Background: The success of practice development and culture change relies heavily on skilled and systematic facilitation, but becoming a capable facilitator who enables individuals to be creative and flourish can be challenging.  This article follows the journey of being introduced to practice development and becoming an enabling facilitator in an aged care residential setting.

Aim: This paper reflects on a personal journey of transformation; from being an organisational practice development internal facilitator to becoming an external facilitator through the stages of enlightenment, empowerment and emancipation: the three Es.

Design: The three Es demonstrated in this paper are compared to and represented as the three stages in the lifecycle of a dragonfly: the ‘egg’ stage,  being fertilised with knowledge and deciding whether to expand and enlarge or lay dormant; followed by the ‘nymph’ stage where the facilitator surrounds themselves with familiarity, avoids episodes of upsetting the calm while they grow and mature; and lastly the ‘adult’ stage where the facilitator has developed and grown to be an external facilitator. Their wings/courage allows them to hover, review, question myths, and encourage quality and innovation; their legs encourage transportation of knowledge and facilitation; and their large eyes observe and question.

Results: Equipping individuals with the skills to facilitate learning in an environment that encourages creativity, growth and high challenge/high support, and using practice development processes, has enabled person-centred outcomes for older people living in residential care.

Conclusion: Facilitators aim to help staff become aware of, and freed from, taken-for-granted aspects of their practice. They help staff understand their roles in creating and sustaining culture in the workplace, and how to approach organisational systems that constrain them. Having a vision for practice development in the workplace, being committed to person-centred care delivery and being actively involved in culture change has fuelled my personal journey to becoming an enabling facilitator.

Implications for practice:

• Building capacity and capability to enable transformational change in the workplace helps individuals to see that care is not a checklist of tasks – it is about engagement and meaningful relationships at all levels
• Enabling facilitation encourages inclusive decision making processes that give older people input into their individual care plans. More than that, it has increased engagement and the building of meaningful relationships at all levels
• Continually recruiting and equipping facilitators who have the ability to engage authentically with individuals and teams helps develop a learning culture where staff awaken their creative imagination

This article by Jacqueline West is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 License.