How I Work: A first attempt at a process map

I have been reflecting on my facilitation practice recently. Something has been not quite right, and I am struggling to understand what the disconnect is. This is not about what I do, that's easy enough to summarize, but rather how I do it. The reasoning behind the steps.

This is my first attempt to answer that question: How do I work? How do I approach facilitation? I expect to revise the answers as I keep thinking, but I wanted to use this space to voice some inner thinking, to bound ideas off the internet.

In total, I think there are seven elements. Not steps in a linear process, but more like questions to ask, each one conditioning the next.

1. Conditions Assessment

The first thing I do before any engagement isn't design a session. It's to ask whether this engagement makes sense.

Do my values align with the work being proposed? Are the conditions right for good work? Is the question real? Are the right people in the room? And is there alignment between what I'm being asked to do and what this process can honestly deliver?

That last one is the hard question, and it doesn't always have a comfortable answer. I've been asked to design processes where the outcome was, functionally, already decided, where the process existed to give a decision the appearance of legitimacy. That work no longer interests me, if it ever did. Values misalignment at the front end is a stop sign, not a speed bump.

I don't always get this right. Sometimes you don't know what you've walked into until you're already in it. But the practice of asking these questions before the contract is signed is an important step that has saved me more than once.

2. The Contract

There are several points along the way where there is a “contract”. Not a contract for employment as in signed agreement outlining what I will do for the client. Rather, an understand between the people I am working with and I. This understanding is more then words on a page, more than the outcomes listed in a Schedule A. This understanding is about how we will work together; how we will move through a complex and sometimes contentious process in a manner that is supportive, open and critical.

The first understanding is with the steering committee or organising body. Our expectations must be in alignment, and we work to ensure that the outcomes they are seeking align with the people we invite and the process we develop.

The second is with the participants. The opening establishes why we're here, what the stakes are, and what I'm inviting people into. I'm not there to lead them somewhere, I'm there to hold the conditions for them to do the work. A muddy opening produces a muddy session; you spend the day managing confusion instead of doing the work. When the opening is clear and genuinely compelling, you can feel it in the room within the first five minutes.

Both contracts are commitments I'm making. I'm telling people what kind of process this is.

3. Designing the Arc

A session is not a sequence of disconnected agenda items. It's a journey with a shape.

Where are we starting from? Where do we need to get to? What's the central question that everything else orbits? The middle of a well-designed session is where the real work happens, which means you must design for depth, not coverage. Depth is difficult to describe. It's the layers of understanding and trust that are built as you move through the opening portions of the agenda. Is the room safe for people to open up? Do we all understand the problem we are trying to address?

This is the part of the work I find most absorbing. There's something genuinely satisfying about building a process with a through-line, where each piece builds upon the next, where the close feels inevitable in retrospect. I spend more time on arc than on anything else in the design phase.

4. Presence

I stay in the room. Always within sight. I read the energy.

This sounds obvious, but it isn't. There are facilitators who manage the agenda and facilitators who hold the room, and those are different jobs. Managing the agenda is useful. Holding the room is the work.

Holding the room means being willing to intervene publicly when the conversation needs it — to name what's happening, redirect, slow down, or stop. It means trusting your read of the group even when the group is pushing back. It means not disappearing into the background when things get uncomfortable.

I've had sessions where I didn't do this well, where I deferred to someone with more positional authority than I had, and lost the thread as a result. I learned something from each of those instances. Presence isn't a personality trait. It's a practice, and it requires conditions: clear values alignment going in, and enough confidence in your own authority to use it when it matters.

5. Collecting Thunder

This is the one I have the hardest time explaining, so bear with me.

The close of a session is the most important part. Most facilitators, including earlier versions of myself, treat the close as a logistical task. Wrap up the flip charts. Assign the action items. Thank everyone for their time.

I've been trying to do something different, to build the close during the session by collecting the pivotal moments, the quotable statements, and reflecting them back to the group. By describing the arc that we’ve been on together.

Throughout the day, I'm listening for the moments, the phrases, the breakthroughs, the vulnerabilities, that belong in the close. When someone says something true and important, I note it. When the room shifts, I notice that too. By the time we're in the final stretch, I have material. Something to work with. Not a summary of what happened, but the shape of what it meant.

6. The Witness

The close I'm building isn't a recap. It's closer to a story.

When I close, I return to the contract and seek to remind people of where we started, the shape of the journey, and what it means moving forward. In speechwriting it's called inclusio; a rhetorical device where a piece opens and closes with the same word, phrase, image, or idea, creating a frame that makes the whole thing feel complete and intentional. The ending doesn't just finish; it echoes the beginning, and that echo gives the whole structure meaning.

I try to experience the work in a way that makes people feel seen: like they just participated in something that will matter.

Then, and only then, the logistics.

I think a lot about this element. It's where facilitation most closely resembles ceremony. The point is that it requires a different quality of attention than the rest of the day, and it can't be improvised. It has to be built by collecting thunder all session.

7. What Comes Next

A single session is rarely enough for the problems I work on.

Multi-interest conflicts, governance questions, relationships between peoples — these don't resolve in a day. They need time, repeated contact, the slow accumulation of trust. Good process compounds. One honest conversation opens the door for the next.

So part of what I'm designing for, always, is continuity. How does this session set up the next one? What relationship are we building that will carry the work forward when the formal process ends? A well-designed close isn't just the end of the session — it's the beginning of whatever comes after.

That's seven elements. The method is only as good as the reasoning behind it, and the reasoning is only as good as the values underneath. Conditions assessment, the contract, presence, the witness — none of those mean anything if you're not genuinely committed to honest process. To the idea that people deserve to know what they're participating in, and why, and what it might actually change.

That's the practice as I understand it now. But that might change.