Category: Good Practice

Facilitation Facilitate means ‘to make easier'. That encapsulates the role of the facilitator; he or she is there to help the discussion flow and to make the whole process as easy as possible to achieve good outcomes. With this in mind it is usually best to have someone facilitating a meeting who has no personal involvement in the topic. It is then possible to be completely ‘outside' the discussion and merely to help people move from one aspect to another by monitoring how it is going and determining when all the juice has been squeezed out of a particular topic. Prepare for informality A discussion of this sort can appear to be relatively unstructured. Indeed, it is important that people do not feel constrained by a rigid structure since different…

Furniture! The layout and comfort of chairs are key contributors to the success of a meeting! Yet they are often neglected. This is true of a church meeting as well as of meetings of elders, trustees etc. For instance, prayer and participation in ‘body ministry' is greatly helped by people being able to see each other - a circle or ‘horseshoe' - rather than praying into the back of the head of someone in front of you! An elders' or trustees' meeting can be more effective around a table where there is space for papers and laptops than in relaxed easy chairs. It also brings a helpful ‘formality' to the meeting. The same is also true for group discussions of the type we are considering in this series. It is…