This is an excellent business book of facilitation and running meetings effectively, and dealing with group think, frustrations, and building solutions that are not easy to discover. This is because tough problems are just that - tough for groups to work through. As the book illustrates, they lead to the groan zone, where many groups give up or capitulate to poor decisions. This book has many wonderful examples and ideas to get people talking and to truly collaborate on solutions. ( )

A great book on facilitating collaborative decision making. It starts with a simple but insightful model on what happens in difficult decision making meetings, and how you can support the different phases the process needs to go through. The discussion continues with an explanation of the role of the facilitator, and some simple general practices that are valuable to have in your toolbox. The rest of the book is a vast catalog of exercises for the different phases of decision making.

The format of the whole book is very accessible, and it serves well for both looking up single exercises and reading the whole book page by page.

Highly recommended! ( )

“In my opinion, Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making is the best book on collaboration ever written. I say this as someone who has been a CEO or executive director for more than 20 years. During that time I have worked with countless facilitators and organization development consultants. For depth of impact and overall effectiveness, Sam Kaner and his colleagues are top-of-the-line. This book is loaded with the tools and guiding principles that make Sam’s work so compelling.” ( )