Facilitation is the process of guiding a group of people through meetings, planning sessions, or training, and successfully achieving a specific goal. It is a powerful skillset that helps improve collaboration, generates results, and improves group dynamics. Facilitation involves creating space for everyone in the group to contribute and encouraging participation and ownership from everyone involved. A facilitator usually involves a "guide on the side" who asks questions, moderates discussions, introduces activities, and helps participants learn. Facilitation is an evolving skill that is particularly important for talent development professionals who conduct in-person or virtual training, but other professionals can also use it to facilitate team projects, task forces, committees, and meetings of any type.

Facilitation is not about having one person get on stage and tell a group how to solve a problem. Instead, it is about supporting group members to discuss that problem together and co-create a solution. Facilitation is all about unleashing the creative potential of a group. Sometimes this means running sessions explicitly designed to support ideation and innovation or using brainstorming.

In summary, facilitation is a process of guiding a group of people towards a specific goal by creating space for everyone to contribute and encouraging participation and ownership from everyone involved. It is an evolving skill that is particularly important for talent development professionals who conduct in-person or virtual training, but other professionals can also use it to facilitate team projects, task forces, committees, and meetings of any type.