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The Art of Facilitation

By Dale Hunter, PhD
Published by Random House New Zealand, 2007

This fully revised and updated edition of The Art of Facilitation has been written by IAF member Dale Hunter, with contributions from Stephen Thorpe, Hamish Brown, and Anne Bailey. It is a user-friendly book for aspiring and experienced facilitators, team leaders, managers, coaches, and others who are called on to facilitate groups and want a thorough understanding of the field of facilitation. It incorporates new models and research and is well referenced to other key texts in the field. Even in this updated version, it retains the freshness and clarity that have made the original book so relevant and loved.

The first three chapters of Part 1 are new and describe the development of group facilitation as a profession, the role of the facilitator, and provide a conceptual framework for facilitation. The following chapters in Part 1, addressing key elements of facilitation, have all been revised. Of Part 2, all but the first chapter is completely new. The six new chapters explore facilitation in organizations, facilitation and ethics, sustainability, therapeutic group work, and online facilitation using the medium of the Internet and computing technology. Chapter 7, Mapping the field of facilitation, covers some of the wide variety of approaches and methods that have now emerged in the field of facilitation.

Part 3 offers a training program that can be used by a group of aspiring facilitators as a peer learning framework. A variety of processes and some useful design frameworks add to this section. The chapter notes and bibliography provide a thorough list of references that many readers will find useful. The interviews that formed part of the original book have not been included in this new edition.

The first edition of The Art of Facilitation, published in 1994, was a leader in the field of facilitation writing, a consistently favored facilitation text, and a long term top-10 bestseller on Amazon in the categories of facilitation and facilitation of groups.