Quick introduction to basic skills of transformative meeting facilitation, and exercises anyone can use to practice them. A detailed section on additional resources will guide you to websites and books for further reading

 

New - Free Tips for Facilitators
Often a facilitator needs to deal with unhelpful or negative comments from participants. Facilitators can handle these constructively by recognising them as they occur. In this list of commonly heard statements, suggested facilitator responses follow in brackets. While all the responses below are often useful, sometimes ignoring unhelpful statements is the best way to discourage them. more

Skills described and taught

• Paraphrasing
• Summary
• Phasing
• Moving Discussion to Deeper Levels

Download immediately as ebook: $2.95. Download ebook now

Payment by Paypal or credit card (Multiple currencies accepted), money order by approval, checks.

 

 

Skills for Transformative Group Facilitation

(excerpts from the booklet by Ron Kraybill)

 

Introduction

The single biggest factor in determining whether a meeting is rewarding or disappointing is the skill of the leader. Unfortunately, skills for facilitating meetings are rarely taught. People seem to assume that white hair, or a good education, or the title of CEO, chair, reverend, etc., somehow equips leaders with skills adequate to lead meetings. Well, maybe. Or maybe not..

When leaders use good listening and summarizing skills, when they have a well-honed ability to recognize the varying and somewhat contradictory phases of making a decision and can guide a group calmly through them, they help groups and individuals to grow. People regain a sense of confidence in themselves and those around them. From that confidence comes an expansion of spirit and capacity.

Whereas a paraphrase summarizes only a few sentences or paragraphs, a summary is a condensation of a longer statement or of many statements. Facilitators use several kinds of summaries, these include: Summary of content, summary of agreement, summary of disagreement, summary of process.

With phasing a facilitator guides group discussion to take place in phases, so that people can cooperate on one task rather than trying to do many things at once. By enabling the parties to cooperate in the many activities involved in successful decision-making in a common way, phasing creates a sense of safety and order in the group.

By agreeing to take turns or to define what the problem is before trying to solve it, for example, participants affirm their willingness to be work together in a common process. In this sense, phasing is a ritual of modest, short-term cooperation, that symbolizes and assists in reaching the goal of larger, long-term cooperation.

Examples of phasing

• Phase moments of social interaction with issue-oriented work, so as to intersperse times of work with times of relationship-building.
• Separate dialogue from the phase of decision-making.
• Separate agreeing (eg: naming the points of agreement or listing a set of common shared principles) from clarifying the differences (eg: listing the points of disagreement or contention)
• Separate joint education or information gathering from the phase of decisionmaking or negotiation
• Phase intellectual activity with physical activity

Strategies to Move Discussion to Deeper Levels

Used on a consistent basis, these skills create space where human beings grow. Individuals become more confident and more trusting. Organizations become more flexible, more humane, more empowering, more effective, more connected to the depths of Spirit that endlessly seeks to transform our world.

Get more on each of these ideas in the book.

Copyright 2005 Ron Kraybill