Grove Facilitation Model
For several years Ed Claassen, The Grove’s long time senior consultant and deep-water thinker about organizational development, felt we should have a model that reflected the challenges of the team leader and/or facilitator to go along with the Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance™ Model, which has widespread use in articulating the challenges a team faces. After gathering a group of our lead trainers and consultants, we created The Grove Facilitation Model. It supports facilitators in understanding their specific role in managing process flow and information communication. It deals with things that facilitators might not necessarily share with the group, but need to keep in mind as they are leading people through group processes. It is also a framework for developing personal skills in facilitation, because it describes the series of challenges for which one must have responses. The model uses the formal architecture of Arthur M. Young’s Theory of Process, which The Grove has evolved into an integrating operating system for all of its tools.
We know that in general, facilitation seeks to create the conditions that bring out the best in people. To become truly skillful, people facilitating group processes need a comprehensive understanding of what this means. In
our new Principles of Facilitation, we share principles relating to the many different levels of activity that need to be managed (attention, energy, information, and operations). The newest book in The Grove’s Facilitation Series, Best Practices for Facilitation, deals with facilitator best practices linked to the stages of group process. The model provides a framework for thinking about the clusters of strategies needed to Open Up Awareness, Connect People, Draw Out Information, Transfer Ownership, Support Action, Improve Performance, and Let Go of Attachments. These are the repeating challenges that anyone who facilitates must address.As The Grove creates new models for consideration, we work hard to have them connect and support each other so that once a person learns some of the basic
frameworks, they can easily use the others. Anyone familiar with the Team Performance Model, for instance, will immediately be able to use the Facilitation Model. We also encourage you to explore the Sustainable Organizations Model, the Strategic Visioning Model, and, even, the Group Graphics® Keyboard, which, like the new Facilitation Model, are anchored in the Theory of Process. All of these conceptual tools provide ways of seeing how all the different processes we support in organizations share common, underlying dynamics. This appreciation is a key to real mastery in facilitation and process consulting.
Telephone: (415) 561-2500 or (800) 49GROVE