Facilitating Breakthrough: How to Remove Obstacles, Bridge Differences, and Move Forward Together

How Do We Define Success? Concluding and Advancing

At the end of every unit of the work of my facilitation teams—every workshop day, project phase, or quarter—we pause for a “plus-delta” meeting (delta is the mathematical symbol for change) in which everyone answers two questions about themselves, their colleagues, and the whole team: “What did I/you/we do well that I/you/we need to keep doing?” an

The three-phase model is also useful in facilitating a process over time, where these phases are repeated at different scales, such as over a single activity, over a sequence of activities within a meeting, and over an arc of the work across multiple meetings.

The practice of transformative facilitation involves gradually and iteratively building consensus and clarity about what is going on in the group’s situation (through cycling between advocating and inquiring), where the group wants to get to (through cycling between concluding and advancing), and how they will get there (through cycling between map

A team can sometimes make progress by agreeing, through debating or dialoguing, with a perspective or option that one of them had come up with previously. But more often they need to create new perspectives or options together.

When participants and facilitators engage in a creative collaboration, they need to be able to pivot fluidly, not only individually but as a group, like starlings flying in murmurations.

Suspending is such an important practice for transformative facilitation that many of the exercises Reos uses in workshops are specifically designed to demonstrate and enable it. For example, we often ask participants to write their ideas on sticky notes, sheets of flip-chart paper, or a physical or virtual whiteboard, which can be easily viewed an

PIVOTING REQUIRES FLUIDITY

an improvisation game called “Learning Like a Dolphin.” We invited one of them to volunteer to be “the dolphin,” which Carlos Cruz (an accomplished community organizer) did, and he was asked to leave the room. The others—”the trainers”—agreed on a simple series of coherent actions they wanted the dolphin to learn to do: picking up a chair, then mov