Nadia very recently challenged me to blog about the ‘bubble bath’.
🤔 What am I talking about?
I was sharing with her my eternal appreciation and gratitude for the fact that I work in the domain of collaboration and facilitation, for a variety of reasons (it’s a lifeskill, it’s exciting, it creates magic at many levels), including the many interactions with other people who facilitate. I find people who facilitate extremely interesting and fun to engage with because they’re authentic, empathetic, they know how not to get stuck in an unproductive conversation. So every conversation involving facilitators is potentially a treat. Upon saying that, Nadia nodded in agreement and mentioned that sometimes she felt like ‘but don’t you think sometimes that we are a bit in our bubble bath’?, like our comfortable little pond, quite disconnected from the reality.
It’s true that it is a bubble bath of sorts, and that’s the reason why personally I want to invite everyone to join this bubble bath and enjoy all of that good, fun, productive, healthy set of conversations.
This bubble bath is a good opportunity to reflect on another conversation that I had with another friend, Bonnie Koenig. Bonnie asked me what I see as trends in the world of facilitation. We had a lovely and super stimulating conversation about it, so I thought I could share my perspective here on the trends that have been rising to the surface of the facilitators’ bubble bath…
Tell me what you see and what you don’t recognise in what I’m offering here…
This blog post may happen to be an excellent introduction to the upcoming Session Lab‘s ‘state of facilitation’ survey 2024 (which is now open, go answer it!).
One prefacing comment: this is based on my subjective assessment, I’m not backing it up with data, and please point me in the direction of useful data supporting or refuting any of my claims below…
Facilitation is becoming ever more present
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit us full frontal in 2020 and most activities moved online, we found out that bad online meetings were insufferable… So all of a sudden we had to understand how we can collaborate online. Many people and organisations then picked up the cue that they needed to invest in collaboration expertise and in group facilitation. Great development!
If you ask me, there’s still way too few organisations that have picked up on that trend. Why is it that in 2023 so many external facilitators are still in such high demand (don’t get me wrong, at a personal freelancing consultancy level I’m not complaining about this at all 🤣)? It beats me that we haven’t made facilitation skills non-negotiable learning for most knowledge workers. But in any case there’s many more folks that have developed these skills.
Add to that another trend introduced indirectly by the pandemic: the ‘great resignation‘. Many people got to share their working time between home and the office and found that adjusting their work-life balance was perhaps not such a bad idea. Or they started questioning the real value (as in ‘soul nourishing’ value) of their jobs and leaving positions devoid of meaning to them. Among them, quite a few people started a facilitative turn of their career.
And BOOOM: Many more facilitators are now on the market. And with the long tail of the big resignation and the perks of working at home and for yourself, I don’t see this trend going backwards any time soon.
More diverse facilitation is coming to the surface, with its pros and cons
As more people are getting into facilitation, more diverse ‘shades of facilitation’ are showing up – almost mathematically.
Add to this that newer generations (millennials and Gen Z) are getting into facilitation, and they hold different values than previous generations, which show up in their facilitation style.
A few traits that I observed in newer approaches to facilitation:
- A keener eye for diversity and inclusion: I sense that newer generations are much more intentional about diversity and inclusion, about making sure that even traditionally overlooked voices are heard. The “Black lives matter” and “Me Too” political / social / cultural movements have strongly contributed to this cultural shift. Facilitators (and the groups they are serving) are finally paying more attention to issues of accessibility, equity and other important values to ensure everyone is doing their best thinking.
- A decreasing attention span. This is not restricted to newer generations only, it’s affecting us all. With social media notifications and its dopamine effects, we are more and more thirsty for quick fixes and attracted by ‘newness’. This means our attention span is decreasing and our presence and attention is solicited by ever more calls for attention. In the workshop place, this translates into an increasing pace in activities, to the detriment of slower participation formats.
- Also some slower facilitation and conversations: Perhaps as a counter movement to the previous trait, I also sense a growing community of people who are attracted by ‘slower’ formats, where we can finally pay close attention to what is happening, let people express themselves fully, share their emotions (both good and bad, intense and light-touch), see things that would escape our attention otherwise. The blossoming of ‘unhurried conversations‘, ‘Time to think‘, formats using talking objects like a Users experience fishbowl (or even 3 minutes ago I heard about the Butter platform’s feature of ‘speaker time’ that allows to see how much someone is hogging space, which nudges us to share the air time) are all testimonies to this.
- Inviting much more playfulness and fun in our conversations. As it becomes increasingly ok (though still not widespread enough) to bring our ‘whole person’ into the workplace, informality is challenged by our full personalities. Fun is increasingly acceptable, playfulness is sought, gamification is cultivated. LEGO serious play is surfing on this trend and there are countless formats inviting play in our ‘serious’ conversations, recognising that we tend to learn a lot faster through play, just like kids do.
- Desacralising the facilitator and putting more onus on teams and groups to self steer, ‘self facilitate’ and ‘self manage’ themselves. This is definitely a premise of a repertoire like Liberating Structures but it’s far from being the only one. As facilitation is becoming more commonplace and more people are cultivating their facilitative skills, it also becomes easier to rely less on an external facilitator or even an internal one, and have the group adopt ‘process mindfulness’ (to use the language of the neat helping heuristics). There are even some people I know who are irked by what they describe as ‘heavy facilitation’ (e.g. explaining what we will do, recapping etc. and thus having a very visible facilitator who holds the space). I do think it’s a very encouraging trend to see groups take their destiny into their hands, and yet I also see that there is value in having a facilitator really holding the space in certain areas at certain times. Which relates to my next point…
This more diverse facilitation animal does beg this wicked question:
“How is it that facilitation should renew itself and invite ever more creativity and different approaches and at the same time, it should ensure that it doesn’t lose its grounding basis of purposeful process design, presencing, active listening and all the rest of the ‘old school’ (with which I identify to a large extent too)?”
So how do we guarantee that new, promising, trends don’t condemn existing good practices? This question becomes all the more important at the dawn of important technological changes…
Facilitation is waking up to AI
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is only in its prehistoric phase, and yet it’s already made an incredible dent into nearly every area of our societies and nearly every domain of work.
Facilitation is no exception here.
Quite frankly, I don’t see AI as very advanced here, and I don’t think it will ever fully replace the work that a human facilitator does, but there’s no disputing that it brings up novel opportunities and challenges.
Myriam Hadness recently interviewed Chat GPT on her wonderful podcast ‘Workshops work‘ and it showed that it’s still early times: if it wasn’t for Myriam’s amazing ability to riff off of whatever her guests are saying, the interview would have died quickly. Myriam did a wonderful job of it, though she still mentioned that it was rather exhausting to conduct that interview.
Nonetheless, from AI-generated process design to having AI monitor the chat in an online event, to generating summaries of conversations, and in the not-too-distant future inviting an AI agent to lightly co-facilitate, the possibilities are huge.
As you can infer from this paragraph, I don’t consider myself an authority on this topic, but I’ll educate myself to find out how it develops. It has a direct bearing on the next trend…
Hybrid facilitation is on the rise… and is only in its prehistory
As the pandemic started to enter a more ‘relaxed’ phase, where people could go back to their brick-and-mortar offices, and meet ‘on-site’, hybrid meetings started to be hailed as the next major trend in the world of collaboration, meetings, facilitation.
I truly haven’t really seen amazing hybrid meetings happen… yet.
Perhaps technological options are still very limited; perhaps (my main guess) we’re just not putting the right level of attention and resources into hybrid meetings but simply, lazily, letting online folks join an on-site conversation just because it’s ‘technologically feasible’ and these online folks are suffering too much from their FOMO (fear of missing out). As a result the vast majority of hybrid meetings I’ve heard about tend to rather be ‘low breeds’ than ‘hybrids’ 😉
But around the corner, as technology advances, we may be able to have our holographic avatars present and engaged in the room, have technology-enhanced props to connect on various dimensions (think of virtual reality headsets enhanced with ‘process options’ to talk, engage, chat, react etc.) and hybrids are not going to stay in their demon boxes for too long.
I do hope that this will be an opportunity for us to still think purposefully about when it makes sense to have a hybrid, an on-site or a pure on-line meeting. But the future promises us a lot of ground-breaking changes in the way groups of people are coming together, sharing knowledge and making decisions or even implementing action plans together…
Facilitation revolves entirely around humans, and as such it’s quite unpredictable…
These are the top-level trends that I notice in the world of facilitation and collaboration. And yet facilitation has everything to do with human groups so nearly ‘by definition’ it is likely to be unpredictable and reveal its coherence only retrospectively.
Which is great! We don’t want to let trends take away our agency. Let’s put our brains together to imagine what is likely to happen in the near and more distant future, so we can make the most of opportunities to unlock even more and even deeper ‘conversations (and actions) that make a real change’.
What are other trends do you see?
What am I not seeing?
What is being made possible as we speak?
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