Facilitation isn’t magic

At its most fundamental, facilitation is the art of making things easy, making it easier for humans to work together and get things done.

The crux of good facilitation, according to Adam Kahane, author of Facilitating Breakthrough, is not to get people to work together, but to remove the obstacles to connection and collaboration—obstacles like disconnection, debilitating conflict, and other forms of “stuckness.

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.

A facilitator is someone trained in the skill of shaping group dynamics and collective conversations. My job is to put the right people in a room and help them to collectively think, dream, argue, heal, envision, trust, and connect for a specific larger purpose.