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Facilitators, from consensus process to ombuds and beyond
A career based in facilitation is usually either in a large organization or as a consultant for a large organization. It may come in the form of a specialized process, such as a consensus decision-making circumstance or it may be one of many conflict management services, such as ombuds services or the design and implementation of internal conflict management. It can be a position that is free-floating in a large organization--government agency, institution, corporation--so that the facilitator is simply available across this large organization or it may be a service offered by a private consultancy that a large organization uses from time to time.
Leading a consensus decision-making process is a specialized set of competencies often done in order to legitimately flatten any hierarchy for the purposes of making major decisions, seeking the genuine input and ultimate consensus of all parties or representatives of sectors of the organization, without fear or favor. This is fairly unusual and even more unusual when management--e.g., owners, CEOs, heads of large departments--have an official power pyramid that is difficult to authentically set aside for the duration of the consensus process. A specialist in facilitating this may be required, and it often starts by engaging in the requisite education of the parties to convince them that, for this decision-making process the facilitator has been brought in to temporarily change the structure of how decisions are made, to seek the participation of each of the parties at the table without the disabling effects of fear of overstepping authority.
An ombuds, on the other hand, is available to individuals and small groups within a large organization, to hear concerns and complaints and to facilitate progress toward solutions in order to head off conflicts that might otherwise become litigious or some grander problem, including severe loss of productivity or efficiency due to festering conflict. Latent effects of unattended conflict can radically reduce the productive output of portions of a large organization, imposing ongoing costs that good upstream conflict work, such as ombuds services, can help reduce.
At times facilitation may also include designing an internal conflict management apparatus and organizational culture that seeks to make the organization self-facilitating to some measure. This frequently includes trainings that skill up more and more of the members of the organization to recognize the problems of unmanaged conflict and to initiate or even perform conflict management themselves. A series of trainings may include increasingly specialized sets of competencies such as: Understanding the organizational working diagrams; Deëscalating workplace conflict; Bystander intervention; Small group facilitation; Envisioning personal futures in the organization; Mandatory reporting legal requirements; Building an organizational culture toward increasing success; Team-building, and much more.
