Facilitation from the back of the room
Facilitators aim to make things easier - but how and for whom..?
“It's not easy being a teacher. I mean where do you stand? Do you stand at the front, where you can write on the board but you can't see the children, or do you stand at the back where you can see the children but you can't write on the board. No one's been able to solve that dilemma — not by a long chalk.” — Milton Jones 1
You’ve probably been in meetings where a facilitator stood up at the front of the room with flipchart and marker pens, keeping things on track, guiding participants towards a productive outcome, and smoothing over disagreements between different organisational fiefdoms, factions, or silos. You may even have been the facilitator…
The word facilitate comes from the Latin facilis (adj.) — “easy to do, manageable, effortless” which in turn derives from facere (vb) — “to make, to do” — and from which we also get words like factory in present-day English.
The original Latin facilis had a neutral to positive connotation of something that’s easy or straightforward. However, when “facilitate” entered English in the 16th century, it increasingly took on a more active sense — i.e. not just something that’s inherently easy, but something made easier by an agent — from where we get today’s understanding of a facilitator.
The key question anyone who adopts the role of facilitator should probably ask themselves is: “Made easier for whom — and in what way”?
The pivotal experience that completely changed my perspective on facilitation took place around 30 years ago, shortly after Arthur D. Little (ADL) had acquired the world’s leading organisational learning consulting firm, Innovation Associates (IA).
My “aha” moment came on first encounter with IA’s next level facilitation from the back of the room.
I’d joined ADL group at their Cambridge UK open innovation lab in 1983. It was at the lab a few years later that a client said to me “Geoff, we like working with your people more than with our own people.” He then asked the fateful question that put me on the career path I’ve been on for the past 40 years, helping clients create future-fit cultures like we had at the lab: “You couldn’t come an make our people behave more like your people could you”?
I’d been doing this work throughout Europe, Asia, and the US for about a decade when, in 1995, ADL acquired IA, the acknowledged global leader in organisational learning professional services, established by Peter Senge, Charles Kiefer, and Joel Yanowitz.2
IA had up to that point largely been geographically constrained to the US east coast around Boston, Massachusetts, where Peter and Charlie were located, and the US west coast around San Francisco, California, where Joel was based.
They’d decided that the best way to expand geographic reach was to get themselves acquired by a management consulting firm with an international footprint. However, they were keen to avoid being bought by a mainstream “Big Con” management consulting firm such as McKinsey, BCG, Bain, KPMG, PWC, etc because they wisely recognised that the finders, minders, grinders business model and co-dependency-driven sales and marketing ethos of mainstream Big Con firms would have destroyed IA’s culture.3
ADL seemed the perfect match, with 3,500 people spread across the globe and a culture of local adaptation and collegiate innovation. ADL’s culture back then is well captured in this comment from the then CEO about the challenge of his role:
“ADL is often described as a global consulting firm of 3,500 people. From where I sit as CEO it looks a lot like 3,500 consulting firms of one person each”.
The deal was done and IA consultants started working with ADL clients and colleagues, often bringing with them their facilitation from the back of the room.
Here’s how it works:
At the start of the meeting, the facilitator does a 30-45 minute teach-in about a practical organisational learning approach, method, or framework — maybe the Ladder of Inference, the Left Hand Column or Balancing Advocacy and Inquiry. 4
The facilitator then retires to the back of the room and lets the meeting proceed.
After a while, things might start to come off the rails as individuals start arguing with each other as they get progressively trapped in their individual narrow, biased, one-sided, “2D” perspectives. 5
The facilitator watches this misalignment develop, remaining at the back of the room, resisting the temptation to dive in precipitately to “fix things”.
More often than not, things get progressively more dysfunctional until the facilitator eventually wanders up to the front of the room and calls “timeout”.
The facilitator then asks the meeting participants for their observations on what happened.
After a period of “blamestorming” (participants pointing fingers at each other) the facilitator calls “timeout” a second time, again asking what happened, but this time drawing participant attention to the up-front teach-in about Ladder of Inference, the Left Hand Column or Balancing Advocacy and Inquiry.
At this point someone invariably cottons on to how their own 2D mindset, and associated attitudes and behaviours, contributed to the meeting going off track.
Once one person fesses up to their personal contribution to the dysfunction, the floodgates typically open as others recognise and reflect openly on how they too had inadvertently contributed to the impasse.
The facilitator then encourages them to reflect what they might do differently in future, both to prevent similar group dysfunctions and/or recover from them for and by themselves. They then wander to the back of the room and only intervene again if absolutely necessary.
Often such meetings are so eye-opening, individual participants spontaneously contact the facilitator to ask for 1:1 coaching, recommended reading, etc.
After relatively few of these facilitated from the back of the room style meetings, participants have often learned enough that outside facilitators are no longer required.
IA’s facilitation from the back of the room deeply annoyed some of the ADL consultants.
I recall one in particular getting very frustrated (I’ll call him Robert):
“These IA folks just swan up to meetings with zero preparation and sit at the back of the room most of the time. I spend hours preparing for workshops, creating flip charts and slide decks. And, to add insult to injury, their billing rate is twice mine — so presumably they’re paid twice as much as me”.
I tried to explain to Robert that whereas the typical ADL consultant saw their role as doing the facilitation, IA consultants saw their role as enabling client people to develop their capacity to facilitate themselves.
Robert was horrified — if they could facilitate themselves they wouldn’t need to keep hiring people like him…
Questions for reflection
What’s your personal approach to meeting facilitation?
Do you help your clients, or do you help equip them so they can help themselves without your help?
What’s more valuable to the client — facilitation that makes it easy for participants to avoid conflict, or facilitation that helps them learn to resolve conflict by themselves?
Ready to take action?
My website provides a range of free resources to help you make the shift for yourselves, by yourselves, from “organisation as machine to be designed and operated” to “organisation as human community for shaping its future by creating continuous new value”.
Contact me to keynote at your next leadership conference or executive retreat, book one of my popular 90-minute "pick Geoff’s brains" sessions for senior executives, or tailor a custom coaching package for your development as a future-fit culture catalyst.
Milton Jones Live Universe DVD — see a ripped clip at 03:14 here on YouTube.
Peter in particular is regarded as a prime mover in the Organisational Learning community. Find out more about him here.
For more on the Big Con and how they kill innovation before it’s had a chance to take root, see this previous article.
See The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook pages 242-261.
For more on 2D perspectives on 3D reality see this previous article.