This is how my whirlwind facilitation week looked like:
- Mon to Thu 3 to 6 Nov – 30 students from Griffith University visiting KL
- Sat 8 Nov – final session for 20 upcoming Malay Muslim leaders in SG
- Sun 9 Nov – 43 mosque staff and board members from SG + 10 community leaders living in Klang Valley (mix of locals, refugees)
- Mon & Tue 10 – 11 Nov – continuing with the 43 mosque staff
By numbers, that’s 8 days of facilitation for 103 individuals of diverse cultures and backgrounds, from late teens to seniors in their 60s.
A normal person would be tired! So as a 99% introvert, I shouldn’t be surprised that my social battery is pooped.
a programme is a whirlwind
Programmes are like whirlwinds because they seem to arrive all of a sudden, end just as fast and everything is left a little bit out of order after it’s gone. During a programme, you’re mostly trying to keep things together as a facilitator – zooming into a particular crisis to be solved or the experience of one participant or one day, and then zooming out to see the group and the bigger picture and whether we’re heading in the right direction. The momentum of the agenda and the group drives everything all the way through the final goodbye.
But after the programme ends, it’s time to pick up the pieces. Some are programme related, like finance, feedback and report-writing. Other pieces are various parts of my personal and professional life lost to the whirlwind (I haven’t gone to the gym in 2+ weeks, and I have more unreplied messages in my phone than usual). But a huge piece is figuring out what you’ve learnt from it all.
What did I gain?
What challenged me?
What do I see differently now?
The learning facilitator creates space for participants to explore these questions within the programme, but we ourselves are (or should be) learning something too. In the end, the final reflection is not the one you run on the final programme day. It’s not even the team debrief. It’s the time you gotta carve out for yourself.
what we learn from programmes
There are broadly two buckets of things then that a facilitator learns through a programme. The first will look like whatever the learning outcomes were for the participants – whether it’s SDGs, collaboration, project management, innovation, community leadership…we went through a learning journey alongside the participants, chances are, we would have learnt something.
(At the same time, I am guessing that many facilitators who tend to do the same kind of programmes for a long period of time probably will get bored because they’ve reached the outer limits of what can be explored within the topic, OR it was never/is no longer something interesting to them at all. Something for me to think about.)
The other bucket is about facilitation, and ourselves as facilitators or in some cases, programme designers as well. Facilitation is a skill that – like any other – gets better through focused practice. The focus comes after the practice.
what have I learnt?
I’ll have to write another post about this soon. I’m still picking up some pieces after the whirlwind.
But I’ve learnt a lot, and am thankful for the opportunities and all the life moments that have led up to this week which Allah has planned so beautifully.
I love being a learner, and this remains the best part of facilitation – to learn while helping others to learn together with me. As the years go by, I hope I learn how to make the whirlwinds calm down and be less intense on myself personally. But I also hope there is more to come.