The F Word
How to Make Facilitation "Facile" Again for Executives
By Kevin J. Fleming, Ph.D.

fa·cil·i·ta·tion (f -sil’i-ta’sh n) n. The act of making easy or easier.

For many executives committed to promoting innovative thought leadership among their team members, wrapping a room of egos around the next challenging steps toward transforming an organization is anything but “easy.” Appeasing head nods, the flat-affect-smile, sighs, arms crossed, or even the classic stonewall, can all become stereotypical reactions in the board room when it is time to step up leadership and build accountability. Making this worse, you have consultants running around telling CEOs what the expert solution is to the organizational issues. As Stolovitch says so well, “telling ain’t training and training ain’t performance.” Any OD recommendation needs facilitation for not only minimizing sabotages or gaps in the organizational chains, but to ensure commitment across the board.

Though organizations are aware that “things need to change around here,” there seems to be only improvements on becoming less ineffective and not maximally effective. It is like taking pride in the fact that you are working out everyday before stopping at Burger King for lunch. Can we afford to break even in this new age of increased investment in cultural capital? I think not.

Here are five strategies that will make your executive conversations more “facile” and therefore more driven towards change and not the appearance of such:

1. Radically change meetings. This is done by changing conversations, not by reducing meeting time. If I am ineffective in solutions in a one hour meeting, shortening them to 15 minutes if the style of the meeting conversation hasn’t changed format-driven discussions to a more natural expression of human dialogue will not get human transformation.

2. Get a culture assessment. In my practice, I always start with a culture assessment that gives me a temperature read of how the employees really think of the company. Facilitation amongst executives satisfies some “other” goals and not true alignment with the pulse of their organization if discussions of where to go are not grounded first by where we are.

3. Seek disconfirmatory evidence. Discussions are naturally flowing towards some external rule-oriented process that set up how we speak. This is necessary in much of communication but not in effective facilitation. From this innate structure of language positioning, we get comfortable as we simultaneously become unaware of unchecked assumptions along the way. Purposely “turnover” all your findings in facilitation to find the missed surprises and the unknowns.

4. Get 360 Assessments. This one is plain and simple. All it takes is one person, ignorant to how they are really coming across, to throw a huge kink in any facilitation process. 360 Assessments aid in closing the gap between one’s self-perception and others’ perceptions of them. Facilitation needs full-presence, engagement and awareness of all its people.

5. The external “chair.” In my Ph.D. defense at the University of Notre Dame, as well as in many universities, it is common practice to bring in an “external chair” to represent an outside voice, bring in a completely unrelated subject matter into the room and to make a topic truly interdisciplinary while testing this linking-like knowledge of the candidate. Organizations are systems. Facilitation is freed up and we get outside our own ontological lenses when our discussions are centered around what works–for the common good.

Dr. Fleming is a regular columnist on Transformation Insights for the high end executive magazine, Executive Decision.