About This Site
The Facilitator’s Handbook exists to define facilitation clearly and rigorously as a professional discipline.
Much of what is labelled “facilitation” online is vague, interchangeable with meeting management, or blended unhelpfully with training, coaching, or consulting. This site was created to correct that drift by offering precise definitions, clear boundaries, and practice-informed explanations of what facilitation is, how it works, and where it fails.
The focus here is not tools, games, or techniques in isolation, but the underlying craft of process design, group dynamics, and real-time intervention that enables groups to think and decide together effectively.
This is a reference site.
It is not a blog, a marketing funnel, or a certification programme.
Authorship and Perspective
The content on this site is written from the perspective of long-term practice in psychology, organisational development, and facilitation-adjacent work across different organisational contexts.
The emphasis throughout is on:
- clarity over novelty
- judgement over formula
- boundaries over buzzwords
Where examples are used, they are included to illustrate professional constraints, failure modes, and decision points rather than to promote a particular methodology.
Purpose
The purpose of The Facilitator’s Handbook is simple:
- to establish clear, shared definitions
- to support facilitators who want to practise with integrity
- to give organisations a better understanding of what facilitation can and cannot reasonably be asked to do
If the site helps people stop calling everything a workshop, that is a welcome side effect.