The State of Facilitation 2024 Report – Episode 36

In this episode, Beth Cougler Blom talks with Deborah Rim Moiso, the editor of SessionLab’s State of Facilitation 2024 Report, about data and insights gleaned from the report and what it might mean for facilitators worldwide.

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Show Transcript

[Upbeat music playing]

[Show intro]
Beth
Welcome, to Facilitating on Purpose, where we explore ideas together about designing and facilitating learning. Join me to get inspired on your journey to becoming and being a great facilitator wherever you work. I’m your host, Beth Cougler Blom.

[Episode intro]
Beth Cougler Blom
Hello, how are you doing today? This is Episode 36.

If you listened to the last couple of episodes, at the end of one of them I told you that Facilitating on Purpose was voted into the Top Five Most Listened-To Podcasts in SessionLab’s State of Facilitation 2024 Report. It was so wonderful – thank you, community – to hear that you voted us in to the top five and it actually helped me connect with a couple of folks over at SessionLab and kind of prompted this new connection with them as a company. What resulted was we decided that one of them would come on the show and that person is Deborah Rim Moiso, who is the editor of the report, the State of Facilitation 2024 Report.

Now, Deborah doesn’t just work for SessionLab. She is also a freelance facilitator in her own right. So what we do in this episode is she gives us some of the data from the report and then we talk about it: what it means for us as facilitators, what it means for our facilitation community worldwide, and even how we reach other facilitators to learn more about them that perhaps weren’t involved in the report this time around.

If you haven’t had a chance to sit down and read the report – and no judgment if you have not done so yet – this might be a great episode for you to listen to because we really encapsulate a lot of the key takeaways from the report. But then, more importantly, we do some reflective discussion and even learning with each other about what it means. And we pose questions that, of course, we can’t even answer at this point because they’re just things that we all have to keep thinking about from this point forward. So in this episode, I’m really pleased to present to you my conversation with Deborah Rim Moiso from SessionLab. Enjoy the show.

Beth Cougler Blom
Deb, so nice to see you. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining me today.

Deborah Rim Moiso
Thank you so much, Beth, for having me. This is great. I’m very excited.

Beth
Tell me a little bit about yourself and your role with SessionLab.

Deb
Sure. My name is Deb. That means busy as a bee, and that basically says everything about my attitude in life [laughs]. I’m based in central Italy, so right now while we are recording it’s morning for you I think; it’s evening for me. We’re really far apart and yet we have so much in common. Isn’t that wacky?

I’m a freelance facilitator. I’ve been facilitating since 2009, mostly in public participation projects and NGOs and community work. In Italy mostly, so in Italian. And some EU work with youth. I think it was a couple of years ago I met the people from SessionLab and we discovered that they had a place in this company for somebody who likes to facilitate and likes to write. That was pretty amazing because those are two of my favourite things in life. The other one is farming! People get excited about this. I’m a facilitator with a farm and with donkeys and with chickens [laughs] and with olive trees. And when I’m not with my farm, I’m either facilitating workshops – recently mostly in national parks, so there’s kind of an environmental thread there – or I’m at my desk writing about facilitation. So I consider myself extremely, extremely lucky and privileged because I get to travel around, work with people, and then also like sit down and reflect about it and write articles and content for facilitators. So that’s me.

Beth
I love that. As you’re explaining more about who you are and kind of what jazzes you up, I feel that I’m very similar. I love to work with groups, but then I love the times at my computer where I’m just thinking through something and writing a blog post or whatever kind of writing I’m doing. I love that piece as well, just the thought provoking time writing. Nice. We have a lot in common.

Deb
Or a book!

Beth
Or a book! Yeah, I did that too. But this episode is about the report that SessionLab put out. So first tell me about SessionLab, so that I’m really well aware of what the company does, and your role within it and with this report.

Deb
Yeah sure. So SessionLab is a company that makes software for facilitators. Our work has kind of two pieces. So one is software, called Session Planner, which listeners, newcomers to facilitation, you should try it out. It does a bunch of things. I’m not going go into advertising, but it helps you design your session, set your timing, save your session so that in two years when your client comes back and you’ve forgotten what you did, you can track it back. And then the other piece is a library of content. There’s a library with many methods and templates and also longer form guides in a blog and also some things you can download, some resources you can download, about things like how to create a workshop, what is facilitation, and all these kind of introductory topics. And then sometimes we delve deeper in like what does facilitation and learning design have in common? Or how to do hybrid or virtual workshops. And it’s in that kind of context that a couple of years ago the team decided to try and put together a report. And so that’s what we’ve been doing. This is the second edition of the State of Facilitation Report.

Beth
Do you think that this is the first report that’s got an international focus? I haven’t heard of another report like this before. Is there one?

Deb
So credit where it’s due, some people have tried. And what I mean by ‘tried’ is they’ve usually put out one edition. So I think somebody in the IAF, in the International Association of Facilitators – which I’m also part of, so I have that hat as well – have put together a report based on a survey given I believe to their members a few years ago. The amazing Myriam Hadnes did a pricing survey a few years ago and put out a report on that. And so did School of Facilitation, Kirsty Lewis, also did a pricing survey, which was in that case mostly UK-based. So there have been pieces of this work done, but as far as I know, nobody had put together a comprehensive, massive survey, big report ever before, which is why we decided to do it. When I say we, it was actually a team effort. This was not originally my idea, it originally came from Filip Kis, who’s one of the founders of SessionLab. And it came from this: ‘It’s not there. We would like to see more data about who facilitators are, who is using facilitation, where – how – tools, and all that kind of thing’. From a business perspective, it’s data that is very useful for our company. But also just from a curiosity perspective and a passion for facilitation perspective, what we really wanted to do, and I think we’re succeeding but people are going to tell us that, is it holds a mirror up to the facilitation world and be like: ‘this is where we’re at right now. Do we like what we’re seeing? Is there any conversation that we need to do to change something?’ And just kind of what is going on and what does that spark for then the next year, or changes happening, or trends happening. So that’s why we put it out.

Beth
Thanks for that explanation. And I think this conversation will hopefully be that mirror that you spoke of and we’ll try to jump off from some of the findings of the report, won’t we, and maybe ask ourselves and the people who are listening to this episode, ‘what do we think about that? And do we have to do anything about that? Or what does it mean for next year’s report and who it goes to,’ and all that kind of stuff. So we’ll get there, I think, in this conversation.

Deb
Yeah, that’s my favourite thing. Of course putting together a report, we have data, so we have numbers – so there is this idea – I was going to say illusion – that there’s answers in the report, [chuckles] but ultimately it’s about the questions that it sparks. I think probably my favourite part of the report is at the very bottom when we’re like, ‘What questions are we left with here?’ So I’m glad that we have some space to discuss that.

Beth
Absolutely. And before we get into that, I’ll just say I’ve known about SessionLab – the library particularly of activities – for many years. And so I have had this impression, and a right one I hope, that you’re a well-founded company and giving lots of things out to the world. I know people that use the Session Planner, that resource as well, and so I’ve always had a good impression of SessionLab. But funnily enough I didn’t actually know where SessionLab was based. I thought that it was an American company. And you’re not an American company, are you? Can you just tell us a little bit about where SessionLab is situated and maybe the diverse workforce I think that you have as well.

Deb
So we’re a fully remote company and that’s an interesting thing to talk about also – how we work as a fully remote company, what rituals we have. We are a facilitation-obsessed, fully remote company. So we are 13 people currently, of which most are full-time employees, and me and a designer are part-time employees or more like kind of on a freelance contract basis, because I want to maintain my facilitation work as well. We’re all over Europe, from Spain all the way to the Baltics, Lithuania, Estonia – except she’s probably right now in the Czech Republic, Spain, Italy, the UK – both England and Scotland – Hungary. I’m sure I forgot somebody. But so we are all over Europe, fully remote. As far as I understand it’s always been a fully remote company. And then we meet twice a year. We have these wonderful team retreats that last, you know, a working week, twice a year each time in different places in Europe. We try to find places so that some people don’t have to travel too far while some other people have to accommodate and travel a bit further. And that’s where we meet. We do our little workshops. We often facilitate internally. Sometimes we have external facilitators. I think it’s all very interesting how we manage to work in a company that – I mean, you shouldn’t take this from me because I’m working there, but it is really excellent in facilitation to have all your colleagues aware of what facilitation is and most of them perfectly able to hold a workshop is heaven.

Beth
That would be heaven. Someday I’ll come and live in Europe and work for SessionLab [laughs] I feel like. I feel like maybe my retirement years. We’ll talk to the owners. No, I’m just kidding. [Both laugh.]

Deb
Or you know, share facil – we keep sharing facilitation culture in all the companies we work in and (yeah) we’re going to get there. It makes very efficient, life very pleasant.

Beth
What a nice model. But let’s get to the report and can you first tell me what your role was with the report and then go into I think maybe the major findings that you found when you saw the results?

Deb
Yeah so I am a content writer. I am a story person, qualitative person, sense-making person. I am not very technical and not very good with numbers, so obviously I was not working on this alone. My role in the report, I think we formally call it Main Editor or Content Editor or whatever. So there’s two parts to this work: There’s a survey that comes out in Autumn/Fall. Do you say autumn or fall in your neck of the woods?

Beth
I think we say both here. Depends. Yeah, I think I totally tend to say fall.

Deb
That is so Canadian that you say both [laughter]. That’s adorable. (We’re so accepting of both ways.) That is so that’s beautifully inclusive! So autumn/fall, the survey comes out, and then we collect answers. This is the second year, so next year is going to be the third year. So far we’ve had generally about a thousand facilitators answering. Or people who facilitate, because some might not be facilitators in their main profession. Then we take all that data, we analyze it, and then we try to make sense of it. So my role is both when writing the survey, I try to come up with interesting questions. Again, not alone, this is all a team effort, but I try to work on the questions so that they are engaging in and of themselves so that the process of filling out the survey is not just a boring ticking boxes, but it’s a reflection opportunity for facilitators. I don’t know if you’ve noticed facilitators like to reflect. So we’ve actually gotten this feedback that people – it’s a rather long survey, but people still enjoy filling it in because you learn while you fill it in by seeing the different options and by having these more open questions. ‘What changed for you in the past year,’ and so on that if you have some time, it’s interesting to reflect back.

And then the other part is I take the numbers and I look at them and I try to make sense of them and I write the little paragraphs that describe what’s in the numbers, and I try to make it logical, not to put too much of my own opinion in, and to ask challenging questions about what does this mean for us for – I don’t know – diversity, or what does this mean for us for the sustainability of the profession? Or for reputation? So ‘question asker’ [laughs] might be a good role (Like a good facilitator!) Well, yeah. Yeah. So that’s what I’ve been doing and I hope to keep doing it because I’m pretty passionate about this project.

Beth
I love that you have added those pieces into the report and I told you I went and sat and read that report this week and really just tried to have time with it as well. Because it is a lengthy document, but I appreciate a couple things about it that you use a large font, so when you actually go old school and print it out, you know, it seems bigger than it really is but maybe that white space kind of gives us that time to reflect as well because it doesn’t seem so dense to read, you know, full of data. But that qualitative piece was really wonderful. And I also appreciated the expert opinions or statements that you collected as well from people in our field where they were sense-making on the data that you were presenting too, and I really found value in some of those pieces.

Deb
That’s another very important point – and thanks because I forgot to mention it – so far, so every year in the report we ask, this year it’s 11 people who are well known in the field, maybe the different aspects, some might be more freelancers, some might be more in-house, some people have podcasts or schools or teach facilitation, and to hear what they say about the report. So that’s an important piece.

Another important piece that was new this year is we added quotes. I had lots of fun with that. So this time we had open questions and we picked out some quotes from people, direct. Again, being a storytelling kind of person, I really enjoy that part. It gives me little insights into colleagues’ minds and working.

Thank you for noticing the white space. That’s a beautiful shout-out to the amazing Laura who does the design for this. And we do try to make it like colourful and legible and, you know, with bolding and all that kind of thing. But everybody listening: Be like Beth, take time with it, sit. She sat in the library with this thing!

Beth
That’s right. [They chuckle.]

Deb
Now you did that because you were preparing for the podcast, but now I’m going to ask a leading question, you know: ‘Was it valuable time you spent reading the report?’

Beth
It was valuable. So what I did was highlight the pieces where – I did this with books too, you know, articles, books, whatever – that I highlight the pieces where that make me go ‘hmmm’ or I kind of pause and I look off into space and go, ‘yeah what is that? What do I think about that? What should we all do about that? Or people never talk about that’. There’s one thing in there which maybe we’ll get to later, which I thought: ‘Wow we don’t really talk about that very much, and that’s a really great thing to bring to the forefront of our conversation’. So I just highlighted and then yes, because I knew I was preparing for the podcast, I just brought all those pieces to help spur our conversation today.

I will say I appreciated those quotes from the survey respondents. So if that was new this year, great job, because a couple of those quotes were those pieces for me where I thought, ‘yeah, right on sister!’ Or you know, I don’t know if it was a woman or whatever, but I thought, ‘OK, that’s a really smart person who’s thinking about something related to the field’. So I really liked the inclusion of some of those quotes. So nice work.

Deb
Thank you. I had fun with that. In case anybody is wondering, it’s free to download. You can read it online or you can download it in PDF and it’s free and it’s staying free. Don’t worry about that. So it’s out there for anybody to read and share.

Beth
So can you tell us a little bit about the key takeaways that you think came up in the report? I know you had, right off the bat, you shared some of these major themes that were, were coming up. Can you tell us what they were?

Deb
First up, very shiny, obviously AI, because that is something that was not present in the report last year and is very present in the report this year. We asked questions at the end of 2023, and already about a third of facilitators were experimenting with using AI as part of the profession. So of course that is interesting and that’s – I think that’s where I decided, ‘let’s try and put direct quotes’, because a few people responded in length to what they were using AI for at that point. But the ones who did were doing super interesting things, and I’m like ‘this has to be in there’. So ‘The Year of AI’ is one of the takeaways and associated to that, sort of, in the same thread of digitalization, is this idea of digitally assisted facilitation. I think we are noticing in the data – but you probably also noticed anecdotally – that facilitators all over the world are weaving digital tools more in their work than we were before the pandemic, of course. Because during the pandemic we all went online. We had to learn all these wonderful tools. But now there’s a lot about going back to in-person and some of those tools we’re kind of bringing with us.

Beth
Yeah, like I like that because you could have said ‘virtual facilitation’, but you said ‘digitally assisted facilitation’ because we’re talking about both modes.

Deb
Yeah, both modes and some intriguing things like – speaking personally – I’ve used Menti in live sessions, right? And showed on a display, while the people are in the room, what they are answering on their phone. So that’s the kind of scenario we’re seeing when we say ‘digital assisted facilitation’. That’s the image I have in my head. As for what is in there that is data, it’s about how many people answered that they’re going back to in-person, but they’re still using digital tools. Or sometimes they’re using in-person and sometimes they’re using online. Maybe in the same intervention series or training series there might be an online session and then a live workshop. And so it’s the digital – I mean, we’re seeing this everywhere, right? I’m not saying anything revolutionary – the digital world and the in-person world are kind of melding together and there are more and more tools available that support some parts of facilitation by using digital tools. So that was another one.

We asked two questions around, are you facilitating online, in-person, or in hybrid mode? So one question was quantitative, like ‘what percentage of your sessions have been online?’ And then another one was an open question, like ‘what has changed in how you’re delivering these sessions this year?’ And the results were kind of different because, when asked to input writing, many people wrote about in-person sessions because it’s a memorable and exciting thing to happen this year: ‘We went back to in-person’. But then when they were looking at the more cold data, ‘how much did you facilitate in-person?’ it was often: ‘I’m still facilitating mostly online, and I probably am going to keep doing that, but a few sessions were in-person and those are memorable’. So that was also interesting, right? There’s so much we could unpack there.

Beth
Definitely. Yeah.

Deb
And then, what topics facilitators were working on. Unsurprisingly, there was a lot that – this comes from a question we asked about: ‘What were the topics of your sessions in the past year?’ About 70% of people said ‘training courses’ which opens another interesting topic about training and facilitation. Then another – I don’t remember the number now – but a big majority was about team support. This is related to going back to work or to this new emergence of remote teams, hybrid teams, so facilitators are being more and more called to support with keeping teams aligned and cohesive.

Then the last two things we highlighted as like the main takeaways are about ‘how do we find work?’ Uh, so ‘how do facilitators learn how to be facilitators?’ And the answers there are very interesting: learning by doing 69.9%, observing other people at work is 40.8%. So I decided that this word was going to be used, which is facilitation as ‘craft’, because that, to me, is how you pick up a craft.

Then ‘how did people find jobs?’ And it’s mostly word of mouth and referrals. So that led another one of the commentators, I’m going to have to go and find who to give us this – yes, that was Leanne Hughes giving us this great quote: ‘We work in a relationship driven industry’. Then what does that mean for us? What does it mean for how you spend your time, when you’re marketing? What is valuable? If it’s a relationship driven industry, well, probably networking community is where we find the most value.  So those are our key findings, and there’s plenty more.

Beth
I know. I want to jump off from about 18 things, you know, that came to mind as you were giving the highlights, but let’s back up just slightly, too. So thanks for the key takeaways. Can you tell us about the respondents, because I think there’s something just really critical that we need to understand about who answered the survey, who didn’t answer the survey. You know where I’m going with that. Who answered the survey?

Deb
Yeah, of course. That’s important to say. That’s like the big disclaimer. It’s somewhere up there on top. So we share the survey through SessionLab’s networks, and all the networks of people who are friends, you know, of SessionLab. The IAF – The International Association of Facilitators – is a enormous help there. So many people in there helped us with feedback, creating this survey this year, translating the survey into Spanish, which was another fun experiment. So we get a lot of help there. And then networks of people, like you, who have audiences or newsletters or in podcasts or through facilitation certification schools. But our reach is inevitably limited. So, when we look particularly at the demographic section, I still think it’s interesting but it’s not fair to say that it’s a photograph of all facilitation worldwide. For example, I know there is so much visitation going on in Japan, but the language barrier there is quite important. So we did get a few answers from Japan, but certainly not representative of the huge diversity of facilitation going on in African countries, facilitation going on in Asian countries. We got a lot of representation from the US and from the EU, which doesn’t really say much about what facilitation is in the world.

What it does say – because OK the obvious thing to say is: ‘Our reach is limited’. But I think there’s also a less obvious thing that we should pay attention to there, which is it means that our networks are not as connected as they could be. There’s networks of facilitators in India, for example. Some of them are part of the IAF so they got this, but it means that there could be so much more work done to create more connections – even interpersonal connections, which then means that you send the survey to your friend and your friend sends it to – so that it would be a bit more uniformly spread out. Any help that anybody can give us with sharing the survey next year and making it more representative, we’re really keen to do that. But it’s not an easy thing to do. It’s not as easy as saying, ‘oh, we’re going to share the survey worldwide’. It takes a lot of work.

Beth
It does. Yeah. Even just that it’s shared through a digital tool would be hard for reaching some people who don’t use digital tools to facilitate or to live their life in certain countries or areas of the world. Yeah. I have the same thing with the podcast, to be honest, because there’s so many people that could come on the podcast and talk about facilitating learning, but where do I find the most people? North America and Europe, of course, so it takes a little bit more effort for me to – and again, it speaks to my own networks that happily are expanding – but it takes time to go and attend other events that are being held in different parts of the world, blah, blah, blah. So, yeah. So let’s all try to help you next year to expand the reach of the survey.

Deb
Absolutely. I’m kind of taking a look as we speak. So we got most answers from the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, Spain, Australia, France, Italy, and then we have South Africa and Kenya and the Netherlands, and then it goes on. So we did get answers from all over the world, which is really exciting. But certainly an over representation – also in terms of languages.

And then there’s the interesting fact about gender. So first year and second year, it’s more women answer the survey than men. And there, I have no idea if it’s more women are facilitating than men or if it’s women are more likely to fill out a survey. [laughter] I am not entirely sure.

Beth
We will never know! Yeah. And what about the under-30 crowd? Because I wrote down here that we have a scarcity of facilitators in that crowd answering this survey. So again, why do we think that is? We may not know, but you might have some ideas about that.

Deb
Yeah, 3.8% of the people filling out the survey are under 30 years old. Now, again, easy to say and probably true, that one comes to facilitation usually a bit later in life, it’s most commonly we’ve had other kinds of experiences and discovered that bad meetings suck and then tried to do something about it. [chuckles] And maybe the confidence to be a consultant, which is a form of what we do, it comes a bit later. But I am meeting more and more young people who are discovering the facilitation is a career and that we might want to just start with that. I think that will change. I think that number will change. I think some of it is also due to the fact that we’re on LinkedIn, we’re not on TikTok. [laughter]

Beth
Where do we hang out?

Deb
Yeah, but I do want to say, because it is one of the things I am proudest about with this work, is that that particular finding which was also highlighted in the first edition, where it was again around 3% of facilitators said they were under 30, really sparked a lot of conversations. I noticed it especially in the IAF because I’m also part of the IAF and shout-out this year, which is the IAF’S 30th birthday, the leadership group has decided to do a ‘30 under 30’ offer. So if you are a facilitator under 30 years old, you can join the IAF for only $30 this year. I do want to claim that that is probably, at least in part, sparked by the report showing that so evidently that people were like, ‘oh can we do anything about this?’ And I’ve noticed also in other like schools offering bursaries and just trying to encourage younger facilitators to come onboard. Because it’s a pretty nice career.

Beth
Yeah. And we know that there are a lot out there I think, too. Here in Victoria there was a younger facilitators’ network at one point and maybe it still exists. I’m just kind of not so young anymore and so I wasn’t a part of it and, and I’m not a part of it, but they’re out there. We just have to find them and kind of draw them in to the rest of us who are connecting worldwide in the field. What about the respondents who reported having a disability, which I found quite interesting because neurodiversity was in there, which I know we can – that is an ability, I don’t want to think of it as a disability – but I know you kind of had to kind of lump a whole bunch of things together there because of how surveys work or whatever – but 20% of respondents – and a lot of respondents reported being neurodiverse, which is really interesting.

Deb
I am very glad that we invited Marie Dubost to comment on that because I am absolutely not qualified to comment on that. What I am qualified to comment on is that I’m so glad we put that question there. I don’t think anybody had ever asked whether facilitators self-identifying as having a disability – who are they, what are they doing, how are they working?

Sometimes we have conversations about participants with disabilities, and even that is not – is a conversation we could have a lot more. I think we are starting to have those conversations and there are some great people out there educating the community, including Marie which is why we invited her to comment on that. So I’m just glad that we asked. Some people asked us back in feedback about this question and about the question about ethnic origin: ‘Why are you asking these things?’ And of course we are ready to be proven wrong, but we are asking these things because we want to see. We want to show what is going on and then see if we need to have conversations about that.

Beth
Yeah I think that’s great because my first thing is what can we do about that? Because we don’t want to say that the field of facilitation has 69.5% facilitators from white or European descent, like that is just not true. That’s true in the survey, but how do we find other people in the world and bring them in and get more accurate data and so on? So no disrespect to the survey. It just, it tells us something, doesn’t it? And it means we have to take action about that. And whether that’s bringing people in to co-facilitate with those of us who are white European descent or referring to other people who are from different cultures and backgrounds. And anyway, there’s a whole bunch of stuff in there that we should notice and then perhaps ask ourselves what we need to do about it. Not just about the race piece, but about the other aspects we just talked about.

Deb
Yeah. We asked a question – towards the end you will find two questions; one is on environmental, like what do you do in your practice about environmental issues and the other one is about social justice. That is certainly a question where we had to kind of bag together lots of different answers, but it’s another place where in the quotes and the ideas that came out from people answering are very interesting. Like what you said about co-facilitating came up. Like ‘what are you as a facilitator doing that you feel is something in the arena of social justice?’ And people say, ‘I’m trying to bring in younger facilitators, or I’m trying to work with people who in some way are very different from me’ – could be origin, could be language, could be age, could be experience, whatever that means for different people.

Beth
Yeah. I will say from personal experience, when I went to one of the IAF Africa events, it just blew my mind. I mean I had never been to one of their events before and it was joyful. I learned so much from my fellow facilitators. The IAF is wonderful, actually, for just opening up all sorts of stuff that we can attend in different countries of the world online. So just a huge learning that I experienced and I’ll do more of that for sure.

The environmental piece was actually the piece that I highlighted where I stopped and thought, ‘oh my gosh, we don’t really speak about this a lot overtly, environmental aspects of facilitation’. So I did write it down for things that I was noting. The report talked about digital pollution, the carbon emissions behind our digital activities. and using materials in an eco way. These are things like – I’m from British Columbia, Canada and we are actually pretty ahead of maybe other countries in the world or other areas of the world in terms of our environmental awareness and knowledge. So I live here in a very eco-friendly, kind of eco-aware area, but still I don’t really hear people talking about the environmental aspects of facilitation overtly. Maybe we make sure those materials are recycled at the end of a facilitation but we don’t really talk about it with other facilitators – like we just do it. I don’t know. Like there was an interesting piece that it was bringing light to that area for me from the survey.

Deb
Well, that brings me to say we really try – when we ask the questions and when we compile the report – to make sure there’s something useful in there for everybody. When I sit down and I start outlining what’s going to actually end up in the report, first I do whatever I think is interesting and then I’m like: ‘if I’m a newcomer to facilitation, what can I find in here that’s interesting?’ Say I’ve been facilitating for 50 years, ‘what is in here that could be interesting?’ And so we try to make sure that there’s something like useful and actionable, including the very simple things like ideas about using markers that are refillable. I’m using refillable markers this year. There. It’s a tiny little thing. But I really like what you said about shedding light.

I have a different experience about talking about it because I worked as a tutor and coach for Climate-KIC students. That’s an EU private-public partnership that does these summer schools. And so I was working, facilitating groups and teams of students on climate, and they would not tolerate my high usage of Post-Its. My crew, my friends – I love you, you’re great – you gave me headaches [Beth laughs] because it was like, ‘Deb’s using too many Post-Its. So I have given thought to that kind of thing [laughs]. And I know these are very small gestures. Sometimes they’re very symbolic but it was very nice to see the range of different answers. Facilitators have this principle of being – of neutrality or equi-distance – but we do make choices about venues, about clients. I think most people who answered environmental things, they said: ‘The choice that I make is I choose my clients. I choose to support certain groups and not others;. And then other people were like, ‘No, that’s not me’ which is also fine. It’s not a hugely important piece but I’m glad it’s in there.

Beth
Yeah and it speaks maybe back to that piece – you said the word ‘craft’ and how do we craft our craft, or craft our practice? And that was one of the pieces I saw too that respondents indicated they’ve chosen to direct their career towards supporting certain types of organizations. I guess in the beginning, maybe that’s kind of an age thing as well, or how long you’ve been in the business. Because I find now that I’ve been in facilitation for whatever it is, 20 plus years, there was a time where I was just taking everything that came my way. And then over the past however many years I’ve been more crafting who I work with, and that work continues so that we make choices, I guess, and show something through our inaction or action around who we choose to work with and where we choose to spend our time. It’d be interesting to see what younger facilitators have to say about that piece. Is that still true for a younger facilitator or are they crafting their career because, I don’t know, they’re just more savvy than we were when we were in our twenties or thirties or whatever it is. So yeah another question for the younger facilitators in the field.

Deb
Oh yeah. We’ve got to get somebody: “Hey, people who identify as this younger facilitation thing, get in touch! We need you for the next report. We need you to help you help us write questions.” We need you as an expert insight, and Beth needs to interview you.

Beth
I do. I’ve been looking for a younger facilitator and I just mentioned – I have a WhatsApp chat with some facilitator friends – and I just said last week, ‘OK if anyone knows someone that’s younger in the field, please send them my way’. And so now I’m saying it worldwide: If you are a younger facilitator I would love to interview you. [laughs] Especially if you come from a background that’s not my own. And I’ve talked about that kind of piece before. So yeah, come and teach us some stuff, you younger facilitators!

Deb
Please. Now Beth, there’s this ability that facilitators have, which is something’s been said in the room, and then you kind of – you remember it – and then about an hour later you go back to it and that amazes participants sometimes [Beth laughs]. So you had something in the report that really surprised you but that’s not the word you used – that you really were keen to talk about. What was it?

Beth
It might have been the environmental piece that I just mentioned. But I have a couple of other things like that and one was around the session length because it seemed so benign. The report says that two hours is the most common session length. And I think you either told me in our pre-meeting or you told me in the recording now, now I can’t remember which, that people were indicating that 70% of people or so were facilitating learning, as opposed to facilitating process, or meetings. And so we think OK there’s a lot of facilitative trainers that are answering this. So they’re saying – maybe those people are saying that two hours is the most common session length. And I want to ask us all: Is that a problem? Because I teach facilitation and I know other people do, like Kirsty, we’ve already mentioned, and you know, Myriam and other people. And so, when we only are given two hours to work with a group to teach them facilitation skills or learning design or whatever kind of pieces are within the learning field, it’s a problem, isn’t it? Like our team has had this discussion where we want to work more often and for longer periods of time with clients in a transformational way. And I just question whether two hours can be transformational. Full stop, right? Maybe two hours over a period of year, when you meet more often for two hours each. But, I don’t know, I have that kind of question for us all. Like, is that a problem? I’d love to see that lengthen in reports to come.

Deb
Yeah. And I don’t think it will but we’ll see because that’s a trend.

Beth
And maybe there was a piece around two hours online, which I agree with. I think there was something about we’ve all decided that something more than two hours in a virtual space is kind of problematic. But if that meant that it was in-person as well, we kind of have a problem. I like getting together with participants for a day, two days, three days – more. That’s transformational.

Deb
Yeah. So it’s data that is not that easy to read online because it’s all divided between: not at all, a few times a year, at least monthly, at least weekly – but there is a super predominance – that is not a technical term – of one two-hour long session. This is definitely an inheritance of the pandemic. During the pandemic we learned that, as you said, one and a half hours, two hour sessions online is good because after that we get Zoom fatigue and our attention levels decrease regardless of how good we are at energizers and stretching and water and all that. It’s a good length for online. But it’s transferring to everything.

I think that finding also goes together with another one that came from this question: ‘What has changed for you in the past 12 years?’ And people talked a lot about impact about their clients requiring a more thorough, careful, and well-done impact evaluation – which is probably a good thing in itself. But then you put those together and you’ve got short sessions with the requirement that you deliver impact. I think it was Jan Keck who wrote on LinkedIn a kind of longish reflection about that particular finding. He’s well known for…ice-melter person. Like working to create connection. That piece of creating connection before going into whatever you’re going into decision making, teaching, learning, whatever it is, it takes time. I also think it is scary if the result of shorter sessions means taking away all the parts that accompany and create the really fertile soil for learning or for solid conversations. You know, working to create connection at the beginning, working to create understanding and debriefing at the end. I think that is a bit of a scary thing.

If we want to be hopeful we can also say something about going back to the digitally assisted or the hybrid or blended modes. Maybe it’s a two hour session, but before that there’s reflections and questionnaires and group work, and after that as well. I hope so.

Beth
Yeah. It’s a combo of something and one-on-one sessions. Who knows? Yeah. Because the other piece that’s sort of related to that – I’m trying to find it in my notes – it was around the session topic section of the report that “we’re consciously creating work culture with the supportive expert facilitators in helping companies navigate the new work landscape”. So that’s big work, right? All of a sudden, we have a pandemic and people realize, ‘oh there are people in the world that facilitate and maybe they’re actually great at working with our companies and helping our teams work better together (laughs) and do all of those things, right? This new work landscape. It was really wonderful to see that reflected. But then, you’re right, when we compare it with the two-hour sessions, let’s just hope there’s something else going on there where people come in as more of a consultative role and they’re working in teams in different ways than just a workshop or a course or a meeting.

Deb
Yeah, I’m looking at that graph, as you speak, under this lens which I hadn’t thought about it yet. So looking at the graph that talks about what types of sessions through the lens of length, and all the ones that are mentioned as most common look to me like they probably need to be longer things: training courses, team building, strategy development, stakeholder engagement. And then there’s ones that are less often run that seem to me like, ‘OK these can be faster’ like design sprints, which I’m thinking can be faster because it’s got sprint in the name (laughter), public consultation events – which I do some of those; they’re often one-off things. So that’s interesting. I think you’ll make me think about how to ask questions next year that allow us to illuminate longer interventions. Like ‘are these sessions that you’re talking about a one-off or are you doing series?’ I think we never asked that before. That’s going to be Beth’s question next year.

Beth
Because you mentioned Jan Keck. I had him on the podcast too and I’ve been watching his writing a book, Ice Melters, Jan, we can’t wait for it! But maybe it’s easier for someone like Jan to do a one or two hour ice melters because it’s activities we’re going to go grab, and it’s easy to grab it. But you’re right, some of those other pieces. We want longer with groups and I hope people are out there doing it. So a bit more data on separating those pieces out would be wonderful.

But it is heartening to see we’re needed. We’re needed in the world for all types of things. I loved that you – because I talk a lot about facilitating learning and facilitating process. I have to kind of mess it up on my website and say training for the one and facilitation for the other. But I love that the report really does say: ‘We are all facilitators and we either facilitate meetings or we facilitate workshops or some of us do both, and that we can call that both facilitation’. And I’d love to read the Myriam Hadnes quote because I think she really nails it around what that is. If you’re OK with me saying that.

Deb
I can always shut up to let Myriam talk, because she’s got smart things to say, yeah!

Beth
[Laughs] OK so Myriam said: “While all great trainers facilitate, because it’s the skill that turns a lecture into a learning experience, not all facilitators train, because they often focus on the process work that remains content agnostic.” So thank you, Myriam, because it’s just a language thing for us all to kind of futz around with going, ‘Ah! Do we call both things facilitation?’ The IAF actually doesn’t really certify people who facilitate learning. I’ve checked this out with them actually, and they’re a great organization. But they certify people who facilitate process. So it’s great that the IAF is such a great partner for SessionLab because they really only support, it seems, officially – through the certification process – the people who facilitate process. But this report says, ‘no we can all call ourselves facilitators’. And maybe, IAF, if you’re listening, maybe someday you’ll have a vein for all of us who facilitate learning or process and what does that look like in – I’m not certified as a facilitator through them but I know many people are – like what does that look like to get certification in either learning or process or both. So yeah. Questions again.

Deb
Questions again. We get very interested in these matters of terminology. I certainly do, obviously, because of the work I do but I’m also really enjoying – something in what you said just sparked this line of thought – what conversations that I see going on in the facilitation community about, ‘OK but from the client’s point of view, what value are we offering?’ We are offering great learning experiences, learning that sticks, and we’re offering support to teamwork, decision making, whatever it is that people are doing. Maybe looking at it from the client’s point of view helps to clarify all those language blunders. But it’s useful to look at it for like ‘what problem are we solving? Who are we helping?’

Beth
Yeah. That’s just great work with clients, isn’t it? Where we have to get ahead of ourselves and go, ‘OK how can we talk about this stuff so that clients can understand?’ Absolutely.

Deb
I think somebody wrote the other day, ‘Stop selling facilitation’. But you’re not selling facilitation. You’re selling some sort of solution. You’re selling better dialogue, better communication, improved decision making, efficiency at work. That’s part of why the word has such a difficult reputation to be explained.

Beth
Yeah, that’s right. I know we should close our time together, Deb. It’s so fascinating because there are many more questions that we could be talking about of –

Deb
You can have Episode #2 anytime!

Beth
I know, exactly! We’ll keep talking about it for sure, in our own networks as well. But I guess is there anything that you really want to leave us with that we haven’t mentioned yet that you think is pivotal?

Deb
Well, I am known to be quite a pragmatic and practical person. So I think one part of the report that we haven’t talked about is the one where we’ve asked people to tell us their favourite resources.

So we had a series of questions asking – so 1,000 facilitators informing us so generously what an amazing community of what your favourite books are, podcasts are, newsletters are, and communities as well – communities, there’s a lot, so this big graph. If you don’t take anything else from this podcast, take the interesting idea of going to the State of Facilitation report and checking out what facilitators’ favourite top resources are. Second year in a row, there is amazing love expressed for Priya Parker’s Art of Gathering, and you see what Priya is doing. Brilliant, Priya. She’s making facilitation so accessible. She’s talking about gathering people. She’s not using jargon. I think that’s part of why we love this book. I bring a lot of books…I do courses, introduction to facilitation to young people in a higher education school, and I bring a bunch of books and Priya’s is the one they’re always like, ‘oh can I borrow this, Deb?’

Beth
Yeah. Because she made it look beautiful, too. I talk about it all the time as well. I just saw a colleague in the field, Brett Macdonald, who has been on the podcast too, she just mentioned that she was reading it. It’s been around for several years now and people just love it still. Yeah, great resource.

Deb
And then in the podcasts, there are entries you would expect to see like once again, we mentioned Myriam Hadnes’ workshops.work. I think every facilitator’s favourite podcast really. And then there’s a new entry which is Beth’s! (Whoo hoo!) She shot right up the charts. People were mentioning how wonderful and how they enjoy her podcast, so that’s nice to read.

Beth
I was thrilled. I feel like this little dark horse that like somehow got in the race (laughs). Yeah. Because Deb, your episode is number 36, so I haven’t really done many episodes, so thank you community! Thank you for voting us into SessionLab’s report. It was really wonderful.

Deb
I really like that section because we have also at SessionLab done – and many other groups and companies have done – like LinkedIn carousels and posts where you’re like ’10 resources’ and blog posts– we’ve got plenty of those blog posts which are like ‘10 favourite resources’, but there are favourite resources. That one is like crowdsourced. So even better. Resources that you really need to read, or follow, because they are the top favourites. And then you probably have other little ones, niches, new books, or something else. And we’ll see. We keep collecting them every year. And see what comes up.

Beth
People love that. It’s kind of like the expanded version of the resource table. When we go to lead a workshop or whatever, you often have a resource table and people love that because it’s – yeah, we’re with our people and we can kind of share and learn from each other.

I went through the whole report and basically every time you had one of the expert people, like Myriam and Hector Villarreal Lozoya, these folks – a lot of them I’m following on LinkedIn and social media, but a couple of the others I thought, ‘oh who’s that? I haven’t heard of this person yet’. And so I went and followed on LinkedIn all the people that I really hadn’t had an online relationship with yet, which was wonderful and definitely looked at the resources and started signing up for people’s newsletters and that sort of thing as well. So there’s lots of great stuff for those of us who’ve been in the business for a while as well as definitely, if new facilitators are listening to this, go and check out all these great resources mentioned! It’s a super fabulous resource.

Deb
And also the tools, obviously SessionLab features quite highly of the tools because many people who respond read it on our newsletter so it’s kind of obvious. But it’s also just interesting to see what tools, and they might not all be useful for all of you, but perhaps you want to check out what they are and why some facilitators are using Canva or Padlet or Menti and Miro and Mural and just to see what new ones you might want to become familiar with.

Beth
Yeah. And you mentioned – we won’t get into AI – we could probably do a whole other episode on just the AI pieces – but the report does, as you mentioned, has a few good ways that people are using AI that I actually went – I’m developing a lot of resources with my team so that we can try not to reinvent the wheel and just write more things down and we can reference it more easily.  I went and created a ‘ways that we use AI document’ in our collaborative folders, because we are using AI, but we actually never wrote it down as a team – what we’re doing – so that we can just remember ‘oh yeah, we can ask ChatGPT for this brainstorming help’ and work from there. So yeah, that was a nice resource that I could kind of tap into as well and just make a resource for myself and my team because of it.

Deb
Yeah, we saw that – at least – and again, that was in the very beginning, like late 2023, so the beginning of using AI – that most respondents – one third had never used it. And the ones who had used it were using it either for copywriting work – so things that are facilitation adjacent – like you need to write the invitation and you need to promote your course. But that’s not your main job. And if you have an assistant, that’s great, but if not, maybe you don’t. Then the other one was kind of brainstorming and throwing ideas around. You can actually now do that in SessionLab. We have now a little AI tool where you can describe your session and it gives you a starting idea. The starting idea, like I was not all for this thing, but now it’s pretty good. It’s just not good enough and then you still have to work on it and you have to add all those human elements.

I was listening to your podcast with Barbara Pedersen and she was saying how important the foundations of facilitation are, like the human element. And that’s irreplaceable. Like the vision here is that we can use AI to do some of the boring stuff or just to kickstart the thought process. But then it’s really about those facilitation fundamentals that the human element brings to the room virtual or face-to-face. That’s what makes facilitation work.

Beth
Yeah, for sure. But it can be both, can’t it? Like let’s get the help where we can get it and then just use our human skills from that point forward. And I’ll mention too that in the show notes, we are going to have a coupon code that – because one of your colleagues at SessionLab shared with me a coupon code for people to try the Session Planner I believe. So check the show notes out, everybody, because we’ve got a opportunity for you there to see what the Session Planner is all about and check it out. And I’m going to do that myself too so I’m really more aware of that aspect of your resources. Because I hadn’t – I’ve seen it in a webinar, I think, once so I know kind of what it is, but it’s been a while, so I’m going to go check it out as well. And use SessionLab for a little bit more than just the library, which I’ve used for years.

Deb
Nice. Well even if you use just the library, we’re happy. But I worked at SessionLab before getting addicted to using the Planner. Now I’m totally addicted [Beth laughs] because of the automated timing. Because my clients understand what it looks like – this to me is the main thing – I show them these nice printouts with colours and they get it. While they didn’t get my messy Excel’s previous iteration of how I was working out things. So that’s good. And then also that it saves my sessions because I completely forget what I was doing and then it’s really nice to have them all – it’s like a little personal library.

Beth
Nice. Oh it’s a great resource. Well thank you so much Deb. It’s been fascinating to talk about the report with you. Thank you so much to SessionLab itself for recognizing that this is something that we needed in the field and for making the time and space to actually grab information from those almost a thousand people around the world. It’s a great resource and I hope folks have benefited from our conversation today. And just keep on thinking, everybody. Like go read it and think about what it means, and then perhaps do something about it. Whatever works for you.

Deb
Yes. And fill out the survey next year. [laughter]

Beth
Absolutely. I will share it at the time, so please let me know when the next survey is ready to be responded to and I’ll share it out as well.

Deb
Will do. It’ll have your new questions in it.

Beth
[Laughs] Thanks, Deb. Great to have you with me.

Deb
Thank you so much.

[Episode outro]
Beth Cougler Blom
Oh, it was great to chat with Deborah about the report. And I must say that if you thought that it might have been kind of a dull episode just hearing some statistics from the report, I hope you found [chuckles] that it wasn’t just us sharing stats but appreciated the delving into and questioning that we did around things that are coming up in our field and looking a little bit critically at the report and saying, what does that say? And is that actually what’s happening in the state of facilitation in the world or do we have to just keep broadening the respondents so that we get more accurate data and all those kinds of questions that came up in our conversation.

So it’s fantastic that SessionLab has done this for us. It’s only the second year of them putting the survey out, as you heard Deborah say. So let’s just all keep helping them put it out in the future and expanding to reach more facilitators worldwide in different countries, but also different age groups and people with disabilities and all the people that we know are out there doing great work in facilitation. So let’s help them spread the word next time it comes around and you’ll see that happening on my social media channels as well at that time.

One of the things that Deborah said that I want to just reiterate here with you now is that she said that reading the report can be like a reflection opportunity for we facilitators. So if you’ve been kind of humming and hawing about whether you should look at the report and what you’re going to get out of it, I think you’ll find as I did that when you spend some quiet time – and I spent about an hour, you might need more, you might need less – when you spend that quiet time and really think about what this report is saying and what questions it’s bringing up for you and where you’re at in your own facilitation practice and where you still need to go, this is well worth the time to do this.

So it’s not just about reading a report, it’s really an opportunity to check in with yourself and see where you are in your practice, maybe where your colleagues are in your organization or on your team or in your life [smiles] and see what you want to do about that. And of course, you heard Deborah and I talking about questions that we all have to continue to ask ourselves about what facilitation looks like. So keep questioning what’s happening in the field and who’s there and who’s not and all those things as well. So it’s a great reflection opportunity for all of us. So thanks again to Deborah and SessionLab for both putting out the survey, spending the time they did on the report and also to Deborah for coming on to the podcast with me today to talk about it.

if you were hearing about SessionLab for the first time and we piqued your interest in trying the session planner that Debra talked about on the show, in the show notes for this episode, Episode 36, you’re going to find a link that says use this link to sign up to session lab for a 30 day free trial of the pro features. Ok? So go on on to either facilitatingonpurpose.com or click the link through your show notes in your app that you’re listening to this podcast on and go. And when you log in using that link, you’ll be able to get a 30 day free trial of the pro version of SessionLab. So I hope you enjoy that. And thanks again to SessionLab for providing that to my listeners.

On the next episode of the podcast, I talk with Dr. Monty Badami. Monty is an anthropologist and the founder of Habitus, a social enterprise that uses anthropology, emotional intelligence, and educational psychology to unlock your human potential. Now, Monty is a facilitator and he also teaches people how to facilitate as well.
He uses concepts in anthropology to enhance and contribute to his facilitation practice and he teaches people how to do that as well. I must admit that I’ve never put anthropology and facilitation together in my mind, which means I really enjoyed my conversation with Monty and he was able to shed so much light on various things that you and I can be doing – both before we get into rooms with our participants and of course, during our time with them in the room as well. So join Dr. Monty Badami and I next time on the show for “Facilitate Like an Anthropologist”. We’ll see you then.

[Show outro]
Beth
Thank you for listening to Facilitating on Purpose. If you were inspired by something in this episode, please share it with a friend or a colleague to help them expand their facilitation practice too. To find the show notes, give me feedback, or submit ideas for future episodes visit facilitatingonpurpose.com. Special thanks to Mary Chan at Organized Sound Productions for producing this episode. Happy facilitating!

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