People need people
What makes an event memorable, an experience meaningful, or a meeting well-appreciated?
Welcome to The Loneliness Economy newsletter 🌻 We talk about relationships, dating, building community, and the economy that has been built around the human experience of loneliness.
What makes an event memorable, an experience meaningful, or a meeting well-appreciated?
It’s a moment, an interaction, a surprising discovery about the world, others, or yourself. It’s also the flow, the vibe, and other intangibles that come together in all the right ways. It’s an element of human touch.
In one word, I’d call it facilitation (derived from the Latin: facilitas, meaning easiness).
What is facilitation?
Facilitation is the art of guiding people and groups through a process toward a defined objective.
Facilitators make it easier for people/groups to achieve their goals by encouraging collaboration, participation, ownership, and creative thinking.
The skillset can apply across industries and sectors. Here are a few examples of types of facilitation:
Education and training facilitation - helping people learn a subject or skill, with or without subject-matter expertise
Dialogue facilitation - helping people share their perspectives to discover new ways of thinking
Conflict facilitation - helping people manage and resolve conflict
Change and transformation facilitation - helping people make decisions or recommendations on projects, plans, or problems; helping people imagine and design a new culture or vision
Some people work as full-time facilitators within organizations or they use the skill as a part of their work leading meetings, workshops, conferences, discussions, and/or seminars.
My facilitation journey
Being a super connector
Some people are natural super connectors. You probably know who they are in your life and network. They are charismatic, they’re generous, they’re happy to share what they know (or are curious about), they bring out the best in you, they get along with most people, they seem to know everyone, and they’re always playing matchmaker by introducing unlikely connections or bringing new friends into a group or gathering.
I’ve always been admirative of these vibrant souls that can truly light up a room.
Growing up I was very much an observer, a thinker, and an aggregator. I loved connecting the dots between disparate experiences and ideas and sharing my discoveries with those around me. Analogies and stories were my default way to interact with the world. I have always been process-driven, finding comfort in lists and systems to organize my thoughts and learnings.
I was an associate producer in a past life and we were in pre-production, putting the pieces together to shoot a short film over the summer in Brooklyn. The story we were telling was that of a difficult conversation between a deaf couple that unfolds in a coffee shop. I was working with a co-producer under a senior producer and after working with the two of us for a few weeks, she revealed our producer superpowers. My counterpart was magnetic, connected, and put people at ease. She would often have stories to tell us about someone she had met over the weekend or how a random encounter turned into an amazing night or genuine connection. I was praised for my attention to detail and resourcefulness. I researched and planned a location scout of local coffee shops, printed and sent everyone Google Map itineraries for the day, called all of the owners ahead of time, and provided color-coded selection criteria.
I had thought of my co-producer as a super-connector in this scenario (or Cheif of Vibes, as a friend would prefer to be called 😅), but being a super connector isn’t limited to charisma and social influence, it also includes connecting people and ideas through processes and organization. Both skills are needed to enable a team to work smoothly and efficiently and each of us contributed to the success of the project through our individual strengths.
This was before I’d ever heard of the term facilitation, but I’d later find out that facilitation is the marriage of process, people dynamics, and collaborative action.
The short is called See Through, starring Lauren Ridloff, and it’s a beautiful story if you’re curious 😉
Last year I participated in the inaugural Human Connector Academy, organized by the kontakt kollektiv, a German social organization that creates spaces for connection in Hamburg.
We spent 5 weeks “mastering the art of meaningful connections” by learning tools and skills to facilitate virtual or in-person sessions. By the end of the academy, we each had our own workshop or gathering we were prepared to bring to an audience of our friends and peers or strangers.
This was a great experience. Many thanks to Natalia Bialobrzewska and Barbara Knoben for organizing! Creating trust in a short amount of time virtually isn’t easy. It was the beginning of my exploration into liberating structures and other facilitation tools (there are tons of resources online for this) and it brought me back to my days as a resident advisor in university.
The academy birthed my personal development event series, Meet Your Match - a two-part workshop (small group dialogues) and gathering (social game) with a focus on understanding who we are and who we want to be in the context of a romantic relationship.
I also applied what I’d learned to my day job, leading webinars and designing sessions to elevate my customers’ learning experience of our product, a community management and engagement platform.
I recently attended a 3-day facilitation course at Hyper Island, a Swedish creative business school. Their core teaching methodologies are all about experiential learning, team development, self-leadership, and reflection.
Here’s what I learned:
People need people 🫶
Before you get to the mission, the goals, the content, or the process, the foundation of any relationship starts with trust. Understanding human dynamics goes a long way. Some social scientists have studied groups and teams to get to the bottom of effective teamwork. We learned two helpful models, the openness-trust spiral and the Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation (FIRO) model. The openness-trust spiral, by Anders Wendelheim, demonstrates that the more we open up to people the easier it is to build trust to the point where it’s easier to accomplish more and more complex tasks. The FIRO model, by William Schutz, explains the underlying needs we have as humans: to feel significant, competent, and likable, and how they’re expressed in a group setting. We all need each other to succeed and a great team works well when everyone can fulfill their needs and contribute their unique value.
Setting expectations & maintaining accountability is key 🔑
Day 1 of our 3-day course was jam-packed but every single action had a purpose. We started the day with a check-in exercise (saying our name and answering a question), followed by an exercise to explain what we all hope to get out of the course. After we shared our intentions, our star facilitators, Louise and Anastasija, explained the concept of experiential learning (how we will learn during the course) and that we are all responsible for our own takeaways (accountability). We then co-created “guidelines for greatness,” aligning on how we would treat each other and maintain a safe and comfortable learning environment.
Now that we knew what we wanted to accomplish, how we were going to learn, and who we could learn from, the next step was to lean in and actively participate to make the most of our experience.
How to be a great facilitator 🌟
As the course continued, we learned what contributes to facilitating a winning experience and how to be great facilitators. We explored a few key tools (what to do) but also spent time on quite a bit of introspection (how to be).
Our Toolkit
Process Design & Facilitation Model
IDOARRT (Intention, Desired Outcome, Agenda, Roles, Rules, Timing)
Some Discoveries
Do & Be exercise: You cannot be everything as a facilitator. Tap into your own unique skills to guide your groups through the most authentic, neutral, and empathetic experience possible.
My facilitator superpowers: process design, storytelling, curiosity, clear instruction, calm demeanor, unafraid of a long silence or two
What is the place of facilitation in the Loneliness Economy?
AI and other technologies have simplified our lives in a dramatically short period of time. ChatGPT (virtual assistant and chatbot by OpenAI) launched less than two years ago on November 30, 2022, and it has already changed the way we use the Internet and interact with each other.
Now that technology is more and more capable of taking on complex work, people are valued more than ever for their unique human abilities. According to the World Economic Forum, the top 10 skills considered the most important for workers in 2023 were soft skills such as analytical thinking, critical thinking, curiosity, and lifelong learning.
Facilitation skills are essentially future-proof and they’re relevant no matter what kind of work you do. The ability to connect and collaborate is important to your company’s bottom line, but it’s also what a lot of us want from our work: purposeful human connection.
I’m leaving you with some great tools and resources if you’d like to boost your facilitation skills 💪
The Loneliness Economy newsletter 🌻
Thanks for reading! It’s a fun practice for me to write to gather my thoughts on these topics. Share with a friend if you’ve found my words interesting or helpful. Comment below if you have anything to add.