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2.11. FACILITATORS

The facilitators are one of the sources of the loose but strong guidance that keeps the session barreling along toward its goal instead of flying apart or bounding off somewhere else. However, the facilitators are not leaders — at least not explicitly. They try to guide subtly enough for the participants to feel that there is no particular leader, that the group as a whole is leading. The most difficult part of the facilitator’s job is to simultaneously provide that strong guidance and goad the team toward chaos. The facilitators must keep the session at the highly productive but delicate balance between unproductive chaos and unproductive rigidity.

As guides, the facilitators prompt the participants through the explicit steps in the methodology by demonstrating, by diving in to start each activity themselves, and sometimes by showing a few overhead transparencies. The facilitators act most forcefully when reining the errant group back into the scope of the session and when confronting the group with their limited time. (One of Tom’s favorite methods is to lean over the table while staring at his watch and muttering “tick, tick, tick,....”) Even at their most forceful, the facilitators avoid explicitly leading the group. Instead they act as the group’s conscience, forcing the group to acknowledge the hard reality of the need to go through all of the methodology’s steps, and the hard reality of the group’s previously and publicly documented goal-and-scope definitions and time allocations. In each incident of reining in, the facilitators first force the group to acknowledge their previous consensus about goal and scope and time, then to acknowledge that they are at this moment pursuing a different goal, or are out of scope, or are almost out of time. Then the facilitators force the group to either get back on track or to change its consensus definition of goal, scope, or available time (e.g., extend the session by a day). In any case, it is the group that must decide what to do. The group should view the facilitators as fancy alarm clocks that are indispensable, but which are unavoidably annoying on occasion.

For the group to trust and value the facilitators in that way, the group must see the facilitators as impartial. “Impartial” means not just toward the project itself, but also toward the project’s politics and the session’s participants. Such impartiality is most thoroughly attained by having the facilitator be ignorant of the project and its stakeholders. Ignorance is also helpful for preventing the facilitators from getting sucked into the session — listening, seeing, thinking, and then behaving like a participant. Without knowledge of the project’s domain, the facilitators can do little more than what they are supposed to do — float right at the surface of the session, using as cues their observations of the social interactions, facial expressions, long silences, too-long discussions, repeated conversations, and other subtleties. But facilitating without knowledge of the users’ domain is difficult because those general social and other cues are the only hints available.

As goads, the facilitators constantly recommend that the participants take their best guesses at decisions and move along, instead of discussing anything for very long. When the team slows after making reasonable progress in a step, the usual facilitator response is to prod the team to go to the next step. If the team seems to have invested too much ego in an idea that no one really likes, the facilitators encourage the team to crumple up that piece of paper and throw it on the floor. It can always be picked up and straightened out if the team decides it really likes the idea after all.

Another, more neutral, role of the facilitators is lubricant for the session. Facilitators help transcribe statements onto the low-tech materials. Facilitators get the participants to switch seats around the table periodically to prevent stagnation of the social relations, to equalize power relations around the table, to break up side conversations, and to give people a different view of the ideas on the table. When participants mutter something, the facilitators hand them pens as a subtle suggestion to write their comments on the public materials.

Many of the facilitators’ goals and activities are subtle. Their role most apparent to the participants is facilitating the team’s execution of the explicit steps that complement the pervasive techniques and orientations we have described so far.


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