Facilitation

The term facilitation is broadly used to describe any activity which makes tasks for others easy. For example:

* Facilitation is used in business and organisational settings to ensure the designing and running of successful meetings.
*Neural facilitation in neuroscience, is the increase in postsynaptic potential evoked by a 2nd impulse.
* Ecological facilitation describes how an organism profits from the presence of another. Examples are nurse plants, which provide shade for new seedlings or saplings (e.g. using an orange tree to provide shade for a newly planted coffee plant), or plants providing shelter from wind chill in arctic environments.

A person who takes on such a role is called a facilitator. Specifically:

* A facilitator is used in a variety of group settings, including business and other organisations to describe someone whose role it is to work with group processes to ensure meetings run well and achieve a high degree of consensus.
* The term facilitator is used in psychotherapy where the role is more to help group members become aware of the feelings they hold for one another ("see" Group therapy)
* The term facilitator is used in education to refer to a specifically trained adult who sits in class with a disabled, or otherwise needy, student to help them follow the lesson that the teacher is giving ("see" Disability)
* The term facilitator is used to describe people engaged in the illegal trafficking of human beings across international borders ("see" Trafficking in human beings).
* The term facilitator is used to describe those individuals who arrange adoptions by attempting to match available children with prospective adopters.
* The term facilitator is used to describe someone who assists people with communication disorders to use communication aids with their hands. See Facilitated communication

There are many organisations around the world who provide Facilitation Skills Training. Interaction Associates based in the USA are a well known provider with high quality trainers and facilitators in the US. Additionally facilitators such as Roberta Grossi and Tony Park are well regarded in Europe.

Facilitation in the context of business can be used in many ways. Tony Park of Park Consulting based in the UK states that "in many organisations thousands of hours are wasted every year due to the ineffectiveness of meetings, or the inability of groups to reach agreements. What this equates to in financial terms can be phenomenal."

Tony Park further explains that by "using an external neutral facilitator, organisations can focus on the content of the meeting or discussion, and leave the process management down to a professional. Experienced facilitators can apply their expertise is senior level negotiations, strategic planning and visioning sessions or even in the most basic of meetings. In fact it is in these every day meetings, either face to face, via voicemail or video-conferencing, that significant productivity gains can occur."

Tony Park's facilitation experience in General Electric over a twelve year career gave him the opportunity of participating in immediate culture change. "When we decided to introduce a facilitative culture, we trained nearly 50% of our leadership team and 100% of our salesforce. Not only were leaders walking the talk but sales people were facilitating customer events and effectively differentiating themselves from the competition. This investment had numerous financial, process and employee benefits."

Tony Park has been working in the Organisation Development field for over twenty years and has held positions in the ANZ Bank in Sydney, Lloyds Register in London, GE Capital in Manchester, GE Medical Systems in Paris and GE Finance in London before starting his own business consultancy in 2000.