Facilitating Breakthrough

Resolving stubborn, intractable conflicts requires a new approach. This book introduces transformative facilitation, which succeeds not by getting people to collaborate but by removing obstacles and letting them find their own path.

People today face increasing complexity and decreasing control. They need to work with more people from across more divides. But the traditional ways of advancing--subsuming individual interests to the good of the whole, or providing total autonomy for all stakeholders to work out their own solution--aren't adequate to resolving these difficult situations. What's needed is a different approach. Transformative facilitation doesn't choose either approach: it cycles back and forth between them. The facilitator pays careful attention to what is going on in the group and decides which approach will work best at any given moment. It is not a way of leading or managing a group: it is a way of enabling the group to work out for themselves how they can transform their situation. Adam Kahane describes precisely what the facilitator needs to watch for and how to cycle between different aspects of each approach. This book is for anyone who helps people collaborate in any setting with groups of any size. Not only is this method a way to facilitate breakthroughs, it is a breakthrough in itself.