Dynamic Facilitation is a way of facilitating people to address and solve difficult issues, even those that seem impossible to solve. The DF'er helps people face critical issues and then helps them to be creative in addressing them. Rather than asking participants to hold back their emotions, stay on the agenda, abide by guidelines, follow a step-by-step process and to generally be rational, the DF'er encourages people to just speak. At the same time he or she keeps everyone safe from judgment by reflecting what is said and holding a space where all comments can fit together. Four basic charts are used: Solutions, Concerns, Data, and Problem-statements. These charts help the DF'er frame the conversation as a creative quest to solve the issue. This allows people to trust their natural instincts more and appreciate what is emerging from self and others.
Using the charts the DF'er establishes a "zone of thinking and talking" that is "choice-creating," where shifts and breakthroughs are normal and where shared conclusions emerge. The process relies more on the skills and consciousness of the DF'er than on participant self-management. So ordinary, untrained people can be in the meetings and speak their minds and hearts, yet shifts and breakthroughs build exceptional group conclusions. And people come together as “We” with a shared story of progress.
Using the charts the DF'er establishes a "zone of thinking and talking" that is "choice-creating," where shifts and breakthroughs are normal and where shared conclusions emerge. The process relies more on the skills and consciousness of the DF'er than on participant self-management. So ordinary, untrained people can be in the meetings and speak their minds and hearts, yet shifts and breakthroughs build exceptional group conclusions. And people come together as “We” with a shared story of progress.
Sometimes the shifts and breakthroughs take the form of new ideas. Other times they bring a new sense of what the "real problem" is, or a change of heart. At the end of a dynamically facilitated meeting, a fifth chart is used to capture group conclusions, what we call "Of Courses", the basic choices for going forward.
Dynamic Facilitation opens the door to a thinking process, which sometimes emerges naturally in a crisis, where people drop their roles and positions, open up and share what they really think, work together in surprising ways, and make progress that would normally be impossible. ... Dynamic Facilitation is especially valuable in such difficult settings ... yet it should be used on a regular basis rather than only when facing an impossible-seeming issue.
Dynamic Facilitation opens the door to a thinking process, which sometimes emerges naturally in a crisis, where people drop their roles and positions, open up and share what they really think, work together in surprising ways, and make progress that would normally be impossible. ... Dynamic Facilitation is especially valuable in such difficult settings ... yet it should be used on a regular basis rather than only when facing an impossible-seeming issue.
