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About Extreme Facilitation |
Extreme Facilitation: Guiding Groups through Controversy and Complexity presents a method of group facilitation that is deeper, more strategic, and more adaptable than other approaches to facilitation. It is flexible enough to use in the widest variety of organizational and public-policy settings, and can help groups facing the toughest of circumstances: conflict, strong emotions, technical complexity, or severe external pressures. The central concept is the facilitator as architect of a custom process. Customization requires a deep understanding of the group—its needs, goals, external pressures, and culture. The facilitator must possess knowledge of a wide range of possible techniques and a strong personal presence, and must draw on all of a group’s capacities—physical, emotional, intellectual, intuitive, and spiritual. Chapter 1—The Right Stuff: What It Takes to Be an Extreme Facilitator helps the reader cultivate authenticity, confidence, presence, trustworthiness, and calm. Chapter 2—The Facilitator as Architect explains how the facilitator creatively designs a process to custom-fit the group. It includes guidelines for increasing creativity, as well as a critique of the overuse of consensus and a model for determining what decision-making process makes most sense for a particular group. Chapter 3—Assessment: The Essential First Step details the all-important stage of assessment (gaining understanding of the group), including assessment methods and questions to ask. It also identifies four key cultural variables and their impact on process design. Chapter 4—Convening: Creating a Democratic Table covers the identification of “stakeholder” groups and individual participants—a skill central to public-policy facilitation but surprisingly useful in the workplace too. It tackles the touchy dilemmas of who gets a seat at the table and the power that goes with it as well as how to coax reluctant parties to the table. Chapter 5—Contracting: Setting Yourself Up for Success explores the under-rated task of negotiating with the client group what kind of success facilitation can promise and what the facilitator needs from the group in order to deliver that success. This ranges from the nuts and bolts of budgeting to the group’s willingness to commit energy and resources and perhaps to suspend their skepticism. Chapter 6—Process Basics: The Beginner’s Guide to Facilitation covers facilitation basics for the novice reader. These include basic stages, basic interventions, and basic discussion formats and activities. While elementary, this model is fluid enough to allow for the more advanced and creative techniques explored later in the book. Chapter 7—The Physical Capacity: The Foundation offers ways to keep a group at peak energy—from comfortable seating and lighting to ways of organizing the agenda to maintain an energizing sense of progress and momentum. Chapter 8—The Emotional Capacity: Welcoming and Working with Feelings helps the reader see emotions as friends, not enemies—yet also enables careful calibration of emotional expressiveness to suit the group culture. Well-known skills for defusing emotions and conveying empathy are covered, as are more advanced skills such as how to foster people’s ability to empathize with their enemies. Chapter 9—The Intellectual Capacity: Facilitating Complex Issues goes into depth on ways to make order of complexity and work through difficult technical issues. It includes important guidance on defining issues (the first key to resolving them), and also examines the limits of factual data and analysis in resolving value-laden issues. Chapter 10—The Intuitive Capacity: Sparking Insights and Ideas invites readers to explore the mysterious yet universal capacity for intuition and how it can aid facilitation by fostering understanding and insight and yielding creative new solutions and inspiring visions for the future. Included are general conditions and specific activities that help draw out intuitive abilities. Chapter 11—The Spiritual Capacity: Helping Groups Transcend Their Limitations helps facilitators invisibly create conditions that help bring out the best in human nature—the side of humanity that can overcome the deepest resentment and hatred. Ways to promote gratitude, love, hope, truthfulness, and community are offered. Each of the preceding five chapters includes advice for facilitators to build these capacities in themselves so that they can best help groups do the same. Chapter 12—Putting It All Together ties the preceding chapters together in two ways. First is a section on how to draw on all the other ideas in the book in designing a custom process. Second is a section on how to handle some of the specific challenges facilitators fear, from disruptive individuals to hidden agendas to clashing cultures.
