To facilitate is ‘to make an action or process easier’.

That definition shows that you can facilitate pretty much anything – growing oranges, kicking a football, building sandcastles. Despite this wealth of opportunity, we have a very narrow focus for our facilitation service.

We facilitate one thing and one thing only: thinking.

And this is in fact one of the oldest and purest forms of philosophising.

Socrates, the father and eternal inspiration of western philosophy, did not write a single word or give a single lecture. Instead, he wandered around marketplaces and into people’s homes, and conversed with people about truth, beauty, goodness, and justice, about what a good life is and how to live it.

Or, you might say: he facilitated. He helped people think better together. And that’s exactly what we do.

We help groups of people think together about things that matter.

Socrates is an instructive comparison for a few further reasons.

For Socrates, facilitation wasn’t the same as pleasing people or always making them feel comfortable. It sometimes involved asking difficult questions and telling uncomfortable truths. It could require showing people their confusions and their self-contradictions. This is part of our approach too, and it is a significant part of the value we add when compared to more conventional facilitation approaches.

At the same time, you could feel safe with Socrates, because you could completely trust his intention. All his poking and prodding and questioning came from a place of deep love – for the truth and for his interlocutors. And that is also a key part of our approach.

We establish a context in which it’s safe for people to say and hear difficult things.

Finally, Socrates saw himself as a midwife – he didn’t have any wisdom of his own, he said, but he helped bring out the wisdom that people already had inside them. And that, too, is a pretty good description of what we do.

We don’t use our expertise to tell people what to think. We use it to help people think better for themselves.