow, but if you remove the blockage, it will flow by itself. And that’s the main responsibility of the facilitator – to remove the blockage.

In this blink, we’ll be exploring a number of situations where facilitation is required. By the end, you’ll have more tools in your facilitation toolbox that you can call upon when needed. Whether you’re trying to bring people together at your place of work or trying to resolve conflicts closer to home, this blink is for you.

In this blink, you’ll learn

how political enemies ended up playing volleyball together in post-Apartheid South Africa;
why it’s important to stand both outside and inside; and
how facilitators and conductors have a lot in common.

Transformative facilitation

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.

Removing obstacles

The most powerful aspect of transformative facilitation is that it can be to solve problems with any group of people. Sure, it can help a basketball team – but it can also help a whole nation in dealing with political transformation.

A year and a half after Nelson Mandela was released from prison, the author found himself in South Africa. His role was to facilitate a workshop on the country’s post-Apartheid future. Attending were 28 leaders from across the nation representing black and white communities, left and right-wing parties, as well as business and civil society.

Humility and the importance of serving

So far, it sounds like some facilitators out there are doing pretty important work. And while this is definitely true, the best facilitators don’t see themselves as heroic leaders. This is because the most important quality a facilitator can have is humility. Their job is not to help themselves, but to serve the group as a whole.

Your role as a facilitator is similar to that of a conductor in an orchestra. While it may seem like a conductor is “leading” the performance, in reality it’s the composer who’s in charge. They wrote down the notes, after all! The conductor isn’t even producing any sound themselves – that’s the musicians.

Stepping inside and outside

It’s a sad but unavoidable fact that not all facilitations are successful. The author knows this very well. But while some workshops don’t work out, it’s even less common that participants reject the facilitators themselves from the get-go. It’s happened twice to the author, and both occasions taught him some important lessons.

In 2018, for example, his team was tasked with co-facilitating a workshop in Manitoba, Canada. The goal was to figure out ways to improve healthcare outcomes of local First Nations communities. The author went in confident – with decades of experiences under his belt, he felt prepared to take on the challenge.

Key ideas in Facilitating Breakthrough

About the Author

Adam Kahane co-founded Reos Partners, where he works as a Director. He has over 30 years of experience in helping businesses, government, and civil society solve seemingly unsolvable problems. He is the author of four bestselling books, including Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities.