The Akous Group - Facilitation

Facilitate
verb [ trans. ]
Make (an action or process) easy or easier: a skilled person was needed to facilitate the exchange of ideas.
DERIVATIVES facilitator, noun
ORIGIN early 17th cent.: from French faciliter, from Italian facilitare, from facile ‘easy,’ from Latin facilis (see facile).

We facilitate progress.

Working with communities and organizations that are faced with decisions and challenges, we help create dialogue that unlocks answers.

Rather than slip into typical patterns of conflict, avoidance, or resignation, we help leaders of all types realize their aspirations.

This is exciting and important work. It is about creating the communities and organizations that we need to address the environmental, business, and social challenges of a new century.

As facilitators we offer you:

• Design of meeting/interaction opportunities that get the real issues out on the table quickly and fairly
• Smart neutrality that is able to surface all the different views in the room and organize them into a coherent whole
• Broad experience that allows us to quickly understand the context and dynamics from which specific issues arise
• Practical listening that opens up the possibility for self-reflection and change

• A range of facilitative approaches from individual coaching through large scale meeting design

If the idea of having a skilled facilitator help you, your community, or your organization accomplish a tough goal is appealing—please contact us. We have something in common.

In August of 2008, my colleague, Kara Vernor of the Results Group and I will be conducting interviews with members of California Department of Pesticide Regulation Pest Management Advisory Committee. We will be using an online appointment scheduling tool provided by Genbook. If you are a PMAC member wanting to schedule you interview please go to our appointment scheduling page.

As facilitators we need to be aware of new ways to effectively bring groups together, both when we work with them in a meeting room and when they are spread out across the globe.

The challenge of our time is to find profoundly creative ways to address global social, political, and environmental breakdown. Both organizations and communities are challenged to redefine themselves and their practices in light of an increasingly unpredictable and in many cases more dangerous environment.

What can we learn from trying to get over 5000 people talking about how to change something as big and complex as the world food system? It turns out quite a bit! Here are some take-aways from my week in Turnio, Italy as a moderator for Terra Madre 2006.

This week I am working as a moderator at Terra Madre an international conference on food system change sponsored by Slow Food International. This gathering of over 6000 food producers, chefs, and food activists has two primary goals: to create a rich exchange of information between people who normally do not get a chance to collaborate and to build a powerful network of people and organizations to promote Slow Food.

Facilitators often recommend creating a set of ground rules to help a group function well together. These rules can help set the boundaries for decorum (as in cell phones on silent) or for exchange (as in no interrupting). The list of ground rules can often go quite long as the facilitator and the group attempt to cover all the ways a meeting can grow wrong.

Many of us have been in meetings where a visual record of the comments made by participants were captured by the facilitator or recorder.

One of the most common mistakes I see in meetings is not paying sufficient attention to how the meeting begins.