Guiding Principles of Facilitation

How you think is how you lead. Consider, as facilitators, we guide teams to exchange ideas, collaborate, resolve challenges, and cultivate creative solutions. While every facilitator may have their own style, every facilitator supports their team through the same processes.

?But it all begins with you.?

?By ensuring you have the right mindset and?facilitation skills?to lead your team, you’ll have more productive and meaningful team experiences. One way to recalibrate your mindset in facilitation is to reassess the structures you’ve created for leading.

?Facilitators provide structure, but we need structure too. That’s why it’s vital to understand the guiding principles that act as your foundation for facilitation.?

?Here are a few guiding principles from?professional facilitator Marsha Acker?that offer a mighty foundation for facilitating:

Principle 1: Maintain Neutrality.?

Be intentional about the desired outcome and purpose of your meeting. As a facilitator, you own the process of the meeting while letting the team own the content of the conversation.

Principle 2: Stand in the Storm

Teams don’t naturally want to stay in conflict; they have patterns of avoiding it, often at all costs. But this is where the good stuff happens.

Principle 3: Honor the Wisdom of the Group

Trust that the team has the wisdom and everything else it needs to solve its own problems creatively and innovatively. The diversity of perspectives represented by different voices on your team will enable the group to innovate and move forward.

Principle 4: Hold the Group’s Agenda

When the group’s emergent agenda appears in your meeting, it’s time to focus on what would serve the team in the long run, not what you want to accomplish in that moment.

Principle 5: Be Future Focused?

To get the most out of your meetings, have a plan that includes questions designed to prompt the team to think about the future — to think beyond the current dilemma to imagine what’s possible.

Facilitation is not only an art; it’s a science. If you need support creating a structure around facilitation and perfecting your principles, sign up for our?Master Facilitation Certification program. The deadline to apply is June 3.

?Douglas Ferguson | President, Voltage Control

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Master Facilitator Certification

You will learn to:

• Identify a spectrum of advanced facilitation methods and approaches
• Select the best advanced facilitation methods for your facilitation context
• Implement the right advanced facilitation methods to meet optimal facilitation outcomes
• Reflect on areas of advanced facilitator strength and growth
• Cultivate a valuable professional master facilitator identity

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Liberating Structures

You learn the 12 principles of Liberating Structures, the 34 structures, and the design process followed by Liberating Structures expert to unleash and empower large diverse groups. Finally, you’ll add some serious tools to your toolkit. Through direct experience running 8 of the 34 you’ll walk away with the confidence to implement them immediately in your work.

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Design thinking is an undeniably?powerful tool for companies, but what does it look like in practice? How have organizations applied it and how does it work? Is?design thinking training?something your company needs? Read the following design thinking examples and case studies to discover how?design thinking?has been successfully applied by many companies.

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