What is Facilitation?

Facilitate (verb): make easy or less difficult or more easily achieved.
The Oxford Concise Dictionary (1990)

"A facilitator's job is to make it easy for a group to be successful."
The Zen of Groups, Fisher Books (1995)

“Facilitation is the art of leading group process toward agreed-on outcomes in ways that elicit participation, creativity, and ownership from everyone involved. At its heart is the art of calling out the wisdom in groups and guiding individuals into fully participating and collaborating in creating solutions and results for themselves.”
The IAF Handbook of Group Facilitation (2005)

“A facilitated session is a highly structured meeting in which the meeting leader (the facilitator) guides the participants through a series of predetermined steps to arrive at a result that is created, understood and accepted by all the participants.”
The Secrets of Facilitation, Jossey-Bass (2004)

“Group facilitation is a process in which a person whole selection is acceptable to all the members of the group, who is substantively neutral, and who has no substantive decision-making authority diagnoses and intervenes to help a group improve how it identifies and solves problems and makes decisions, to increase the group’s effectiveness. The facilitator’s main task is to help the group increase effectiveness by improving its process and structure.
The Skilled Facilitator, Jossey-Bass (2002)

Some good reference books define facilitation as this.

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