This is the essay that I wrote and submitted for my IAF Certified Professional Facilitator | Master (CPF | M) re-certification in April, which has now been approved.

In their feedback, the assessors wrote:

“This application demonstrates the qualities expected of a CPF Master. The applicant combines extensive experience with ongoing curiosity, learning, and service to the profession. Particularly impressive is the ability to continue evolving practice while contributing significantly to the growth of other facilitators and to the development of facilitation communities internationally.

The reflections show both professional maturity and humility. The applicant does not rely solely on established expertise but continues to question assumptions, explore new perspectives, and engage thoughtfully with issues of participation, equity, power, and inclusion. This willingness to continue learning while simultaneously supporting others is one of the strongest indicators of Master-level practice.

The application also highlights a sustained commitment to the wider facilitation profession through mentoring, training, publishing initiatives, community leadership, and international collaboration. The impact extends well beyond individual client engagements and contributes to strengthening facilitation as a profession globally.

Overall, this is a strong re-certification application that clearly demonstrates continued growth, contribution, and leadership within the facilitation field.”

The requirement of the essay was to “write on your growth as a facilitator since your last recertification, including lessons learned against the IAF Core Competencies, and explain how your facilitation style and behaviour have developed”. See also my previous essays of 2008, 2012, 2016 & 2020.

In my 2020 CPF-M application in late 2019, I wrote with regard to my future growth as a facilitator:

“I am clear that I want to continue to “stretch and grow as I take on new levels of challenge”, as my assessors urged in 2016, and I am asking myself what that might look like. My expectation is that it will over time involve more (and more advanced) training, more mentoring & writing, less air travel and more virtual work”.

As in 2019, I shall use the IAF competencies as a framework by which to reflect on and illustrate some of my professional experience, learnings and development in the period since then – affected greatly, of course, by the COVID19 pandemic that was just then beginning to spread rapidly worldwide.

Those expectations have been largely met, with the exception of more writing. The one to travel less and work more online was of course met to a greater extent than any of us could have expected, at least during the peak-COVID years. Working more online resulted in a great deal more collaborative working as well, with clients and with other facilitators.

A. Create collaborative client relationships

I have continued to publish annual reviews of my facilitation practice on my blog since 2016. They record that I delivered 122 contracts to 91 clients in the 6 years to June 2025.  Sheer volume of work in the 3 peak-COVID years 2019-22 was only slightly higher than the prior 3 pre-COVID years to 2016-19, but in the three post-COVID years 2022-25 it fell by about 40%.  To a large degree this was a result of a conscious post-COVID choice to work and travel less, and be more selective about my work.

More significant for my growth as a facilitator, particularly in terms of creating collaborative client relationships, the number of online and hybrid sessions that I delivered grew from 5 in the pre-COVID years to 193 in the peak years and down to 18 post-COVID – compared to 83, 16 & 40 in-person events delivered during those three 3-year periods. Not unrelated, contracts delivered with a co-facilitator, producer or team of facilitators grew from zero to 50 and then fell to 10 for those three periods.

A good example of stretching and growing as I took on new levels of challenge in creating collaborative client relationships was a series of 17 trilingual sessions of the online Global Assembly (GA) of Amnesty International that I delivered over 4 months in 2021, involving 3-4 delegates of each of around 70 member entities worldwide.

For this I led an international team of five facilitators collaborating with multiple teams on the client side. These included the elected GA Preparatory Committee, the Global Governance team of the International Secretariat, the translation and interpretation team, a tech support team and numerous specialist teams involved in preparing and presenting motions for consideration and voting.

This was the first time for Amnesty to hold its GA online, and challenging for all of us in many ways. Contracting in particular was challenging, and mutual commitments were reviewed and revised repeatedly in the context of considerable ambiguity and uncertainty, a highly political process and a complex and demanding governance framework. Nevertheless one delegate remarked that it was the most engaging and collaborative GA that he had attended in 20 years, and client feedback was good.

Ann Burroughs, Chair of the 2021 Global Assembly and Preparatory Committee, wrote:

“Martin and his team provided outstanding support during Amnesty International’s 2021 Global Assembly which for the first time was held entirely online. They were integral in the planning of the model which helped to ensure broad participation and access for delegates of almost 70 member entities. Their experience and familiarity with facilitating online spaces were game changing and were critical in helping to build trust in the process and in a new model of digital governance.”

B. Plan appropriate group processes

My core facilitation methodology and focus of my facilitation training, ICA’s Technology of Participation, continues still to serve me well.  I find that there are no applications to which it can not add value, if only as a frame of reference. Nevertheless I have continued to explore and apply other methods, tools and approaches as well, including many digital tools in the context of much online work.

An in-person example of this was a 3-day meeting in Lille in 2023 that I delivered for around 30 delegates of the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance, to support their learning and collaboration on Dramatically Reducing Embodied Carbon in Europe’s Built Environment.

A key aspect of the meeting’s design was to work in three different venues around the city, each selected by the host city to highlight different aspects of building decarbonization. I wasn’t able to visit the rooms in advance of designing the agenda and process, but I was able to arrive early enough at each to plan and prepare how best to make use of them.  I adapted my planned process, methods and tools considerably in order to meet the agreed aims of the event while considering what would work best in the spaces available.

Irene Garcia, CNCA project manager, wrote:

“I had the pleasure of working with Martin for a 3-day event in Lille in June 2023 as part of the “Dramatically Reducing Embodied Carbon in Europe’s Built Environment” project, led by the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance (CNCA). His facilitation skills played a crucial role in guiding multi-level conversations among participants. He was instrumental in organizing the flow of the sessions and seamlessly adapted to the unique needs of the group, making sure that the voices of all stakeholders were given due consideration. His preparation, energy, and professionalism enabled us to dive deeply into the complexities of decarbonizing the built environment, and the results of this workshop were wonderful”

C. Create and sustain a participatory environment

I wrote in my 2020-21 annual review:

“I have been challenged by the Black Lives Matter movement and other recent manifestations and responses to systemic injustice and oppression, and by clients who have been similarly challenged, to reflect on how I might ensure that my own practice is more effectively and explicitly anti-racist, feminist and anti-oppressive, and to commit to working on that.”

That commitment led me to participate in the 12-week online feminist leadership development programme of We Are Feminist Leaders in 2022, to blog on my experience of ‘Exploring Feminist Facilitation’ and to lead a series of online webinars, with a number of IAF and ICA colleagues and others, to advance our exploration together and to encourage and support others to join us.

I have continued to value the professional community and facilitation meetups of IAF England & Wales, and particularly the annual conference, for offering numerous valuable learning opportunities on ways to honour and recognise diversity, ensuring inclusiveness, in the light of systemic and intersecting barriers to participation. These have convened increasingly diverse groups in recent years, and offered diverse programmes featuring numerous sessions focusing on aspects of diversity, inclusivity and lived experience including dyslexia & neurodiversity, power dynamics & protected characteristics and language.

The more I learn of diverse new perspectives on diversity, equity and inclusivity, the more I find I have still to learn. Nevertheless, a recent ToP Group Facilitation Methods training course reassured me of the extent to which my own experience, coupled with the intentional inclusivity of ToP methodology, can already serve to address such barriers effectively. The trainees were leaders of a number of staff networks of a national, public sector development agency, each intended to support and advocate for staff with a particular protected characteristic such as faith, disability, sexuality etc., and to hold space for them to support each other. They were very aware of barriers to their own and others’ participation, and very articulate in expressing them, and they were very delighted and appreciative of how inclusive and engaging they found the facilitation and the training to be.

D. Guide the group toward useful outcomes

IDH is an international foundation that works with businesses, financiers, governments and civil society to realize sustainable trade in global value chains. In June 2022 I was invited by IDH UK to design and lead a first in-person workshop in London for 16 CSR officers of nine major retailers, after they had had several online workshops together during the pandemic, to agree a draft commitment on measuring living wage gaps in their banana supply chains.

I used the ToP Focused Conversation method to structure the day as a whole, and to design the opening conversation and closing reflection. I used the ToP Consensus Workshop method to articulate “What are key elements of a Living Wage Commitment for Banana Supply Chains that we would like UK retailers to be able to agree?”.

Critically, I invited participants to draw on a previously circulated draft commitment to identify elements that they would like retailers to be able to agree. For the purpose of consensus-building, I discouraged them from focusing on what they did not or could not agree, or what it would take for them to be able to agree. The former would be an unhelpful distraction, and the latter would be addressed later under Next Steps and following the workshop.

To enable them to work most effectively together, I invited them to adopt and/or adapt some pre-drafted working assumptions, including for the first time “to respect each other’s health by practicing COVID safety”.

A year later, in June 2023, my IDH client Amanda Penn wrote:

“The top 9 UK retailers launched a living wage commitment in March. On numerous occasions the CSR managers who attended the workshop you led credited that day with being a pivotal moment in the process and paving the way for the ultimate result. So, thank you!”

In October 2023, I was pleased to be able to work with Amanda again, with some of the UK retailers and some of their European counterparts working to develop joint commitments on living wages in Banana supply chains, to design and facilitate a one day hybrid workshop in Madrid – thus guiding a wider group to further appropriate and useful outcomes.

E. Build and maintain professional knowledge

It was partly my experience of co-authoring a chapter in The Power of Facilitation (FacPower), a collaborative book project of a number of IAF contributors led by Kimberly Bain, which inspired me in 2019 to expect my future growth as a facilitator to involve more writing. In fact I have found that I have had little appetite for more writing of my own, but increasing opportunities to support others in their writing.

My most substantial project has been to maintain the FacPower website and to convene and support over 80 IAF colleagues around the word to work together in teams to translate the Power of Facilitation into their own languages, in order that we all are better able to use the book to help to promote the power of facilitation worldwide. Eight translations have since been published, and (in all 9 editions) the book has been downloaded a total of more than 30,000 times. Several new translation teams have just started work in 2026 after being inspired by a 12 month-long online group study of the book led by the IAF Global Book Club last year.

I have also been pleased to contribute an endorsement or foreword to the publications of IAF and other colleagues in recent years including The Art of Focused Conversation (Second Edition) by Jo Nelson, Facilitating Breakthrough by Adam Kahane, Making Workshops Work by Penny Pullan and How to Facilitate the LEGO Serious Play Method Online by Sean Blair.

After discontinuing my own public schedule of in-person ICA:UK ToP training courses in 2020 in order to collaborate with ICA:UK colleagues to develop and deliver online versions instead, I re-established them in London in 2023 and then again in Brussels in 2024 and now also in Barcelona in 2026.

I have continued to mentor two mentees per cycle of the IAF mentoring programme, making a total of 11 since 2019, and I have mentored three new ICA:UK ToP trainers in that period as well.

In 2021 I was inspired, partly by my experience of IAF mentoring and partly by my exploration of feminist facilitation, to begin to offer free facilitation coaching online for young or emerging facilitators – particularly those using facilitation in their work for peace, climate justice, gender equity or anti-racism, or otherwise in response to systemic injustice and oppression or toward achieving a just and sustainable world for all. I have learned much from coaching the 22 diverse, younger facilitators that have so far taken me up on that offer.

I returned to hosting free facilitation meetups of IAF England & Wales in London when they began again in person in 2023, and in 2025 I began to host such meetups also in Barcelona on behalf of IAF Spain.

F. Model a positive professional attitude

The outbreak of full scale war against Ukraine in 2022 prompted me to reflect on ‘Facilitator neutrality in the context of war and oppression’, inspired by responses of Ukrainian facilitators and informed by my exploration of feminist facilitation. I wrote in a blog post with that title:

“While we must strive to ‘model neutrality’ in respect of the content of the group’s work, in order to be effective in our role as facilitator, we need not and perhaps cannot be neutral to it. We cannot and must not be neutral to the group’s process. We must demonstrate and advocate for respect, equity and inclusion, for dialogue and consensus.

To demonstrate and advocate for the values and competencies that we believe are needed to improve group effectiveness and to address the challenges faced by people around the world, we must stand up for them and we must be seen and heard to stand up for them. That must mean also standing up against those systems and structures of power, discrimination and oppression, violence and war, that deny the inherent value of the individual and the collective wisdom of the group, that risk people’s welfare and dignity and that obstruct or destroy an environment of respect and safety.”

I wrote that I was shocked and appalled then by the unfolding Russian invasion of Ukraine, and I have been shocked and appalled since by a great deal more war and oppression as well. I continue to struggle to know how to respond, knowing that anything that I do will not be enough.

To demonstrate and advocate for the values and competencies that I believe are needed to improve group effectiveness, and to address the challenges faced by people around the world, seems to be the very least that I can do. I am thankful that I find that I continue to have ample opportunities to do that as a professional facilitator and a CPF-Master.

See also about me, how I work, who I work with and recommendations & case studies, and please contact me about how we might work together.