The Global Flipchart is IAF's quarterly magazine about the power of facilitation – made by members, for members. Contact the editorial team by email: globalflipchart@iaf-world.org

Global Flipchart #12

June 2018

Facilitation: A skill for the next century

By Héctor A. Villarreal Lozoya

“Collaboration and facilitation are the only way humans as a species will be able to arrive to the 22nd century”.

Ever since hearing these words from Gary Rush at the IAF Halifax Conference, a question has lingered in my mind: is facilitation a skill everybody should develop? And if it is, what is the future of facilitators and facilitation as a profession?

To answer those questions, let’s first take a look at where we’re heading as a global society, according to the predictions of analysts and futurists.

In the next 25-50 years:

Changes in geopolitics, centers of economic and political power shift, conflicts will continue to arise until a new stable balance comes to be. The global institutions of the 20th Century are no longer fit for purpose, so a transformation is expected.
Increase in demand for food, resources and living space will generate conflict (by 2050 there will be 10 billion people on the planet)
Cities will continue to grow with many more megalopolis spreading. New social structures will emerge. Methods of public participation and decision making will be implemented using technology.
Agnosticism and religious fundamentalism may continue to increase the tension between secular and religious agendas.
Breakthroughs in technology and science will continue to change the business landscape, with a heavy impact in the energy, robotics and artificial intelligence arenas. Biological studies at the nanoscale and genomic level will provide tremendous breakthroughs.
Gamification as a means to solve real life problems will become everyday life. Holographic communication becomes mainstream, hyper-connectivity is everywhere.
Neuroscience will teach us how to learn better, faster and in a more enjoyable way, tailored to the individual.
The human being will have set foot on Mars, establishing the first interplanetary colony.
Singularity could be achieved (when a computer will develop superhuman intelligence and the capability of improving itself).
Significant demographic shifts and migration will transform the composition of entire countries.
Participation and hierarchical changes and structures inside of business and non-for-profit organisations will increase.

Some of these statements define situations that are challenges in themselves, others state achievements that will be the result of people coming together. We can easily see that collaboration as a competence will be critical for many, if not all, of those accomplishments; the time of a single genius creating a miracle is in the past.

So, will facilitation and facilitators be needed for all of this? To answer this, we also need to explore where we are now…

Education

Currently the skill set of most graduates still focuses on the technical development of the individual - a result of decades of education policy established 30+ years ago. But we are seeing changes in certain areas - some universities are even making “teamwork”, “collaboration”, “innovation” and “creativity” daily buzzwords. Agile and design thinking are trends in many universities, learning centers and enterprise hubs around the world. The world is moving in the right direction then, but for it to spread across to the whole society, will take probably a couple of generations. Training millions of teachers around the world into how to teach for teamwork instead of individual problem solving and memorisation is not an easy feat.

Industry

In the industry, we are also seeing changes. Teamwork is not a new concept. Since the development of quality circles in the 80s, Deming’s total quality school started to transform how we relate to each other by promoting the idea of changing the hierarchical ways of enterprises and sharing the responsibility and power with all members of a team.

Helping people work together has become an important skill set for managers. In the words of Andy Smith: “In the future, managers are less likely to know all the details about the specific areas of expertise of their team members, instead, the value they will add will be increasingly to help these people find solutions and new approaches. On a one-to-one basis this has a considerable cross-over with coaching. But with groups, whether small or large, facilitation is becoming one of the most imperative skill sets of all."

Facilitative leadership, anyone? It’s easy to see where facilitators can mentor these leaders in developing this new skill set. Cooperation generates a sense of belonging, so we can also see facilitation supporting people to feel that they belong to a group that creates something bigger than themselves.

A trend identified in 2011 by Sandy Schuman is the growing role of in-house facilitators. They might be called HR specialists, programme or project managers or organisational development experts. Their main role is helping people come together, discuss issues and agree on the path going forward, isn’t that facilitation?

Several authors are now even proposing new ways of interaction such as self-directed teams and holacracy, where teams as a whole make decisions in a very structured way. Is it self-facilitation?

Inter-sector collaboration

As we can see in the “future society list” another area of opportunity for facilitators is the increased interaction between businesses and civil society. Where they coincide is known as “shared value” which definitely generates opportunities for facilitators who can build bridges between these sectors.

Institutions

A particular challenge seen by futurists and analysts is the collapse of trust in institutions. Governments and banks have been particularly affected. Trust is the new currency, and facilitators base plenty of their work in it. It’s critical that participants trust the process and the facilitator as an impartial actor. Facilitators are situated in the crossroads where people can allow themselves to trust what is happening in the group.

Party politics will give way to a new means of communication between government and its citizens. Connectivity will allow citizens to experiment in new and different forms of public consultations. We can see even now where new parties are using facilitation to engage citizens in conversations. Indeed conversations will generate a new type of representation. New concepts of social interaction such as liquid democracy will arise. Facilitators can support these conversations.

Be ready for these opportunities

Facilitators will need to prepare themselves for these changes by learning a variety of large-group engagement processes like Open Space, World Café, and Future Search. We can also learn to integrate technology in our processes to make them more efficient. Although these engagements may involve many of the same skills that are used for small group facilitation, a very different approach is needed for its planning and preparation.

Facilitation has a pivotal role in tackling the challenges and supporting the advancements of the future.

As I often say, if a group already has the skills to listen and communicate with each other, to identify issues, challenge themselves, point out the strategic direction they want to go and come to a consensus without external support, then I have to look somewhere else to work. In the meantime, as I recall the list of challenges above, there is plenty of work to be done.