foundations…

Facilitation Exchange (FE) is a community of practice for emerging and seasoned facilitators interested in deepening the impact of their work.  We draw on the disciplines of experience design and collaborative inquiry. The origins of FE date back to 2003 at the Banff Centre. Read this. 

At the core of the practice  of facilitation is a belief that collective sense-making provides the best way for people to address  dynamic and complex issues. Whether it is in group-delivered training for skill development, in making a  collective response to an event or circumstance or in charting preferred futures through strategic planning, facilitation provides the means for groups of people to gather thoughts and generate actions. 

In the throes of the COVID pandemic, we feel even more strongly in the power of good collective sense making.  The need for facilitators who have the knowledge and skill to  bring people together with purpose, is great. The challenge to facilitators, in these times, is to find the means of using facilitation skills ‘at a distance’. Familiar with proximity-based facilitation (people in the same room at the same time), facilitators are now forced to practice their craft ‘at-a-distance’ (on-line) and/or perhaps in differently constituted  groups than was the case before the pandemic. 

Before the pandemic, facilitation was already broadening its boundaries to encompass on-line delivery, but the pandemic has hastened the need to make this transition quicker. Facilitation Exchange is for facilitators and as such has been a valuable forum for our own sense-making. We see this continuing apace as we learn to work our craft in new ways.

Experience Design is the practice of designing products, processes, services, events, that focuses on human outcomes.
- Hassenzahl, M. (2010) Experience Design : Technology for All the Right Reasons, Morgan & Claypool Publishers, San Rafael.

- Wendt, T. (2015) Design for Dasein: Understanding the Design of Experiences. 1st edn. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Collaborative Inquiry is a process in which participants come together to analyze, assess, discuss, discover, learn and make meaning.
- Collaborative inquiry in practice: Action, reflection, and making meaning: JN Bray, J Lee, LL Smith, L Yorks - 2000