Complexifying Facilitation by Immersing in Lived Experiences of on-the-fly Facilitation

Abstract

Background: Describing the role of a facilitator often results in to-do lists resembling a recipe or a laundry list to follow. Such lists fail to grasp the inherent complexity of facilitation and are not very useful in guiding facilitators when, why and if they should intervene in the unfolding live performance of that day. Aim: To develop a deeper understanding of on-the-fly facilitation by analyzing rich empirical accounts of in-situ facilitation episodes. Intervention: Six facilitation episodes were through purposeful sampling selected from a body of hundreds of interventions in forty-seven performed crisis management training exercises in Swedish municipalities. Each full-day crisis management simulation-game had between fifteen and fifty participants involving politicians, administrative managers and crisis management staff. Method: An auto-hermeneutical phenomenological analysis of six lived experiences of facilitation episodes was conducted to understand what the facilitator observed and how a facilitation intervention was applied. Results: On-the-fly-facilitation is instantaneous, but draws simultaneously on awareness of the past, present and future. Facilitation needs are foreseen during design and they influence current attentiveness and coaching. Unfolding game-play needs to be grasped quickly. Potential future consequences of intervening or not intervening are evaluated within a limited window of opportunity. Due to these circumstances, facilitation is multi-skilled, arbitrary and fallible. Such muddiness of on-the-fly facilitation requires courage from the facilitator. Conclusions: In order to better understand how facilitation skills and roles actually are performed, the facilitation literature desperately needs a larger number of rich empirical accounts of interesting in-situ facilitation. Elaborate analysis of such lived experiences could develop understanding as to how available skills, situational circumstances as well as the unfolding interaction between players and facilitators actually develop into a facilitation intervention. This could generate more complex theoretical understanding of how to apply facilitation skills, in addition to theories that list what skills a facilitator should master.