The Secrets of Facilitation: The S.M.A.R.T. Guide to Getting Results with Groups

I am the Principal of Cohesion Inc, a marketing & business consulting organization, and also a part-time course director in the marketing faculty of the Schulich School of Business, York University in Toronto, Canada. Facilitation is an important part of my work and teaching, and as such I regularly review literature on this subject to discover new insights and techniques with which to experiment. Whether you are new to facilitation or already an experienced practitioner, this book will serve as an excellent resource to build your skills in this area.

This is a wonderful, practical, well-written book, with 60 facilitation secrets that are worth far, far more than the price of the pages. In fact, I learned more from this book than I did from a nationally recognized Advanced Facilitation course for $1700. The chapter on consensus-building, which introduces 4 common techniques for building consensus (Delineation, Strengths and weaknesses, Merge and Weighted Scoring) I found particularly useful. The 6 high-level agendas for common facilitated sessions (among them process improvement and issue resolution) are a must for every facilitator. I would recommend this book most highly for facilitators who want to build on their existing skills rather than as an introduction to the field, as some of the secrets (those related to dealing with dysfunctional behavior, for example) assume some foundational facilitation skills. However, anyone interested in the field would benefit greatly from the secrets in this book. A truly great addition to the facilitator's library!

The Secrets of Facilitation delivered success for me at a recent series of conferences. My primary role on the day was to open the conference and engage delegates in thinking about the future and formulating questions, and observations to put to various speakers throughout the day. Thereafter my role was to facilitate the question and answer sessions and generally keep the conference moving along. Getting the opening right was crucial to the success of the day. The first 2 conferences were deemed to be successful but I knew that although the level of participation was reasonable it could be better, with more questions and more people asking them from the floor. Also I felt, due to the uncertainties of change I hadn't managed to create the rapport and warmth in the room I would have liked. By the end of the day it was still a little frosty! Prior to the third Conference I had ordered and received the "Secrets of Facilitation". The book arrived on the Monday,two days before the last conference. I read it Monday evening and Tuesday in readiness for the third conference on Wednesday. My motivation - were there any secrets I could apply to improve my opening pitch, generate more involvement and more questions. By Tuesday afternoon I had read the book and my attention was focussed on chapters 2 and 4 The Secrets to Questioning and the The Secrets to Starting - and to some extent on chapter 3 the Secrets to Preparing. I also had in mind PeDeQs for my direction giving and Secret 27 (the Secret to Q & A Sessions). Late Tuesday afternoon I rewrote and replanned my opening to better focus it around the IEEI outline and set up the participation for Q & A by following the steps outlined in secret 27. I applied the Secrets on Wednesday morning at the 3rd Conference and noted the reactions. The opening flowed better and a greater level of rapport was achieved. The opening also established greater involvement and participation in the pre-questioning process and sequence. During the Q & A more questions were asked than at the other 2 conferences - and these kept coming throughout the day. The PeDeQs sequence for giving directions also improved understanding and execution of activities throughout the day. I might be biased, but at the end of the day I felt the mood of delegates was not as frosty as the other 2 conferences, and subsequent analysis of conference evaluations showed that, in comparison to the other two conferences, we had improved on all our ratings. The client also thought that this had been the best of the 3 conferences. Of course, I could put this improvement down to familiarity with the conference process (it was the third one, after all) - but I don't think so. I had made sufficient changes, (based on my reading of "the Secrets of Facilitation") to the way I facilitated the third conference to know that these changes - some process, some change in words and/or emphasis had made the difference. As I sit here and reflect on all 3 conf

A very comprehensive resource for guiding group facilitation. Each chapter begins with a list of questions that will be answered. The book is organized around 60 secrets, which are presented in the back of the book as a quick guide. These secrets are clustered by chapter under major headings. The major secrets (and chapters) are The Secrets Of (To): questioning; preparing; starting; focusing; recording; information gathering; closing; managing dysfunction; consensus building; energy; and agenda setting. The closing chapter covers applying the secrets to special situations: very small or very large groups, designing a conference, conference calls, and facilitating remote participants. This book has an abundance of solid content, and its organization is excellent.

I rightly say a must "have" because this is a fantastic book - not just to read (and forget ;-) ), but to keep by your side and imbibe the secrets into your everyday life! I have been looking around for books on running meetings smoothly and everything that goes with - most of the ones I have seen were really trash. This one is rather different. To be frank, not being from the US, the author is unknown to me - but what he writes is good stuff - and very practical. What I have learned is that to be an effective manager - apart from having reasonably good "content" skills, what is equally, if not more important is people skills - and in today's management arena - one of the most important interaction is in the form of meetings - and if you can master that interaction - one can go a long way - and this is one of the first book that I found to really help me with that.