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Nature
of Facilitation
Professional Facilitation is becoming an increasingly popular means of
resolving relationship impasses, especially in partnership and delicate
commercial situations, where parties recognise that they have a serious
problem, but don’t want to call it a dispute.
Facilitation is equally at home:
- Developing pre and post-nuptial marriage agreements and,
- Helping to reveal and/or modify the fundamental intentions behind
a major commercial contract and,
- Coaching partners in a contractual relationship to communicate and
function together more constructively and,
- Helping partners in a professional practice to resolve their differences
(profit shares, exit arrangements, succession planning etc) and,
- Working with family members in a family business context to understand
their different perceptions, needs and interests, without having to
formally acknowledge that they're in dispute and,
- Helping parties in merger negotiations to develop a shared vision
(and dreams?) for their newly merged entity, perhaps 25 years into the
future.
The Facilitation Process
The process stages are similar to mediation,
but the parties may never actually sit down together to thrash out the
problem(s), perhaps because they prefer to use the Facilitator to “shuttle”
between them with ideas, proposals and offers.
Other facilitation processes may require the Facilitator to chair, or
otherwise organise and manage, problem solving meetings designed to address
problems and to generate options through brainstorming processes.
Facilitation can be as "hard" or "soft" as the parties
and the circumstances demand. Sometimes we are asked to do some
"head kicking", more often it's a question of "softly,
softly" to achieve a necessary result.
Benefits of Facilitation
Facilitation provides parties with the services of an expert negotiator
/ mediator who is given a brief to help overcome specific problems or
issues, in effect without restriction on the approach he or she may adopt
to achieve acceptable outcomes.
In the hands of an experienced, professional dispute resolver almost
anything can be achieved through Facilitation, using a style and pace
designed specifically for the parties and their needs.
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