Becoming a Better Strategic Partnerships Facilitator

I used to think strategic partnership facilitation was mainly about getting the right people around the table and helping them reach agreement. Now, I’m increasingly thinking it is more about helping people understand what problem they are actually trying to solve.

Because the problem you see determines the questions you ask, the evidence you look for and the decisions you eventually make. That sounds simple but it isn’t.

Take a partnership where everyone agrees the problem is “poor communication”. One person may mean information isn’t reaching communities. Another may mean organisations aren’t sharing data. Someone else may actually mean, “I don’t trust them.”

So when I facilitate, I try to make a quick mental calculation: What is this person seeing? What distinction are they making? What are they leaving out? What are they treating as obvious?

People can be looking at exactly the same situation while making completely different sense of it.

This is because people also speak from different modes of thinking. One person may be describing what happened to an individual. Another sees a recurring pattern. Someone else sees the system producing that pattern. None of these views is automatically more intelligent.

The facilitator’s job is to understand the relationship between them and help the room move between the concrete experience and the wider system.

There is another trap: what people say is not always what they think, and what they say or think is not always what they do. This becomes particularly important when power is in the room.

Someone can agree enthusiastically to a recommendation and then do something completely different afterwards. So “everyone agreed” is not necessarily evidence that accommodation happened.

Some partnerships are genuinely pluralist, with people willing to negotiate their differences. Others contain much stronger power dynamics, where some actors have far more ability or incentive to preserve the status quo.

You cannot facilitate both situations in exactly the same way.

So perhaps the biggest lesson for me is that facilitation is less about having the perfect framework and more about developing the ability to read the situation before deciding how to intervene.

And how do you develop that?

The frustratingly simple answer is:

Facilitate more. Reflect more.

After the meeting, ask yourself: What did I think the problem was? Did that change? What did I miss? Whose understanding dominated? Did we reach genuine accommodation or simply polite agreement? And what will I look for afterwards to know whether anything actually changed?

There is no shortcut to becoming better at this. The best facilitators are not necessarily the people with the most frameworks. They are the people who can stay curious when everyone else is rushing towards a solution.

Sometimes the most strategic thing you can do in a partnership meeting is slow the room down long enough to make sure everyone is actually talking about the same problem.

That is where better questions start.