[Image from Unsplash]
A few months ago, I watched ten bright people speak intensely for ninety minutes and walk out with twelve action points, seventeen loose ends and absolutely no shared sense of what they had agreed upon. As we stepped out, someone whispered, “So what was the decision?” Even the chairs looked confused.
Scenes like this are not exceptions. They’re symptoms of meetings that generate motion, not meaning.
These days, rooms are full. Understanding is not. And leadership often feels strangely hollow.
For years, leadership meant having the answer. When information was scarce and hierarchy was solid, that worked. Today, information is everywhere. Hierarchy is only intermittently obeyed. And half the room is checking something on their phone that looks suspiciously like cricket scores or the stock market.
People don’t follow instructions. They follow involvement. They follow the sense that their voice shaped the path. That is exactly where facilitation stops being a “nice-to-have” and becomes a core leadership competence.
Larry Dressler’s Standing in the Fire: Leading High-Heat Meetings With Clarity, Calm and Courage reminds us that presence and neutrality often matter more than expertise. Groups usually carry far more wisdom than the lone hero at the front of the room. A comforting thought in a world that expects leaders to function like walking encyclopaedias.
Yet the public image of facilitation remains trapped in a training-room stereotype—sticky notes, energisers and cheerful marker pens. Nothing against colourful stationery. But reducing facilitation to tools is like describing literature as a set of alphabets. Technically correct. Profoundly insufficient.
Facilitation thrives far beyond the training room. It is a way of working, a way of leading and, for many, a way of being.
The clue lies in the word itself. Facilis means “to make easy”. The work of facilitation is to make progress easier, reduce friction, enable movement and help people work with one another rather than around one another.
Leadership, at its heart, is exactly that.
Why it matters today
We live in a world overflowing with information yet starving for meaning. Dashboards glow. Calendars groan. Opinions arrive so quickly they overtake the person expressing them. Meetings often become long stretches of polite noise, punctuated by someone saying, “Let’s take this offline,” which usually means, “Let’s never speak of this again.”
Social media rewards performance over curiosity. Dialogue gives way to point-scoring. It becomes easier to defend a view than to explore one. Teams rarely lack data. They lack shared understanding.
A leadership team I worked with spent weeks debating a priority. Everyone had numbers. Everyone had strong views. A short facilitated conversation changed everything. It forced them to pause and ask, “What problem are we actually solving?” Once that became clear, the whole debate loosened—like a stubborn jar lid finally turning.
Dressler writes, “Groups do their best work when they know the facilitator trusts them to find their own way.” Most teams do not need more direction. They need space—and a leader who trusts that space enough not to fill it with speeches.
In a well-held conversation, presence becomes contagious. As Dressler notes, “People can feel your presence long before they hear your words.” A leader who is genuinely present ends up facilitating without speaking much at all.
Priya Parker reminds us that gatherings fail not for lack of goodwill but because we assume purpose instead of designing for it. Leaders often make the same mistake. Purpose does not arise from a slide deck. It emerges when people participate in shaping it.
Data reflects this gap. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index reports that 68% of employees leave meetings without clear direction—not because information is missing, but because sense-making is missing.
The role of hierarchy is shifting too. People now expect to participate, not spectate. Everywhere else in their lives they like, comment and shape conversations. A passive, top-down meeting feels outdated. Facilitation channels this instinct so it becomes contribution rather than chaos.
And beneath it all lies the illusion of knowledge. The Dunning-Kruger effect tells us that confidence peaks precisely where knowledge bottoms out. Facilitation softens this by inviting people to test ideas in the open, discover blind spots and think together.
A well-facilitated conversation may even sound loud. That noise often comes from involvement—and from people finally getting the chance to shape the outcome. That is precious.
What a single question can do
In September this year, at an International Association of Facilitators gathering in Bali, a senior practitioner said, “If we do not learn to speak to one another, we will end up speaking at one another.” The room fell quiet—not tense quiet, but thoughtful quiet.
Then he asked a simple question:
“What possibility might open if we postponed judgement and stayed curious for ten minutes longer?”
He neither talked down to the room nor hinted at a preferred answer. He simply placed the question in the space and trusted the group. And the room softened. Opinions loosened. People looked up instead of inward.
Dressler reminds us that “the room mirrors the facilitator’s inner state.” He was steady, so the room steadied.
This is facilitation at its quiet best. No theatrics. No choreography. Just a question, a pause and a leader who believes in the group.
And what happened in that room in Bali is exactly what leadership teams, organisations—and sometimes whole societies—need when confronting difficult questions.
When views diverge and complexity rises, dialogue becomes essential. Without facilitation, such conversations can harden into acrimony.
Some countries have learnt this well. Singapore’s Our Singapore Conversation brought 47,000 citizens into 600 dialogues—not to reach consensus, but to build understanding. Finland’s National Dialogues operate on the same principle. Citizens’ Assemblies across the world reveal similar results.
Nations use dialogue to build trust. Organisations can use it to build far more. The question is: are leaders ready?
The skillset leaders must learn now
Corporate life quietly assumes that leaders naturally know how to ask good questions, listen deeply and host meaningful conversations. It also assumes people read pre-reads. Neither is true.
Most leaders have been trained to present, not host; to speak, not listen; to run a meeting, not hold a space.
Charles Duhigg writes in Supercommunicators: How To Unlock The Secret Language of Connection that great communicators are not the ones who sound impressive. They are the ones who leave people feeling understood.
Asking good questions is a discipline. Listening is emotional labour—the kind that requires attention, restraint and a willingness to not rush to a conclusion. Hosting a conversation requires neutrality and the ability to keep your own ego off centre stage.
In The Power of Facilitation, a book I contributed to (and which is freely downloadable), we wrote that facilitation is innate in all of us. But organisational life demands depth, structure and deliberate practice. Leaders who treat facilitation as a craft see meetings change shape. People stop performing and start thinking.
There is no special category called the facilitative leader. There are simply leaders who have built facilitation skills in generous measure. They carry a calm presence. They remain neutral enough for ideas to emerge. They notice what is not being said. They help the room think rather than think for the room.
More than a decade ago, I saw this firsthand in an Indian multinational where senior executives were trained in simple process-facilitation skills. A year later, the quietest transformations had taken place in the hardest rooms—union negotiations, performance-rating calibrations and other conflict-prone spaces. What had once been tense, defensive exchanges became easier simply because leaders learnt to hold the room differently.
Dressler puts it simply: “Facilitation is less about guiding people and more about getting out of their way.”
Leaders who learn facilitation do not impose clarity. They help groups find it.
The invitation
People will forget your slide deck. But they will remember the space you made for them. In this mechanical age, that is the part of leadership that lasts.
When people feel heard, they work differently.
If you want faster decisions, slow the conversation down.
If you want better answers, ask better questions.
And if you want the room to think, give it space.
In a noisy world, the ability to hold a good conversation may be the most underrated leadership skill of all.
Dig Deeper
[Video] How To Come Together In A Meaningful Manner: By Priya Parker
(Play Time: ~35 mins
