Mohamed El-Zayat: Confessions of a Facilitator

Name: Mohamed El-Zayat

Location at time of writing: Cairo, Egypt

A bit about me:

I'm an environmental engineer by training, almost two decades spent moving between Environmental Impact Assessments, green building certifications, climate change reports, and solid waste strategies across Egypt and the MENA region. I teach at the American University in Cairo and Cairo University, and somewhere along the way, without really planning it, I also became a facilitator; not instead of the engineer, but alongside him. The two turned out to need each other more than I expected.

The moment it all began:

It started with a phone call from II's founder, Maggie Dugan. By the time she reached out, I'd already spent close to ten years inside the Africa Science Leadership Program and Future Africa; first as a fellow, later as someone who kept coming back, drawn in deeper each time. Somewhere in those years I moved from participant to co-facilitator, running two workshops for young researchers and students that I still think about often. Maggie had seen that thread running through a decade of my life, and she asked if I'd bring it into Inclusive Innovation. I said yes before I'd even finished processing the question.

I didn't expect facilitation to teach me…

…that it would spill into absolutely everything. I thought I was learning a professional skill. Instead, I picked up a way of moving through life. The small, ordinary moments with my family, the ones that quietly need someone to hold the space, I handle differently now. Leading a team, mediating a disagreement between friends, managing hard conversation or situations with clients, defusing tension between colleagues at work: it all turned out to be facilitation wearing different clothes. Even my lectures changed shape. I stopped just delivering content and started designing rooms… interactive, a little playful, built so the learning outcomes land not despite the fun, but because of it.

The lessons that changed how I show up:

Facilitation taught me that almost any subject, however heavy, can be carried lightly. That suffering, more often than not, is optional. That the world doesn't lack shared human values, it lacks people willing to hold the space where those values can actually meet. I learned that there's always a more generous way to disagree: to build on what someone just said rather than knock it down, to let two opinions differ in judgment without either one having to be entirely wrong. A right opinion can still carry a flaw. A wrong one can still carry a truth.

I learned that listening beats talking more often than we admit. That when you want someone to hear a hard opinion, you start with the positives and the potential, and only then name the risks (PPC/O approach), alongside a solution, never alone. That the world runs on integration, because no one finishes anything entirely by themselves. And that encouragement is not a soft extra… it's load-bearing.

My tools of the trade:

Icebreakers, without question. They turn a room of strangers into something else entirely, and the shift never stops feeling a little bit magic. Sticky notes and sharpies …always within reach, non-negotiable. Writing, I learned, does for tangled thoughts what reading does for a tangled mind: it puts them in order. And drawing…I've watched it, again and again, hand people a way back to their own stillness in the middle of a room full of noisy ideas.

The thing I hold onto most, though, is simpler than any tool: there's no such thing as a worrying list. Only a blessings list we've mistaken for a burden. Most of what sits on it is just work waiting to be done,  and worth being grateful for.

What Inclusive Innovation gave me:

A line I now carry everywhere: despite our differences, we are not different. I've watched that prove itself in every workshop… in the quiet moment someone discovers they can write poetry, or sing, in front of people who, an hour earlier, were strangers. Facilitation doesn't just move ideas forward. It uncovers people to themselves.

To Maggie… thank you, genuinely, for this opportunity, and for seeing a decade of ASLP and Future Africa and recognizing where it could go next. Being part of Inclusive Innovation (II) has given a name to something I'd been doing for years without knowing what to call it.