There is no one right answer to this question, but I think there are a lot of problematic approaches that are worth reviewing and some strategies for overcoming the challenges.  

In general, we would like facilitators to be willing, skilled, and varied. We’d like facilitation to be a joyful experience that the facilitators find rewarding, even when it’s tiring or frustrating.  We’d like our facilitators to have a variety of approaches to topics, an ability to read the room, a plan for each meeting and enough flexibility to make changes if the plan isn’t working.  We’d like meetings to be facilitated by a variety of folks. 

The problem is that most communities don’t have a ready supply of eager, skilled facilitators from a variety of backgrounds. The more typical situation is that there are one or two folks willing to do it and a handful of others that can be convinced. There may not be great alignment between willingness and skill. Facilitation takes enough time and energy that often the people available to do it don’t include younger folks, parents, anyone with less societal privilege, etc.  All of which make the selection of facilitators tricky. 

Problematic approaches

• Everyone takes a turn – Many communities, particularly smaller groups take this approach. It seems fair, both in sharing the work of the task and in avoiding too much power landing in any one place.  If you happen to be in a group where everyone is reasonably willing and reasonably skilled, it should work.  Smaller groups are easier to facilitate and thus can be successful with less skilled facilitation.  In most cases, however, I think this approach results in less successful meetings. Facilitation is a skill and an art. There are people who are naturally more talented, more trained and/or more experienced in facilitation, and some who are less so.  In most communities, there are some people who are never going to do a good job of facilitation, and you don’t want them trying to do that work any more than you want me to tackle an electrical problem. This is an area where you want to look at the various skills each person has and let them contribute in the ways that will be most successful for all.  
• The same one or two people do all the facilitation – This is rarely by design, but it happens, usually because no one else wants to facilitate.  This can work for a short period of time to get through a crisis. It can also make sense for one or two people to facilitate a particular topic that may span several weeks or months of meetings. Where you get into trouble is when facilitation becomes a power center with the same person or small group managing all the meetings and others feeling like their voices and ideas aren’t being heard. A team of 6 or 8 strong facilitators is probably enough provided they include a representative sample of your group (gender, age, wealth, background, race, etc). If you find yourself with too few facilitators, it’s time to get curious about why and start addressing the underlying causes.  
• Facilitator qualifications – This is the plan where some group maintains control of the meetings and decides who is and isn’t allowed to facilitate. While I think it’s a bad idea to have unskilled folks facilitating meetings, I think it is generally a worse idea to tell someone who wants to facilitate that they aren’t allowed. When someone wants to facilitate and others think it’s likely to go badly, the ideal thing is to have an honest and respectful conversation to figure out why the person wants to facilitate and whether there is a path forward that will meet their needs and the needs of the group. There are a lot of reasons those conversations don’t happen. Either way, in the end, if a person wants to be in the facilitation rotation, I think it’s better to support them toward doing it as well as they can than to tell them, “No,” and have the fallout of power struggle and resentment.  
• Roberts Rules, voting and rigid structures – When decision making in communities is going badly, it’s common for groups to look at their consensus process and try to revamp it, usually adding rules and steps to the process to try to assure better consensus behavior.  While any process can be improved, this is rarely the cause of decision-making strife. It’s generally the relationships that need support, not the process. While the two are related to each other, they are not the same.  Better process is easier to address and it can support better relationships, but it doesn’t solve relationships problems.  Better relationships are harder to achieve, but far more powerful for creating safe and effective decision-making spaces.  

Some Strategies

• Participant’s Skills – Working toward consensus or consent decisions is hard work and different than anything most of us have experienced before cohousing. It requires us to be better at being curious, listening, self reflection, and flexibility.  These are skills that can be learned. Read books like The Cooperative Culture Handbook, Brene Brown’s Braving the Wilderness, Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering or others. Invite a consultant in to do a workshop for your group. Send even non-facilitators to facilitator training.  A more skilled group requires less skill from a facilitator to have successful meetings.  
• Facilitator Training – Whether you have willing, but untrained facilitators, not enough facilitators, or skilled but unsuccessful facilitators, getting more folks trained or more training for the folks you have will improve your pool and generally support better meetings.  
• Facilitate in pairs – Working in pairs generally improves the quality of facilitation and decreases the anxiety that prevents people from volunteering.  Pairing a skilled facilitator with a newer one is an excellent way to improve the skill and confidence of a beginning facilitator or a new group member.
• Feedback – Find ways to give and receive authentic, meaningful feedback. This is a hard thing that few people do well.  If your community is ready to tackle it, I recommend Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen’s book, Thanks for the Feedback, The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well, even when it is off base, unfair, poorly delivered, and, frankly, you’re not in the mood.
• Meeting activities – The standard meeting approach involves one person speaking while everyone else theoretically listens and then the next person speaks.  Some of this has to happen in every meeting, but it doesn’t have to be, and usually shouldn’t be, the only approach. Find other ways to share and process ideas and information.  The Cooperative Culture Handbook by Yana Ludwig and Karen Gimnig offers dozens of exercises, including a “Facilitator’s Toolbox” (Appendix 7) that will help facilitators choose between them.  

What about meeting participants? Read the next in our series of posts exploring how Facilitation can help you and your community here.

Interested in developing your facilitation skills? Join us for our 6-week Facilitator Training. From February 13 – March 20th, we’ll cover the structures that make meetings run well and the artistry of creative planning and intuition that build safety and connection. The course will be full of opportunities for participation and will meet you where you are. Learn more and register here.