Facilitate, Don't Force
A collection of the best facilitation books. Conversations in the workplace can be messy and chaotic. Learning a few facilitation techniques can help you and the team navigate this uncertainty more effectively.
You can find a link to each of the best facilitation books below. You'll also find many of these summarised in this collection of book summaries.
I'd love to hear your suggestions on LinkedIn too.
by Jean Tabaka
To succeed, an agile project demands outstanding collaboration among all its stakeholders. But great collaboration doesn’t happen by itself; it must be carefully planned and facilitated throughout the entire project lifecycle. Collaboration Explained is the first book to bring together proven, start-to-finish techniques for ensuring effective collaboration in any agile software project.
by Michael Wilkinson
This expanded edition includes new chapters on facilitating virtual meetings, cross-cultural teams, and large groups and conferences. It also provides a series of strategies for engaging teams, additional information about making meetings more productive, and further guidance on preventing dysfunctional behavior. In addition, the book contains a wealth of fresh case studies and an ancillary website with must-have tools and techniques for both the beginner and the seasoned facilitator.
by Priya Parker
In The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker shows us how to ensure that however, we meet, it's a truly transformative experience. An expert on organizing successful gatherings whether in conference centres, crisis zones or her living room, Parker sets forth a human-centred approach to gathering that can help us create meaningful, memorable moments - large and small, for work and play.
by Sam Kaner
This fully updated edition of The Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making guides readers through the struggle and the satisfaction of putting participatory values into practice, helping them to fulfill the promise of effective group decision-making. With previous editions already embraced by business and community leaders and consulting professionals around the world, this new book is even more insightful and easy to use.
by Sharon L. Bowman
This innovative resource introduces 65 training strategies that are guaranteed to deliver outstanding training results no matter what the topic, group, or learning environment. Now, trainers can replace the traditional "Trainers talk; learners listen" paradigm with a radical new model for designing and delivering instruction: "When learners talk and teach, they learn."
by Esther Derby, Diana Larsen
Derby and Larsen show you the tools, tricks, and tips you need to fix the problems you face on a software development project on an on-going basis. You'll see how to architect retrospectives in general, how to design them specifically for your team and organization, how to run them effectively, how to make the needed changes, and how to scale these techniques up. You'll learn how to deal with problems, and implement solutions effectively throughout the project--not just at the end.
by Rob Fitzpatrick, Devin Hunt
Most workshops don't work. They fail to deliver real results and they fail to keep the audience energetic and engaged. They're stressful to run and painful to attend.
Designing and running a brilliant workshop is easier than you think. It's not about flashy showmanship or natural charisma. Instead, it's about following a set of clear, simple rules for structuring and arranging the day.
by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, James Macanufo
This book includes more than 80 games to help you break down barriers, communicate better, and generate new ideas, insights, and strategies. The authors have identified tools and techniques from some of the world's most innovative professionals, whose teams collaborate and make great thingshappen. This book is the result: a unique collection of games that encourage engagement and creativity while bringing more structure and clarity to the workplace. Find out why -- and how -- with Gamestorming.
by Henri Lipmanowicz, Keith McCandless
Smart leaders know that they would greatly increase productivity and innovation if only they could get everyone fully engaged. So do professors, facilitators and all changemakers. The challenge is how. Liberating Structures are novel, practical and no-nonsense methods to help you accomplish this goal with groups of any size.
by Amanda Ripley
High conflict is what happens when discord distills into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an us and a them. In this state, the brain behaves differently. We feel increasingly certain of our own superiority, and everything we do to try to end the conflict, usually makes it worse. Eventually, we can start to mimic the behavior of our adversaries, harming what we hold most dear.
by Juanita Brown
The World Cafe is a flexible, easy-to-use process for fostering collaborative dialogue, sharing mutual knowledge, and discovering new opportunities for action. Based on living systems thinking, this innovative approach creates dynamic networks of conversation that can catalyze an organization or community's own collective intelligence around its most important questions.
by David Sibbet
Visual Meetings explains how anyone can implement powerful visual tools, and how these tools are being used in Silicon Valley and elsewhere to facilitate both face-to-face and virtual group work. This dynamic and richly illustrated resource gives meeting leaders, presenters, and consultants a slew of exciting tricks and tools, including