Schuman S. - The IAF Handbook of Group Facilitation (2005)(en)

(IAF), believe that our profession gives us a unique opportunity to make a positive contribution to individuals, organizations, and society. Our effectiveness is based on our personal integrity and the trust developed between ourselves and those with whom we work. Therefore, we recognise the importance of defining and making known the values and ethical principles that guide our actions. This Statement of Values and Code of Ethics recognizes the complexity of our roles, including the full spectrum of personal, professional and cultural diversity in the IAF membership and in the field of facilitation. Members of the International Association of Facilitators are committed to using these values and ethics to guide their professional practice. These principles are expressed in broad statements to guide ethical practice; they provide a framework and are not intended to dictate conduct for particular situations. Questions or advice about the application of these values and ethics may be addressed to the International Association of Facilitators.

Statement of Values

As group facilitators, we believe in the inherent value of the individual and the collective wisdom of the group. We strive to help the group make the best use of the contributions of each of its members. We set aside our personal opinions and support the group’s right to make its own choices. We believe that collaborative and cooperative interaction builds consensus and produces meaningful outcomes. We value professional collaboration to improve our profession.

Code of Ethics

1. Client Service

We are in service to our clients, using our group facilitation competencies to add value to their work.

Our clients include the groups we facilitate and those who contract with us on their behalf. We work closely with our clients to understand their expectations so that we provide the appropriate service, and that the group produces the desired outcomes. It is our responsibility to ensure that we are competent to handle the intervention. If the group decides it needs to go in a direction other than that originally intended by either the group or its representatives, our role is to help the group move forward, reconciling the original intent with the emergent direction.

2. Conflict of Interest

We openly acknowledge any potential conflict of interest.

Prior to agreeing to work with our clients, we discuss openly and honestly any possible conflict of interest, personal bias, prior knowledge of the organisation or any other matter which may be perceived as preventing us from working effectively with the interests of all group members. We do this so that, together, we may make an informed decision about proceeding and to prevent misunderstanding that could detract from the success or credibility of the clients or ourselves. We refrain from using our position to secure unfair or inappropriate privilege, gain, or benefit.

3. Group Autonomy

We respect the culture, rights, and autonomy of the group.

We seek the group’s conscious agreement to the process and their commitment to participate. We do not impose anything that risks the welfare and dignity of the participants, the freedom of choice of the group, or the credibility of its work.

4. Processes, Methods, and Tools

We use processes, methods, and tools responsibly.

In dialogue with the group or its representatives we design processes that will achieve the group’s goals, and select and adapt the most appropriate methods and tools. We avoid using processes, methods or tools with which we are insufficiently skilled, or which are poorly matched to the needs of the group.

5. Respect, Safety, Equity, and Trust

We strive to engender an environment of respect and safety where all participants trust that they can speak freely and where individual boundaries are honoured. We use our skills, knowledge, tools, and wisdom to elicit and honour the perspectives of all.

We seek to have all relevant stakeholders represented and involved. We promote equitable relationships among the participants and facilitator and ensure that all participants have an opportunity to examine and share their thoughts and feelings. We use a variety of methods to enable the group to access the natural gifts, talents and life experiences of each member. We work in ways that honour the wholeness and self-expression of others, designing sessions that respect different styles of interaction. We understand that any action we take is an intervention that may affect the process.

6. Stewardship of Process

We practice stewardship of process and impartiality toward content.

While participants bring knowledge and expertise concerning the substance of their situation, we bring knowledge and expertise concerning the group interaction process. We are vigilant to minimize our influence on group outcomes. When we have content knowledge not otherwise available to the group, and that the group must have to be effective, we offer it after explaining our change in role.

7. Confidentiality

We maintain confidentiality of information.

We observe confidentiality of all client information. Therefore, we do not share information about a client within or outside of the client’s organisation, nor do we report on group content, or the individual opinions or behaviour of members of the group without consent.

8. Professional Development

We are responsible for continuous improvement of our facilitation skills and knowledge.

We continuously learn and grow. We seek opportunities to improve our knowledge and facilitation skills to better assist groups in their work. We remain current in the field of facilitation through our practical group experiences and ongoing personal development. We offer our skills within a spirit of collaboration to develop our professional work practices.

with the organization, and of people with themselves. Facilitation is about helping a group to become the best it can be in carrying out its task.

One underlying assumption that deserves special emphasis, because it sets apart facilitation from other such roles as training, consulting, or managing, is this: everyone has something valuable to contribute, and the primary source of contribution is the group. While other professions may assume that their clients are defective in some way and so need the help of experts, facilitators take a different tack: facilitators assume everyone has a valuable contribution to make, and the best results are achieved when those contributions form the basis of the group consensus.

This assumption, when embodied through appropriate methods, creates vitality and enthusiasm in a group. I watched this happen recently. The session had a number of presentations on various learning methods. They were interesting, clever, and interactive. One presentation demonstrated an immersion method of teaching a foreign language. The group, fascinated to see a skilled trainer “teach” Italian to a group of volunteers in fifteen minutes, asked numerous questions about his techniques. Next on the agenda was a facilitated session in which the group was invited to create a model of trends in training from their own insights and experience. The group’s energy level changed markedly. Before, there was interest; now there was involvement. Before, it was interactive; now it was participatory. Before there was one expert; now there were fifty. The interest was evident and the contributions substantial.

People usually come to sessions with the mind-set of a recipient, intent on getting something out of it, whether that be an insight, a skill, a plan, an idea, or even a laugh. This is a default mechanism brought on by years of schooling and training sessions, which teach us to be recipients of a master’s wisdom. We evaluate sessions for their take-away value.

Facilitated sessions emphasize a different mode—a contributor mind-set. One of our basic jobs as a facilitator is to help people move into a position in which their insights and experiences create something that did not exist before. We move them from recipient to contributor, a major shift in mind-set that releases immense vitality. Regarding individuals as having something valuable to contribute honors them and generates an energy and commitment that so often is lacking when plans are developed through a different approach.

This assumption does not mean that we necessarily assume expertise among people in our groups. In some situations, that is obviously not the case. Training

and consulting are valuable professions. However, in facilitation, our job is not primarily to train but to elicit insights and ask questions that may help group consensus to emerge. We make efforts before the session to ensure that appropriate persons are present and then assume that people have insights and experience that are relevant to the topic at hand. We craft our questions carefully to draw out that wisdom. That approach tends to make group members owners of the results.

There are several additional assumptions that we should examine. They fall into three broad arenas: what facilitators know, what facilitators do, and what facilitators are.

WHAT FACILITATORS KNOW

Facilitators understand some things about life that undergird our sometimes fanatical concern for details that others might regard as unimportant.

Facilitators Know That People Are Moved by Hopes and Dreams

Most of us deny that people are moved by hopes and dreams. We have been so disillusioned and disappointed that no one beyond the age of eight takes Santa seriously. It is not that facilitators are naive. Indeed, most facilitators could give a hardened cynic a case of depression with their lucidity about what is really possible and likely. But facilitators understand that people live in the tension between the desired future and the present condition. Attempting to reduce that tension by negating the future is a common but dehumanizing practice. Even in the midst of knowing what you know, you still dream. People are driven to hope even in hopelessness, and that hope is a driving force in human affairs.

The facilitator dares to draw on vision to elicit unspoken hopes and dreams for the future. He restores tension to life. In helping a group create a vision, she works in an arena that is beyond the simply rational. He works with spirit. And spirit has to do with genuine desires and passion that operate below the conscious level. Vision is not what you do; it is what you dream. We are moved by our dreams.

One job of facilitators is to discern ways of smoking out the real hopes and dreams of participants, to help them get beyond caution and acknowledge their desires, even when it means heightening the tension between vision and reality. Facilitation is not stress relief. It does not mean making people feel good. It means making them own up to the energizing reality of life. Common visions can

overcome a wealth of diversity. A group with similar desires for the future is a powerful force for getting things done.

Facilitators Know That Problems Do Not Exist

Obstacles are opportunities through which to realize the future. Calling something a problem puts a negative cast on it and fosters a desire to negate or avoid it. This can seriously limit alternatives for dealing with the situation.

Negative perspectives that close off alternatives often thwart potential resolutions. Full potential is realized only when one perceives that all that is is good. This is a perspective on reality, not a moral judgment; it allows looking deeply and seriously at reality without being threatened by blocks. (For a full discussion of this posture that goes back to St Augustine, see Niebuhr, 1960.) In fact, obstacles, irritations, issues, barriers, frustrations, and constraints are part of life at every point. They are not problems to solve as if it were possible to get away from them; they are opportunities to seize in creating a desirable future.

Facilitators help people get beyond fault finding, excuse making, and blame seeking to the underlying factors we sometimes call contradictions. Sometimes you have to be hard on people both to identify the real contradictions and to regard them in a positive light.

Facilitators Know That People Find Their Fulfillment in Taking Responsibility, Not in Avoiding It

Authentic humanness is not realized only after working hours. The after-hours time is a time for replenishing the energy and perspective required by one’s work. One’s work, the expenditure of energy, is a place where life can find meaning and fulfillment. Structures, attitudes, and habits that deny this fact of life are major enemies of facilitators.

The hierarchical form of organization, along with top-down decision making, has been an effective form of evading responsibility for all levels in an organization. At the top, people declare they cannot know everything that is going on; at the bottom, people declare that they cannot do anything without permission. For both levels and everywhere in between, the structure provides space to hide from responsibility and authenticity. Being fully human certainly includes a level of responsibility. This may be one reason that people in hierarchies are so intransigent: everyone finds them a comfortable dodge. But the idea that one can avoid

responsibility in an organization was exposed as an illusion at the Nuremberg trials. Soldiers are responsible even when they are carrying out orders.

By implication, just following orders does not mitigate responsibility for one’s work. Facilitators know that, and they also know that whatever role one plays in however authoritarian an organization, one still has responsibility. Moreover, living out that responsibility is energizing. Facilitators have no hesitation in inviting people to take responsibility for implementing their decisions. Surprisingly, they are often delighted to take on major responsibilities. It is invigorating.

Facilitators Know That Teams Are Tension Filled

The joy and comfort one finds in real teamwork is not serene; it comes in the midst of active struggle with colleagues in a similar cause. The idea that teams must get along well and have good interpersonal relations is an ideal that often does not correspond with reality.

The teamwork that facilitators advocate and generate is not based on mutual affection so much as on mutual commitment to a common task. Startling amounts of diversity of age, sex, culture, ability, and interest can be held within that commitment. And this diversity is tension filled. But it is mitigated by the common concern to get a job done to which each participant contributes. When the tensions are recognized and appreciated, they tend to produce creativity.

Getting a task done is the basis of teamwork. This includes the need for communication and a shared vision of what the task is about and what it is for. Facilitation concentrates on the task as the source of cohesion for the group.

WHAT FACILITATORS DO

The assumptions about what facilitators know give rise to particular actions that, though symbolic, are no less real. These actions have to do with taking exquisite care to be sure the group is honored. Life can be thought of as having the dimension of practicality and the dimension of significance (see the discussion of internal versus external history in Niebuhr, 1954). The practical dimension is enlivened by attention to details that point beyond themselves to significance. Attending to these details constitutes what I mean by symbolic activity, and it directly addresses this world of significance. It has four aspects: space, time, celebration, and role model.

Facilitators Take Care of the Space of Their Gatherings

The facilitator takes ultimate responsibility to clean and set up the space. She inspects the meeting room at least an hour ahead of time, usually rearranging the furniture to provide a venue that announces to the participants as they arrive, “Something significant is about to occur here.” Certain room arrangements are more conducive to participation than others, and the facilitator makes sure that the space enhances the process.

This may mean providing decor that highlights the focus of the gathering so that when minds wander, as they surely will, they wander to something related to the topic rather than to something unrelated. And it means straightening up the place during breaks so that on reentry, participants get the same message. It may mean filling the space with sound—music—during breaks to create a mood of relaxation in the midst of work. The facilitator is the profound janitor for the group. (See Chapter Five.)

Facilitators Attend to the Time of Meetings

Nothing dishonors people quite so much as waiting for one or two latecomers to arrive. If it is inevitable that some come late, then the facilitator either begins on time or has activities for the rest of the group as a special treat. Facilitators also attend to the ending time: it further dishonors people to be kept past the time they have agreed to give. If it is absolutely necessary to extend the session, facilitators get the permission of the group. If that permission is not forthcoming, then another time to complete the work is arranged. Starting and ending times set the limits for task completion. Facilitators take them quite seriously. (See Chapter Four.)

Rhythm is also important: the facilitator varies the pace of sessions so that repetition and routine are avoided and people remain attentive to the proceedings. A boring pace can kill a group’s participation. The facilitator avoids it. The facilitator senses the rhythm that is most enlivening at the particular time of day and paces the activities so as to capitalize on the beat of the group. For example, physical and high-energy activities may work best just after lunch or later in the day when people tend to be sleepy. Serious and thoughtful deliberations may be best early in the day when energy is still high. Facilitators need to be sensitive to the energy level of the group and pace the activities to take advantage of it. The facilitator is the profound metronome for the group.