Effective Facilitation

Abstract

Every facilitator struggles with the challenge of knowing when and why to halt role-play and how to generate meaningful insights in group discussion. Heinrich offers a useful, four-part heuristic that distinguishes situational awareness, knowledge base, management plan, and actual performance. In other words, do role-players know what they are dealing with, understand what that means, know what they should do about it, or know how to do it? Each of these four quadrants of discussion presents a different challenge, requiring different questions from the facilitator in order to solve that situation. Each set of questions produces a specific kind of conversation with its own tonality and quality, its own appropriate level of subjectivity or objectivity, and leads to very different outcomes in each case.

How do we decide how to halt role-play and lead a group into productive discussion and further experimentation? One effective solution is to work from a four-part heuristic that follows a player’s questions from initial reading of the scenario, through knowledge and strategy, to successful implementation.