What is facilitation?

Reflective Activity 10

What experiences do you have of being facilitated or being a facilitator in your work? How do you think facilitation could be used in a Living Lab?

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Answer

There are many similar definitions of facilitation, such as this one from the Cambridge English Dictionary: ‘the act of helping other people to deal with a process or reach an agreement or solution without getting directly involved in the process, discussion, etc. yourself’. In other words, you do not lead or impose what happens, you support the process and should not have a personal stake in the outcome. This may be what you are familiar with, but it is not quite how we used facilitation in AgriLink, which is set out by Kevin Collins of The Open University in his AgriLink Practice Abstract on Facilitation in Living Labs [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] :

Facilitation is the process of making something easy or easier in order to achieve an aim. It is usually done by an independent person, or facilitator, designing and running a meeting or events for participants to understand their situation and develop new ideas and practices. In environmental contexts, facilitation is often associated with helping to resolve conflicts or disagreements, such as how land should be managed or how water resources should be allocated. In AgriLink, facilitation is understood more broadly as a process of inquiry or learning about complex situations. This framing enables new ways of thinking about and ‘doing’ facilitation.

In particular, the Living Labs themselves are seen as a form of facilitation that brings together diverse stakeholders (including researchers) in more open and inclusive processes of co-learning. The Living Lab can help facilitate learning about the ‘whats’ (what are/should we do?) and the ‘whys’ (why are/should we be doing it?) as different contexts and the needs of the stakeholders determine. While there is a dedicated ‘official’ facilitator within each Living Lab to help design learning events and provide direction and advice, the participants in the Living Labs can also ease learning and commit to designing new forms of practice with other participants.

Facilitation requires several skills, not least the ability to develop trusting relationships with other participants, an understanding of group dynamics, good communication skills and a willingness to engage with other peoples’ framing of situations, interests and concerns. In turn, this requires the use of a range of participative techniques and tools, such as diagramming, that support these skills and promote learning and insights.

We talked in Session 3 about the factors we used when choosing the six Living labs. We have also talked a bit about the overall approach we adopted, which is in part captured by the word cloud from when we started (Figure 5.1). Interestingly, facilitation does not appear but monitoring (and evaluation) does.

And yet from the outset we established two key roles for each Living Lab – an official Lab facilitator (as Kevin Collins mentions) and a Lab monitor. This division of roles is seen as important in allowing each to focus on different aspects of the ‘health’ of the Living Lab but at the same time work as a team. Monitoring and evaluation is the topic for Session 6, but it is important that facilitation, the topic of this session, is seen as being intimately linked to monitoring and evaluation.

Described image
Figure 5.1 Word cloud produced for an AgriLink Living Lab workshop

Some information on facilitation skills and using role play to practise them is covered in the AgriLink Living Lab Toolbox, but the way that facilitators worked in AgriLink covered three main areas:

1. identifying and engaging with stakeholders
2. planning meetings and other events involving stakeholders
3. facilitating events involving stakeholders.

While we have labelled them as distinct areas, they do overlap considerably. We will look at how we approached each of these areas in turn, drawing on the AgriLink Living Lab Toolbox.

Session 5 The facilitation of Living Labs

Identifying and engaging stakeholders – stakeholder analysis