Facilitating Breakthrough: How to Remove Obstacles, Bridge Differences, and Move Forward Together

  • 3h 5m
  • Adam Kahane
  • Berrett-Koehler Publishers
  • 2021

Making progress on complex, problematic situations requires a new approach to working together: transformative facilitation, a structured and creative process for removing the obstacles to fluid forward movement.

It is becoming less straightforward for people to move forward together. They face increasing complexity and decreasing control. They need to work with more people from across more divides. In such situations, the most common ways of advancing—some people telling others what to do, or everyone just doing what they think they need to—aren’t adequate.

One better way is through facilitating. But the most common approaches to facilitating—bossy vertical directing from above or collegial horizontal accompanying from alongside—aren’t adequate. They often leave the participants frustrated and yearning for breakthrough.

This book describes a new approach: transformative facilitation. It doesn’t choose either the bossy vertical or the collegial horizontal approach: it cycles back and forth between them. Rather than forcing or cajoling, the facilitator removes the obstacles that stand in the way of people contributing and connecting equitably. It enables people to bring their whole selves to the process.

This book is for anyone who helps people work together to transform their situation, be it a professional facilitator, manager, consultant, coach, chairperson, organizer, mediator, stakeholder, or friend. It offers a broad and bold vision of the contribution that facilitation can make to helping people collaborate to make progress.

In this Book

  • Foreword by Edgar H. Schein
  • Introduction—“You are Removing the Obstacles to the Expression of the Mystery!”
  • Facilitation Helps People Collaborate to Create Change
  • Conventional Vertical and Horizontal Facilitation Both Constrain Collaboration
  • Unconventional Transformative Facilitation Breaks Through Constraints
  • The Facilitator Enables Breakthrough by Making Ten Moves
  • The Facilitator Knows What Move to Make Next by Paying Attention
  • How Do We See Our Situation? Advocating and Inquiring
  • How Do We Define Success? Concluding and Advancing
  • How Do We Get from Here to There? Mapping and Discovering
  • How Do We Decide Who Does What? Directing and Accompanying
  • How Do We Understand Our Role? Standing Outside and Inside
  • Conclusion—Removing the Obstacles to Love, Power, and Justice
  • A Map of Transformative Facilitation
  • Notes
SHOW MORE
FREE ACCESS