People sometimes ask “What is the difference between ‘good’ facilitation and what we call Vertical facilitation?”

I would say that "Good facilitation" helps the team perform better. 

For instance, a “good” facilitator will invite someone who has been silent throughout a meeting to speak. All good. This results in a key group process condition, which is that all voices of a system be heard.     

What "good" facilitation doesn’t do—at least not by deliberate design—is help the team (and its members) become more aware of the dynamics of their group such that some people—who might want to speak but, for whatever reason, don’t—remain silent, while others do much of the talking.

Read on….

Consider that ‘transformation’ refers to that moment when we can stand outside the Time we are in. When we can stand back and, in some way, intervene in the unfolding of the shaping forces and organizing structures that constitute our experience.

When we can see something about how we are making meaning of a given moment; when we can stand in witness to the ways in which those shaping forces and structures constitute how a particular situation or event occurs for us.

And, given this capacity to observe and witness the shaping forces that shape us, become more choiceful in how we engage in the Time we are in.

Read on…

The Time we are in is constituted by a set of beliefs, preferences, cognitive frames, habits, expectations, concerns, mannerisms, and assumptions that shape the world—both the world in us and around us.

These shaping forces constitute the Time we are in. An invisible hand (similar, perhaps, to Adam Smith’s?) whose constituting force realizes itself in the very thoughts, feelings, moods, and acts that make up our most ordinary experience. These shaping forces generate the atmosphere in which we dwell. Most of the time we are subject to them—that is, they animate our thoughts and actions in ways we cannot (at least, ordinarily) see.

Transformation is practice, and a path we choose, by which we seek to stand back from those forces and organizing structures in order to witness—and, thereby, possibly free ourselves from—the constituting power they exert on us.