Co-facilitation

Thirty years ago (!) I was a facilitator who sometimes also co-facilitated. Much of my work was facilitation; I supported participants in a group undertake some processes to help them learn, resolve a conflict, plan or achieve an identified outcome in education or community service settings. Sometimes, I was fortunate enough to do this with another facilitator. When there were two of us, our planning was better, the group processes were smoother and the outcomes were more satisfying for the group and me.

In this last sentence, however, there was a dilemma: were the outcomes better for my co-facilitator? In fact, how did my co-facilitator feel about the work we did together as we facilitated the group? Was there something we, or I, could do to make the experience more positive, more effective, more satisfying, for the group, for us as individuals and for us together? We spent the majority of the time we were working together focussing on the group: we planned what the group would do, the processes we would use with the group, the activities we would undertake as the group worked and the outcomes the group might achieve. That was what we were being paid to do. Our relationship seemed to take care of itself. We took it for granted and, mostly, it seemed to ‘work’. Sometimes, however, it did not ‘work’. Success on one occasion was no predictor of success on another. Similarly, failure on one occasion did not prevent success on another.

I facilitated with many different people and with very few of them did I have the same positive experiences as with the co-facilitator with whom I worked most often. I wondered what I was doing differently with her and if there was a way of us co-facilitating more effectively. Could I create a more positive experience of co-facilitation with some intentional action?

Others echoed my experiences. I wondered: what does ‘co-facilitation’ really mean? What is the nature of the co-facilitation ‘experience’? What makes co-facilitation ‘successful’? What might I, my co-facilitator and other co-facilitators do to make the co-facilitation experience successful?

I read a lot, I talked a lot, I facilitated with co-facilitators a lot. I had more and more questions, and I thought I wanted ‘answers’. I conducted a preliminary study to develop a ‘framework for co-facilitation’ but the process of its creation demonstrated that there were no easy ‘answers’; there was no recipe for successful co-facilitation. I might, however, be able to conduct some research to improve my own, and other co-facilitator’s understandings of co-facilitation.

And so, I began researching.

Facilitation was an emerging field of practice and research that was growing into both a “profession and rigorous discipline” (Pierce, Cheesebrow & Braun 2000, p.24). Roger Schwarz summarised the challenges of facilitation in the following way:

“Facilitating a group is mentally challenging work. You need to simultaneously pay attention to content and process, verbal and nonverbal behaviour, those who are speaking, those who are not, and what is apparently happening in the group compared to what has happened in the past and what will likely happen in the future. While considering all this, you also have to think about whether to intervene, what interventions to make and how, when to intervene, to whom to address the intervention, and the effects of the intervention on the group once made. Then you intervene. Quite often, you have to do all of this in less time than it takes to read this paragraph.”

“Because of the high demands of the work, facilitators sometimes work together with the same group”. This is ‘co-facilitation’.

Co-facilitation is designed to share the responsibilities that Schwarz described. The addition of another facilitator, however, adds another layer of attention, awareness and response. There are now “two ongoing levels of communication” (Knight & Scott 1997, p.29) with new potential for miscommunication and misinterpretation. Yet, co-facilitation was a recommended way of working with a group (Pfeiifer & Jones 1975) and some researchers believed “that the potential advantages of co-facilitation outweigh the disadvantages – both for the co-facilitators themselves and the groups with whom they work” (Knight & Scott 1997, p.28).

I wanted to know more. I wanted to understand the ‘lived experience’ of co-facilitation.