Facilitation Information

A facilitator is someone who uses knowledge of group processes to formulate and deliver the needed structure for meeting interactions to be effective. The facilitator focuses on effective processes (meeting dynamics), allowing the participants to focus on the content or the substance of their work together. 

Other roles exist for meeting participants besides facilitation. These include scribing, recording, timekeeping and leading discussions. The facilitator’s role is unique, although no more or less important, since their primary focus is on the meeting processes. Facilitation can involve many different levels of knowledge and skill, can include work on all kinds of problems and challenges, can assist the group in fulfilling its desire, or can include pushing participants to new levels of understanding. Most importantly, however, facilitation includes both an ability to recognize when effective meeting processes are needed and an ability to provide those processes. 

In its loosest definition, a facilitator is any person who jumps up during a meeting and starts writing key points on a chalkboard as they are being discussed. Or someone who puts up a hand and suggests that the participants focus on a single problem. Or even a participant who suggests that they find out a little about each other, or agree on how they're going to make decisions. These actions that define facilitators are based on an intuitive sense that something in the meeting could be more effective. 

Though this intuition is fundamentally important to good facilitation, it must be emphasized that intuition alone does not replace an understanding of the skills and techniques that are the foundation for the profession.  Sometimes your best bet is to engage a professional facilitator who can help your group make real progress and achieve high-quality outcomes. 

Adapted from: http://www.iaf-world.org/files/public/FacilitatorMnl.pdf