Written by Student Associate Erin Rumsey, Edited by Hanna Busse

What is a Facilitator?

When a situation calls for community-based engagement, it is important to have someone there who can lead the discussion in an efficient, effective way. Facilitators play an important role in community discussions; they are the ones to keep the discussion on track and guide the conversation to a productive place. 

It is important for any facilitator to remember that they are NOT responsible for making decisions or acting upon those decisions. Instead, a facilitator should help, teach, and guide the group discussion so the group itself can make whatever decisions they feel are best for their community. Discussing issues face-to-face can be incredibly useful for communities facing important issues, and having a facilitator to aid in these discussions will help communities begin to tackle the issues they face.

It is the job of a facilitator to become an expert in whatever issue they will be helping a community tackle. Research should be done on both a national and local level. There are also some important questions that a facilitator should answer for themselves before they are in front of a group:

1. What are the current opinions on this issue? Determine both popular opinion and opposing opinions.
2. What, if any, solutions to the problem have already been implemented? How has this implementation succeeded and/or failed?
3. What is at stake? What could happen if nothing is changed?

When is a Facilitator Needed?

If a problem has a simple solution, a facilitator is generally not needed. Larger problems, however, have no easy solution. Communities have to grapple with the pros and cons of each proposed course of action. In these cases, a facilitator is useful.

In this article, Martin Carcasson discusses these larger problems that have no technical solutions. He names them “wicked problems,” which are named as such because they are pervasive and complicated. These wicked problems often involve competing values and the need to introduce new, sometimes controversial ideas while deliberating solutions. Solving wicked problems also requires changes in behavior or culture, and changing the way people think and act is notoriously difficult. Wicked problems cannot be solved in a single meeting or with the passing of one law. Instead they require the cooperation of all members of a community, and solving them will take a significant amount of time and effort.

How Does Facilitation Work?

The best way to begin solving wicked problems is to implement deliberative engagement. Carcasson explains that deliberative engagement “begins with the recognition of the underlying values inherent to public problems, and focuses on developing mutual understanding and genuine interaction across perspectives, which then provides a base to support the constant adjustment, negotiation, and creativity required to tackle wicked problems.” Essentially, deliberative engagement is the most effective way to tackle wicked problems. It takes into account the values held by everyone involved, while also encouraging them to see things from the perspective of others.

It is a facilitator’s job to keep people open to new ideas and new opinions. However, if too many divergent opinions emerge people can find themselves entrenched in the “Groan Zone.” In this zone, too many different opinions cause confusion and a desire for people to simply give up because the problem seems too difficult to solve. Once the initial stage of discussion has been completed, a facilitator must know how to encourage people to listen to each other. Many traditional settings for deliberation (public comment, open houses, almost every online discussion board) are very good at bringing in opposing opinions, but once that is accomplished, there isn’t much encouragement to have conversations and listen to each other. Instead, these settings can easily become places where people yell at each other and nothing much gets accomplished. Deliberative engagement aims to move beyond this stage. It encourages people to listen to each other and recognize that the problem they are discussing is a wicked problem with no easy solution. It is the job of a facilitator to help people understand this.

In an ideal situation, a group will work through the Groan Zone, overcome their differences, bring their thoughts together and reach a decision that leaves everyone satisfied and motivated. Of course, that is not always the case. Many groups stumble on their way to a solution, and some may feel that they will never be able to cooperate. It is a facilitator’s responsibility to help groups overcome any barriers they might face, and to help them reconcile the pros and cons of every proposed solution to the wicked problem they face.

Ultimately, a facilitator introduces a healthy culture. This culture can continue to function and work toward solving wicked problems, even after the facilitator is gone.

Further Reading

Sam Kaner’s Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision Making is an excellent resource for anyone thinking they might want to take up the role of facilitator in a group discussion. It goes into greater detail on the dynamics of group decision making and offers skills and techniques that can help a facilitator from the initial brainstorming stage all the way to reaching closure with a group.

Additionally, when preparing to facilitate a discussion, it’s always a good idea to see if a facilitator’s guide already exists for that topic. They’ll include meeting agendas, questions to ask, remind you of the important facets of every issue, show you how to wrap meetings up, and are great to refer to if you’re ever going to create a guide for your own meetings. Here are some guides that can get you started: 

Building Community in a “Connected” Age: Facilitator’s Guide

This is a guide written for a meeting on using technology to shape the future of Vermont. It has a great agenda for how the meeting is supposed to go, plenty of questions to ask both when the group is together and when they’re discussing in small groups, as well as some activities such as brainstorming or asking people to write down a few answers before sharing them with the group. It focuses a lot on what opportunities and challenges come with making Vermont an e-state, a state where people are connected by technology and the community is centered online.

Building Prosperity for All: Facilitator’s Guide

This guide is meant for groups of people in small towns who are looking to move from positions of poverty to ones of prosperity. Along with discussion guides, it also includes different viewpoints on the issue, diagrams, samples of handouts and flyers you can use, sheets to collect contact information, and more tips on how to lead and effective and informative discussion. This is the perfect facilitator’s guide for a beginner because it includes almost everything someone would need to facilitate a discussion of their own. 

Working Together to Remove Racial and Ethnic Barriers (A Facilitator’s Guide)

This guide focuses on discussions of the issue of inequality and racial barriers in education. It is meant to remove racial and ethnic barriers to both student success and parent participation in Montgomery County Public Schools. It also includes tips on how to handle any situations that may arise during discussion. This guide covers plans for several sessions of meetings, as well as notes for the facilitator to remind them of the goals of each part of the sessions, from the importance of group members getting to know each other to reminders the facilitator should pass along to group members. It also includes a whole section of goals for each meeting and questions to ask when there are difficulties in a meeting or when group members feel discouraged.