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This open letter to facilitators everywhere, asks the question, what is a facilitator?

This is really a why question, right? And WHY is that question that Simon Sinek continually challenges us to ask of ourselves. So then, why facilitate?

AR is, if we are to be honest, a commercial industry that has one foot in the grassroots world. There is no official accreditation or professional registration required of facilitators or the training of facilitators. And so its no suprise that there is also no official definition of a facilitator.

But from witnessing the practice of many different AR facilitators lately here are some first glance candidates for an answer:

• a space holder, a setter of context
• modelling communication
• doing something to promote AR
• sharing a passion for something
• exercising and practicing leadership
• a teacher, coach, mentor
• a seeker of fame, fortune and attention

From this diverse list of possibilities, all observed in the wild, could it be said that facilitation doesn't really know what it is?

Here, the notion of hero leadership comes to mind. It's the idea of a leader as a person on a white horse, that is somehow special and knows better. That will guide us, that will save us from ourselves.

Or, then there is another view, one that speaks to the idea of servant leadership. Where a facilitator is less a leader. Where there is a leader in every chair. This quote by Peter Block elegantly speaks to this idea:

Dale Hunter said something similar, that it's about making a space for people to have a conversation.

OK. So what happens when we bring the frameworks that inform the project to bear on the matter?

The principle that's screaming to be heard here is reciprocity. If you have a circle of ten people and one person, who happened to stepp up as the 'facilitator' ends up speaking for 60% of the time, does this violate our mammalian nervous systems longing for reciprocity?

I believe that it does. And, is there a risk of our facilitation being a platform for those with a tendency toward dignity (and its shadow posture) to run wild in our community? Yeah i think so.

It could be said that few of us in this community (and the whole world) really grok the largely hidden side effects that status has on us as mammals that are still under development (that is a story for another time).

What i'm curious about, here, is what might facilitation look like if we also looked to the gifts of a more vulnerable, humility informed style of facilitation? One where the facilitator is semi invisible, where an onlooker might wonder actually who was in charge.

It requires the humility leaning folk to step out from under their shadow (which is collapse). This style of leadership we see more often in the circling world.

At the start i said that the unregulated nature of AR has downsides. But there is an upside. What if we understand facilitation the same way we understand what it is to practice. That it's an opportunity to learn by doing. Its an opportunity to mess up and try again. To fall down, and to get up. To figure out, what is facilitation, and what it is not.

And for those suffering under facilitation that's not working for us, it is a golden chance to get more practice asking for what we want :)

Photo credit: The Zegg Ecovillage