If you are a facilitator and you haven’t seen this, take note that a new book is forthcoming from the international Association of Facilitators on facilitation practices. It is edited by Sandy Schumann and features Sam Kaner, Roger Schwarz, Lisa Kimball, Chris Hogan, Marv Weisbord and Sandra Janoff, Reinhard Kuchenmueller, among many many others. It’s out in February at $75 US which is a hefty price, but this might well be the first and last facilitation book you ever buy.

There is a famous quote attributed to Albert Einstein that goes something like this:

AS a facilitator it�s sometimes hard to be in that place � what Sam Kaner calls �the groan zone� � where confusion, frustration and divergence live. The process of assembling patterns of meaning in a group is labourious but it is worth every moment when you see intricate and elegant decisions emerge from the chaos.

The other day in a meeting, one of the participants came up with a metaphor to describe this process. She likened it to solving a jig saw puzzle with out knowing the picture. As you empty the puzzle out on the table, you shift around the pieces, turning them over, noticing their size and the various types of connections. Then you start to build patterns: pieces of border, the all-important corners, big patches of red or blue with the same tone. Soon you have clusters emerging. As if by magic, these clusters meet up with one another. You can stare at a cluster for days wondering how it connects to its neighbours and then suddenly, on your way out the door to go to work, you see it.

And then, most interesting of all, you are finally left with two or three pieces. If for some reason you don�t have those pieces � if they are lost, or if someone has hidden them � you will do almost anything to get them. You will turn the house upside down, interrogate the children, write away to the puzzle company, ANYTHING to get those pieces! What began as 500 small pieces of cardboard with no cohesion has emerged into a quest for wholeness.

So this is how it is solving difficult problems with groups, where all the pieces live in the hearts and brains of the participants. In the beginning, we don�t know which of the hundreds of pieces will ultimately be the one that brings the whole pattern together. As we work through the sorting and meaning making, certain pieces take on greater or lesser importance until finally we see the whole pattern and that taste of the nearly completed puzzle drives our adrenaline as we respond to the natural human attraction towards wholeness.

So it is with difficult problems; so it is working with emergence.

(PS…other jigsaw puzzle metaphors here!)

Recently, my facilitation practice has increasingly involved helping people to set a simple vision for their work and then to invite them to find a place for themselves in that vision. In Open Space we call that �passion and responsibility� but the truth is those two dynamics are the yin and yang of getting anything done well.

Focussing groups on passion involves facilitating seeing. I find especially that �what if�� questions help a lot in this respect. Asking �what if� proposes a future, but doesn�t worry itself with the details. And it also allows each person to immediately see themselves in that future.

For example, for a community safety planning process I�m engaged in right now, we�re currently playing with the question of �what if we won an award for community safety and that we were cited specifically for how each community played a specific role in achieving our goals? What would your role be in that scenario?� This gathering will involve everyone from elderly neighbours to sexually exploited youth in a tough community plagued by tough dynamics. And yet everyone knows that unless solutions involve everyone, nothing will change for the better. Command and control hasn�t legisl;ated the problems away, in fact it has made them worse. Positing a simple vision of safety for everyone in the community and inviting them to steward that vision is what�s on the table now.

A �what if� question is tasty, and demonstrates exactly an important power of �seeing:� once you see a desired future, you can�t put it back in the bottle. As Thomas King says about stories of transformation, you can do a lot of things, but you can�t say you didn�t hear it. Jonathan Schell, in The Unconquerable World, argues that this quality of real vision is what makes the democratic impulse so strong in people: once participatory democracy is unleashed on the world, it cannot be refuted. Taste freedom or inspiration once, and it�s hard to deny its full emergence.

�What if� questions bring the sophisticated process of seeing to a very practical point. I find that increasingly, my work is about helping people shift from one place to another. Any kind of transformation process requires this kind of forward viewing in order to provide some idea of where we are going. So I am finding �what if� questions, and the accompanying challenge to individuals – passion AND responsibility, remember – to see themselves in that new future to be useful in just about every context, be it planning, consultation, community building or organizational development.

I�ve been following the work of Adam Kahane for a while now, and have just been reading his latest book, Solving Tough Problems. In it, he recounts his experiences over the years of working with groups to varying degrees of success engaging in the practice of talking and listening deeply. It�s a wonderful book.

Talking and listening are the �implementation� side of good visioning. Kahane is a master of scenario planning, having worked for years at Shell and subsequently on the Mont Fleur scenario project (.pdf) that played a significant role in inviting South Africa�s diverse political players to envision post-apartheid futures. On the surface these exercises seem na�ve, dreaming up possible futures. But the reason for powerful and symbolic views of a future emerging reality is, as Kahane says, that the future is unpredictable. And why is it unpredictable? �One reason the future is unpredictable,� says Kahane, �is that it can be influenced.�

The trick to influencing the future is seeing now how that future might emerge and to find a way to influence it for the best. Using �what if� questions to cast very basic but compelling visions helps us to set the stage for the deep dialogue, engagement and conversation that loosens up our present and takes us to new levels of participating in the emerging and envisioned future.