Facilitation for complex, multi-stakeholder groups

Facilitation — making it easier, whatever the scale.

Facilitation, often complexified, ironically, as the role is to make things easier! For me, good facilitation means holding a process, be that on a personal or a systemic level, with a willingness for supporting it to flow.

Skilful facilitation means conversation happens, ideas flow, behaviours become flexible and able to move around other behaviours rather than becoming stuck and entrenched. For individuals, this can facilitate people to move more elegantly beyond stuck boundaries and edges in their own personal practice. For groups and teams, it can make it easier to traverse the ravines of established opinion and established ways of working - so that new realities and new opportunities can come to the surface.

For Leaders and individuals who keep looping on the same topic of decision or behaviour, for teams planning strategy, for communities who are navigating the complexity of sharing spaces and not sharing opinions (!) for funders redesigning how they give, and partnerships whose future depends on people who don't naturally agree finding a shared way forward. Everyone is welcome. I would love to hear what you are facilitating (or want to facilitate) in yourself or your place or group - please, drop me a line.

Philip standing inside a large circle of seated people in a panelled room, several hands raised.

Large-group facilitation

Some large and complex groups and processes require a more layered approach. Given time we prefer to design multi day events for large stakeholder groups, which enable all the conversations to come to the surface over time, in the right order - employing the range of methods required to facilitate that happening easily.

This will include some capacity building and learning for your own team as we will work with you to design the programme so you will get some learning by doing during the run-up and then you get to participate for the event itself.

For shorter facilitation or specific task-focussed facilitation of a single conversation to focus on one clear purpose — for example a strategy day, a launch event where the people affected by a decision will participate in the day but not the design, we will ordinarily be able to move in a more agile way, although our preference is still to design with a member of your team to make sure we are clearly tuned into the purpose and the context of your own organisation.

What is the Art of Hosting?

The Art of Hosting and Harvesting Conversations that Matter is a global community of practitioners who share practice foundations for working in complexity with hosting conversations that matter. The practice was developed some 25 years ago and has grown into a distributed ecosystem of practitioners who are spread across 7 continents, and are deliberately joined together by relationships rather than a formal organisational structure, adopting living system design principles.

The Art of hosting and Harvesting Conversations That Matter in the UK has been supported and nurtured by many people over the years, and the current regional contacts and stewards for the UK field of practice are Sue Hoey, Philip Marken, Jon Dorsett, Jose Barco. Open trainings continue to be organised as well as specific work with organisations on their own specific needs. You can read more here and find out about upcoming trainings here.

Because of the many years of experience working with the Art of Hosting and Harvesting Conversations that Matter, this forms one of the pillars of the way I work, particularly bringing to life the principles of Chaordic Design and the four fold practice

Wherever we are going, we will put what matters in the centre, and make it our purpose to focus on being in service to what matters.

Governance and decision making processes

One Decision, Many Facets

Making a decision seems like one moment in time - however it is the result of many many months, years, decades, generations of culture, opinion, relationship and layers upon layers of experiencing and hoping and dreaming and personal identity all wrapped up together in the decision about one thing.

This is why working towards a single decision making event can often take months and months of build up, relationship development, mediation in advance, personal awareness, systemic work to set the scene for a group of related but not necessarily agreeing parties to work together to find a shared solution.

Then the process becomes the decision making architecture and the decision making event becomes the ratification of the decision they are making.

The process becomes the decision making, as people who are not ready to make a shared decision will likely not be able to make one if given the chance. Rather than designing clever and equitable voting systems, we rather develop process deeply rooted personal and interpersonal relationship building, so people are then ready to work together on a solution. This is where multi-party governance and consensus design flourish where long term investment in relationship means a decision is both arrived at and stuck by for the long term.

One example of this is a DEFRA Landscape Recovery partnership — eighteen landowners, from family farms to conservation charities to natural capital companies, working to agree a single legal structure to hold a twenty-year land management agreement together. Read the full account →

I am Keen to hear what you are working with, if you feel a chat could be interesting, drop me a line.

A circle of chairs set out in an empty room, a small centrepiece on the floor and two hand-drawn Art of Hosting charts on the wall.

See the work · Working with me — the practical detail

Facilitation training

Within the mindset that the quality of the facilitator themselves is instrumental in the quality of their own facilitation outputs, we do also deliver facilitation training of various styles. This can either be an Art of Hosting taster or full training, for a full and transformational immersion into the art of hosting practices and methodologies, and a welcome into the global field of practice of The Art of Hosting and Harvesting Conversations that Matter. You can find news about open trainings worldwide on the trainings page on the artofhosting.org website. The next Art of Hosting training for England is in February 2027.

Recent examples include Art of Harvesting training for England at Ashburnham House, Sussex — 3.5 days of immersive and transformative residential training for those wishing to develop their personal and shared practices for working on the things that matter in these complex times.

Participatory grantmaking

Participatory grant-making is a practice rather than a formula, and is therefore unique every time because the cohort designs the fund based on their own experience, knowledge and wisdom. It starts with the principle that people closest to a need usually hold the clearest wisdom about what would help, and that funding decisions are fairer and more connected, when those people are the decision makers.

In a similar way to governance and decision making processes, Participatory grant making puts all the decision making in the hands of a community panel, and our way of supporting participatory grant making processes is to first build relationship between the parties involved in the process and form a foundation of relationship before they even begin making decisions about what the grant process will look like or how decisions will be made.

This in our experience is the most beneficial way to support not only wise decisions to be made, but also the inherent benefit of stronger links persisting amongst community panel members when the entire decision making process is concluded. This is enormously capacity building and leaves an imprint of not only money but also stronger relationships.

I am currently working on participatory grant making with Together for Peace co-facilitating peer learning for the National Lottery Community Fund's You Decide programme.

Getting the right people together

All of this participatory work is made connected and meaningful if the groups, rooms and settings include people representing the entire system. If the cohort is made up entirely of people who share thoughts and opinions, the reduction in difference means only certain sides of the story will be included - and therefore the solution will be lopsided, and unstable. A critical component of all design work, in every way of working, is making sure all voices are included. Then the skill of the facilitator needs to be employed to ensure voices of those who might be ordinarily subordinated, are actively included, at least in the discussions and processes, and at all times if possible in the design itself.

Questions

What does a facilitator actually do in a large group process?

A facilitator designs and holds the structure a group needs to think and decide together — who speaks when, how disagreement gets space rather than getting smoothed over, how quieter voices carry real weight alongside more confident ones. In Art of Hosting practice specifically, the starting assumption is that if a group is convened to represent the system it is in service of, the wisdom needed is already there; the job is building a structure for that wisdom to come to the surface and, thereby the process and way forward will be owned and mandated by the people who have created it.

How do you brief a facilitator?

Begin at the beginning and tell us where you are at. At the initial outreach, just drop us a line and share your thoughts and what you hope to achieve. Any information about who's involved, what's the purpose and what's already been done to date is helpful. If you have information like dates, a venue, that's great but we can cover that on the introductory call. We will design everything based off our initial conversation with you the client and ideally, design it with you so you learn a bit through the process and can carry some capacity back with you into your organisation.

What shapes the cost of a facilitation engagement?

All costs depend on the scope of the work, and are itemised for clarity. Together we will agree a rate, scope and expected duration and boundaries for if any over-run is experienced. The initial scoping conversation is free and no charged-for meetings will take place without it being made clear in writing.

How is Art of Hosting different from other facilitation approaches?

Art of Hosting is distinct from ordinary facilitation processes because it takes the view that the quality of the internal condition of the facilitator and their willingness to be a committed collaborator, directly influences the quality of the outcomes.

This is articulated in the four fold practice, which encourages that before even participating in processes, a person spends time to connect with and host themselves. There beyond, participation comes from a place of already roundedness.

After learning to be a good participant from that place of established roundedness, a person may begin to host other people and convene events and gatherings where they take responsibility for the process. After becoming experienced with hosting their own events and gatherings, they then have cultivated enough internal condition to enable themselves to be a good collaborator who can truly work with others to create and scale outcomes and impact.

Therefore, one who is facilitating large processes from within the art of hosting methodology is expected to have already spent time building relationship with themselves and their own personal practice before they step forward and begin to collaborate with others on higher stakes work. This embodies the worldview that in order to facilitate a change process one is inherently changed in and of oneself, which is distinct from linear styles of facilitation. As a host of, and a human inherently involved in a complex process, my destiny is inevitably wrapped up with yours, and we are each working together in service of a future we will participate in, and be changed by.

Do you work with NHS and public sector organisations?

Yes — a good deal of this work fits inside NHS, DEFRA, and government departments and we are experienced in working with statutory sector and third-sector governance structures, where procurement and funding rules, accountability, and multiple institutional stakeholders are part of the system. Public sector procurement and reporting requirements are familiar territory here, not something that needs explaining from scratch.

Start a conversation about what your room needs.

See the work · Working with me — the practical detail