Leonardo Muñoz: Confessions of a Facilitator

Name: Leonardo Muñoz

Location at time of writing: Santiago, Chile

I didn't expect facilitation to teach me to let go. Facilitation is a tricky word — many people prefer to say “leader,” “coordinator,” or even “supervisor.”, roles that are usually more focused on results. Yet although we facilitators are accountable for the results, they’re not our results — they belong to the participants. I’d even say that the participants themselves, and their emerging sense of team, are the real outcome of facilitation, more than the tangible results they came for.

In my part of the world, trust is a rare thing. Perhaps it’s because Chile has always been something of an island — the dry desert to the north, the cold pole to the south, the vast Pacific Ocean to the west, and the towering Andes to the east. Being wary of the new, the foreign, the different has long been our favorite national sport. That mindset takes a lot of time and makes most things harder to do — and sometimes it even keeps us from finding a better solution for everyone involved.

“One time, everything went sideways…” I was facilitating a workshop where two teams had to agree on something they needed in order to keep working — but they just didn’t. Tension kept building because we needed to move on, yet both teams held firmly to their positions. Eventually, they suggested voting to solve the issue, but I didn’t think that was a good idea. We needed consensus, not democracy. I could barely resist the urge to step in and fix things — or to silence my own judgment, that nagging feeling that I wasn’t doing my job well enough. We went to lunch, the schedule went to hell, but the incubation process kept working underneath. When they came back, things slowly started to fall into place, and the work that followed was much easier and more purposeful.

“My weirdest / most wonderful tool is…” I almost always start by tossing the ball to the participants and stepping off the stage. For me, connection is key — if I can get them interacting, playing, and laughing with one another while staying connected to the topic of the workshop, I can finally breathe. I like to think of it as warming up the very same muscle they’ll use later. If the main activity calls for discussion, then we warm up the muscle of arguing. If it’s about making connections, we stretch the muscle of association — getting it ready for the sprint ahead.

“If I could change one thing about how we work together on this planet…”

I believe that almost everything could change for the better if we learned to see from a wider lens — not only across time, but also across space and people. If we could look at situations as part of a larger whole, considering everyone and everything involved, we’d make wiser, longer-term choices. Most of the time we’re not mean or greedy; we’re just shortsighted and in too much of a hurry to let things mature before we pick the fruit.

Alisa asked: "What is the genre of music that you and your family might jive into this circle with?"

My youngest daughter says she can recognize almost any song instantly because I “primed” her with Beatles music since she was a baby. So, the Beatles it is. Still, music in many forms flows through my veins thanks to my mother. To her, as in the ABBA song, I can only say — thank you for the music.

“Pass It On” — I nominate the one and only Esh — Eshchar Mizrachi — and my question for you, Esh, is this: if you were a plant, what would your genome say?