Art of Facilitation Reviewed by Mary Simpson
The Art of Facilitation is a welcome development in the field of facilitation - and from my perspective - within New Zealand. I teach managing conflict and consensus in a university course, and this book is a recommended text for it. The book addresses the theoretical dimensions, contextual issues, and practices of facilitation and in this respect, has a lot to offer both practitioner and teacher.
The book is structured in three parts. The first part discusses conceptual perspectives on facilitation including definitions of facilitation, roles of facilitators, and dimensions of practice. The chapters in this section explore valuable philosophical and foundational aspects of practice, and help to locate the profession: for example, by comparing it to coaching, teaching, and mediating.
The second part explores facilitation-in-action and uses a range of examples to illustrate its value in different arenas such as ethical practice, organisational process, and social sustainability. In this section, I particularly value the chapters on A sustainable society and Mapping the field of facilitation. The former explicitly links individual practice with broader social contexts; the latter succinctly captures the range of facilitation models and domains of practice, and so demonstrates the breadth and depth of the field.
The third section offers the reader resources for approaching, designing, teaching and learning facilitation and the structure plays an important part in accessibility of the material. The chapter on individual process activities, for instance, is structured so that a group can easily use different processes at each stage of its development.
This book appeals to me for all the features mentioned above. Finally, because it successfully engages the reader with theory, context, and practice, The Art of Facilitation will be an invaluable resource for many. Dale Hunter has succeeded in producing a user-friendly book.Mary Simpson is a Lecturer in the Department of Management Communication, University of Waikato, New Zealand.