Introduction

“You Are Removing the Obstacles to the Expression of the Mystery!”

Transformative facilitation is an unconventional and powerful approach to helping people collaborate to effect transformation. I had been facilitating for decades, but it was only in a workshop in Colombia in November 2017 that I grasped what is distinctive and important about this approach. This book was conceived at that workshop.

A BREAKTHROUGH WORKSHOP

In the sunny outdoor restaurant of a small country hotel, a former guerilla commander and a wealthy businesswoman greet each other by name. The organizer of the workshop tells them he is surprised that they know each other. The businesswoman explains: “We met when I brought him the money to ransom a man who had been kidnapped by his soldiers.” The guerilla adds: “The reason we’re at this meeting is so that no one will have to do such things again.”

Transformative facilitation enables such breakthrough.

This workshop brought together a diverse group of leaders to talk about what they could do to contribute to transforming their country. Seventeen months earlier, in June 2016, the government of Colombia and the FARC (the Spanish acronym for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) movement had signed a treaty to end their fifty-two-year war, in which thousands had been kidnapped, hundreds of thousands killed, and millions displaced. In October 2016, President Juan Manuel Santos was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of this long-struggled-for accomplishment. Santos appointed Francisco de Roux, the former head of the Jesuit order in Colombia and a renowned peacemaker, to be president of the Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence, and Non-Repetition, one of the bodies established to implement the treaty. After decades of being at one another’s throats, Colombians were now trying, amid much turmoil and trepidation, to break through and work together to construct a better future. Our workshop was part of this effort.

In January 2017, in the troubled southwest of the country, two civic-minded leaders, Manuel José Carvajal, a businessman with connections to the elite, and Manuel Ramiro Muñoz, a professor with connections to the grass roots, decided to organize a project to contribute to rebuilding that region’s society and economy. Their idea was to bring together leaders who were representative of all the region’s stakeholders: everyone with a stake in the future of the region and therefore an interest in making it better.

Carvajal and I had worked together twenty years earlier, so he knew my work, and now he and Muñoz engaged Reos Partners to support them in facilitating this new project. We helped them identify and enroll forty influential people from different sectors—politicians from different parties, former guerilla commanders, businesspeople, nonprofit managers, community activists—who, if they could collaborate, could make a real difference in the region. We also helped them get started on a yearlong program of work for this group, first to discuss what could happen in the future—a set of possible scenarios—and then what the group would do to create a better future—a set of initiatives. (In the years that followed, this group continued to grow their membership and their impact on the region.)

In November 2017, the first workshop of this group took place over three days at the country hotel. I was delighted that Francisco de Roux showed up: I had met him before and found him lively and interesting. I asked him why he had taken time away from his important national responsibilities to participate in this local event, and he said he wanted to learn about how we were enabling collaboration across diversity.

On the morning of the first day of the workshop, the participants were tense. They had major political, ideological, economic, and cultural differences, and major disagreements about what had happened in the region and what needed to happen. Some of them were enemies. Many of them had strong prejudices. Most of them felt at risk in being there; one politician insisted that no photographs be taken because he didn’t want it known that he was sitting down with his rivals. But all of them had showed up anyway, because they hoped that the effort could contribute to creating a better future.

Our facilitation team had organized the agenda of the first day as a structured series of exercises to enable the participants to get to know one another and to understand one another’s perspectives on what was happening and what they could do about it. In the first activity, they sat in a circle and each of them took one minute, timed with a bell, to introduce themselves. The activities that followed were precise and varied. Some were conducted all together in plenary and others in different groups of two, four, or six persons. Participants shared and synthesized their thinking using sticky notes, flip-chart paper, or toy bricks. They came together in the meeting room, at the restaurant, or on walks around the hotel grounds. Our facilitation team supported these activities attentively: arranging the workshop space, explaining the exercises, helping everyone to participate.

By the end of this first, long day, the participants had begun to relax and to hope that they could do something worthwhile together. One of them said he had been amazed “to see the lion lie down with the lamb.” Then, when we all got up to go to dinner, de Roux rushed up to me, overflowing with excitement. “Now I see what you are doing!” he said. “You are removing the obstacles to the expression of the mystery!”

I knew de Roux was telling me something that was important to him—in Catholic theology, “the mystery” refers to the incomprehensible and unknowable mystery of God—but I didn’t understand what he thought this meant for what we had been doing in the workshop. Over dinner we talked for a long time and he patiently tried to give me a secular explanation: “Everything is a manifestation of the mystery. But you cannot predict or provoke or program it: it just emerges. Our key problem is that we obstruct this emergence, especially when our fears cause us to wall ourselves off.”

I found this conversation fascinating but baffling. I said, “I am not aware that I am doing what you say I am doing.” He shrugged and said, “Maybe that’s for the best.”

De Roux’s cryptic comments intrigued me. I understood that the mystery is intrinsically, well, mysterious—not in the sense of a mystery that is solved at the end of an Agatha Christie novel, but in the sense of something that is important but cannot be seen or grasped. Maybe, I thought, it was some sort of felt but invisible force, like gravity, that, if we could remove the obstacles, would pull us forward—like a mountain stream that, if we could remove the boulders that have tumbled in and are blocking and dispersing the water, would run freely downhill in a strong, coherent flow.

THE PRACTICE OF REMOVING OBSTACLES

De Roux’s observation enabled me to see my longtime work as a facilitator in a new light. Most facilitators, including me up to this point, talk about their work in terms of getting participants to do things. But now I realized that in fact most of the people I work with want to or think they need to collaborate, in spite of or because of their differences. And when they succeed in doing so, they are overjoyed. The essence of what I am now calling transformative facilitation is therefore not getting participants to work together but helping them remove the obstacles to doing so. You can’t push a stream to flow, but if you remove the blockages, it will flow by itself. This realization transformed my understanding of facilitation.

What I found particularly intriguing in de Roux’s observation was not his esoteric reference to the mystery but his pragmatic focus on removing obstacles to its expression. After dinner, I went back to my room and made a list of all of the actions our facilitation team had taken over the months leading up to this first workshop (our facilitation work had started as soon as we had begun the project and engaged the participants ten months earlier) and during that first day that I could now interpret as aimed at removing obstacles to these leaders collaborating to transform the region.

The approach we took in Colombia unblocked the three essential ingredients to moving forward together: contribution, connection, and equity.

Removing Obstacles to Contribution

Our facilitation team helped remove obstacles to contribution through creating opportunities for the participants to bring their diverse ideas, skills, and resources to bear on their collective task. One of the larger objectives of the project, beyond the workshops, was for the participants to support one another to act with greater effectiveness in their respective spheres of influence to create better futures.

All collaborations require contribution. The reason people collaborate is to harness the diverse contributions of diverse participants to achieve a common purpose. Most people want to contribute, but often there are institutional, political, economic, cultural, psychological, or physical structures that hinder or prevent them from doing so. The consequences of these obstacles are disempowerment and stifled creativity, energy, and growth. Transformative facilitation focuses on creating change in these domains—within the working space of the group, and possibly also beyond the group—that dismantles these structures, empowers participants, and thereby enables their contributions.

Removing Obstacles to Connection

In Colombia we removed obstacles to connection through creating opportunities within the project for the participants to get to know one another as persons and to work together as peers. This helped everyone see more of the whole regional system they were working with, including how it was being exemplified in the interactions within the group itself. One of the larger objectives of the project was to remove obstacles to connection among people throughout the region in order to stitch together the torn social fabric.

All collaborations require connection. Harnessing diversity requires inclusion and belonging. People’s contributions can’t be effective if people are not connected to one another, to the situation they are trying to address, and to their own thinking, feeling, and will. Most people want to connect, but there are structures that separate or exclude them. The consequences of these obstacles are estrangement and weakened communication, linkages, and relationships. Transformative facilitation focuses on dismantling these structures and thereby enabling connection.

Removing Obstacles to Equity

Finally, in Colombia we removed obstacles to equity through creating an egalitarian and respectful culture within the project: sitting in a circle without anyone having a superior position; giving everyone an equal opportunity to contribute in plenary and small-group sessions within workshops, and in activities between workshops; and making project decisions transparently and democratically. One of the larger objectives of the project was to create more equitable contribution and connection in the region. In this regard, the project provided a visible and influential example of a radically unconventional way of being and working together. Whereas in English we use the word coexistence to refer to such a peaceful situation, in Spanish they say covivencia, which has a more dynamic connotation of living together, as a couple does, with all of the attendant possibilities and tensions.

All collaborations require equity. Contribution and connection will be constrained if they are not equitable. Many people want contribution and connection to be inclusive and fair, but there are structures that give certain people more freedom, privilege, and power than others. As a consequence, some people have fewer opportunities to contribute and connect than others, and this impedes collaboration. Transformative facilitation focuses on dismantling these structures and thereby enabling equity.

A GENERAL THEORY AND PRACTICE OF TRANSFORMATIVE FACILITATION

Transformative facilitation is a powerful approach to helping people collaborate to create change. I have told the story of facilitating the extraordinary process in Colombia because it illustrates this approach in bright colors. I have also told it because this is where I started to understand the essence of transformative facilitation: removing obstacles to contribution, connection, and equity.

In Colombia, my colleagues and I used this approach to help a group of leaders from across a region work together to address the challenges of that region. But transformative facilitation is powerful in many settings. At Reos we have used this approach to help all kinds of groups work together on all kinds of challenges all over the world: retail company managers in Mexico making a plan to enter new markets, university administrators in the US redesigning their emergency financial aid system, First Nations leaders in Canada finding new strategies for improving population health, community members in the Netherlands implementing low-carbon energy systems, businesspeople in Thailand creating systems to reduce corruption, and food companies, farmers, and nongovernmental organizations around the world creating more sustainable food supply chains.

Transformative facilitation is a widely applicable approach to helping people collaborate to create change.

WHERE TO USE TRANSFORMATIVE FACILITATION

Transformative facilitation can help people collaborate in many contexts:

• From across different backgrounds and different positions in different organizations, and so bringing different perspectives on, interests in, concerns about, and aspirations for the situation they are facing

• In small or large groups, teams, departments, committees, and task forces

• In all kinds of organizations, including companies, government agencies, educational and health care institutions, foundations, nonprofit organizations, and neighborhood and community associations, and in cross-organizational and multi-stakeholder alliances

• To deal with all kinds of challenges—internal organizational, management, and cultural in addition to external business, economic, political, social, and environmental ones

• At all scales—local, regional, national, and international

WHAT TRANSFORMATIVE FACILITATION IS AND IS NOT

Transformative facilitation is an unconventional approach to helping a group collaborate. It involves working through the purpose and objectives of the collaboration, who will participate in what roles, what process they will use, and what resources they will require, and reviewing and revising all these elements as the work unfolds.

Transformative facilitation is not

• Just the activity of standing at the front of a conference room or in the central window of a video conference. It includes all the activities involved in helping people move forward together, before, during, and in between meetings.

• A process that has a fixed duration. It can last for a few hours or a few years.

• A recipe. It is a way of working with groups and of discovering, one step at a time, what needs to be done.

• A specific methodology. It is an approach that can be used with any collaborative change methodology.

• A way of getting or pushing a group to advance. It is a way to remove the obstacles to their advancing on their own.

• An approach that I invented. It is an approach that many excellent facilitators use, in part and implicitly, which in this book I map in full and explicitly.

WHO CAN FACILITATE TRANSFORMATIVE FACILITATION

To emphasize the basics: transformative facilitation is facilitated by a facilitator. The role of a facilitator—or, more usually, a team of several facilitators dividing different parts of this role among them—is to strategize, organize, design, direct, coordinate, document, coach, and otherwise support the work of the group of people who are collaborating.

In general, a facilitator supports the group through focusing on and taking responsibility for the process the group is using, so that the group itself can focus on and take responsibility for the content of the work. The key point is that the group decides what they want to do and the facilitator supports them to do this. But this division of responsibilities is not always clear-cut: often the group needs to weigh in on the process, and sometimes the facilitator is involved and so has a relevant perspective on the content.

The role of the facilitator can be played by anyone who is willing and able, from time to time or on an ongoing basis, to help people collaborate to create change. A facilitator can be

• A professional or an amateur

• Someone who is given this role or who takes it

• A leader, manager, staff member, volunteer, organizer, chairperson, consultant, coach, mediator, or friend

• Someone who has a stake in the work at hand or is impartial

• A member of the group that is collaborating or someone from outside

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

Transformative facilitation is a particular approach to helping people collaborate. I have written this book to provide guidance for everyone involved in such efforts: facilitators, the collaborators they are facilitating, people who initiate or sponsor such collaborations, and facilitation students and teachers. Everyone who is involved in a collaboration will benefit from understanding the theory and practice of transformative facilitation.

This book builds on and goes beyond my previous ones. Solving Tough Problems and Collaborating with the Enemy explained how diverse groups, even ones that don’t agree with or like or trust each other, can work together to address their most important challenges. This new book explains what facilitators need to do to support such groups: it is focused on the work of the facilitators rather than of the groups.

Transformative Scenario Planning explained one methodology for collaborating to shape the future. This book explains an unconventional and powerful foundational approach that facilitators can employ to help groups using any collaborative methodology, including not only transformative scenario planning but also, for example, appreciative inquiry, emergent strategy, Future Search, Open Space Technology, social laboratories, and Theory U.¹

Power and Love explained how people who want to effect change need to employ not only power, the drive to self-realization, but also love, the drive to reunification. This book fills in a missing piece of this puzzle: it explains the need also to employ justice, the structure that enables power and love. Power, love, and justice are the fundamental drives that manifest as contribution, connection, and equity; facilitation that does not employ all three drives cannot enable transformation. This is the red thread that runs through this whole book, from its introduction in the Colombia story through to its full elaboration in the conclusion.

This book does not provide specific agendas, exercises, or checklists; many excellent texts already do this.² Instead it explains, through specific stories and the general principles derived from these, the five elements of the transformative approach to facilitation and the five pairs of outer moves and five inner shifts required of facilitators to be able to enact this approach. The stories I tell are of my own firsthand experiences of facilitating and the lessons I have learned from them. I have written about some of these experiences before in my books on other subjects; my focus here, however, is not on telling new stories but on eliciting new lessons.

The stories in this book are not presented in chronological order because the challenges of transformative facilitation do not arise linearly: they arise repeatedly and must be answered iteratively. Many of the stories (like the one from Colombia) are of experiences I had while I was facilitating a group for the first time, because these challenges all arise in all collaborations right from the outset and are often clearest when they first appear. My own learning has also not been linear; these challenges are not straightforward to work with, and I’ve had to learn many of the same lessons multiple times.

Part 1 of this book explains why transformative facilitation is necessary and powerful. Part 2 explains how to put this approach into practice. The conclusion explains the larger contribution that transformative facilitation can make to creating a better world.