Within a few minutes of meeting Camilla Gordon in London, you are struck by her warm personality and appreciate that participants in her groups must quickly feel at ease. Camilla encourages everyone to fully participate in discussions and to start conversations with people they may not know well as they hold different positions within the same company, or they have simply never met before.
Camilla spent her childhood near Edinburgh and from a young age became interested in drama. She went on to study drama at Manchester University and it was there that she became interested in how drama could be used as a tool for change and how more creative methods could be used to answer difficult questions. Camilla started volunteering and was working with young people and started facilitating sessions for them on topics such as confidence and helping to create a space for them.
Voluntary work was where Camilla found her own space and where she learnt many of her skills. She smiles when she admits that at that stage, she didn’t know what she did was called ‘Facilitation’ and nor did she know that she could make it her career!
Having grown up in rural Scotland and then studying at university, the experience of working in an outdoor education centre in Botswana, gave her an insight into the many bigger challenges in the world – in particular structural inequality and racism. While she was there, one of the students became unwell and the group worked together to adjust sessions so that she could participate. For Camilla, this was an important lesson in access and inclusion and how she as a Facilitator could ensure that everyone could participate equally.
One of Camilla’s first jobs was working with small-hold farmers across Kenya, Uganda and Peru. It was there that she learnt how to design a workshop and the importance of understanding what motivates the group and what are their challenges. Knowing these facts ensures your sessions encourage participants to engage with the content as you have made it relevant to them. Camilla also spent time reflecting on her own position as a white woman in their space and how to recognise the power dynamics at play in different spaces with different groups.
Camilla found that she enjoyed working in small scale start-up businesses as she likes being ‘in the nitty gritty’ of things and enjoys working dynamically. At the age of 25, she decided to go freelance as this would enable her to ‘do her own thing’ and give her greater variety in her work-
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“I can work one week for a corporate doing facilitation training and then the next week do a few days pro bono work for a small charity that cannot afford to bring in a professional facilitator. I feel that the power of facilitation is so strong and the impact so huge that I don’t think it should be only for organisations that can afford to pay for it. I like to do work that brings me energy but also puts good into the world”.
What exactly is Camilla’s role as a freelance Facilitator?
“For me, it is all about bringing people together. I see myself as a process facilitator. Lots of people do lots of different things and facilitate. With my skills and experience, I put facilitation first. I like the metaphor of being like a computer programmer. They build the structure, it doesn’t really matter about the content. I don’t need to have knowledge of the topic or the area – I come in and design the process”.
Camilla’s work takes many different forms as she designs ‘away days’ for teams who maybe want to look at their five-year strategy or similar. She also helps teams so that they can work better together as a team. She does a great deal of work around stakeholder engagement where participants may not know each other. Camilla often works with young people too, especially those affected by trauma in some way-
“For me it is all about the individuals in the group and how we can make sure that when they are in the group, they can have a voice and that voice is heard”.
Camilla explains that as a Facilitator she also recognises the different hierarchies within the group, and it is part of her role to address these hierarchies so that everyone can be heard and that they be more equal. She helps groups to recognise where there could be hierarchies at play and to help them to create a space where everyone feels able to share things from their perspective. She is not there to answer the questions but to ensure that the right questions are being asked to develop better relationships amongst the participants that will last long after a session finishes.
One of Camilla’s greatest achievements so far was working with an international organisation that brought stakeholders from around the world to discuss the implementation of one of the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals). There were 200 people in the room for two days in Helsinki and she and colleagues created a road map so participants could work together using a roadmap for change-
“We had MEPs working alongside youth activists and our challenge was to create a space that worked for both of them. I used creativity and energy plus my own character successfully to help others to feel safe in the space and to work with people whom they had not traditionally worked with”.
Camilla’s approach is certainly innovative and her clients find her refreshingly different to the more usual and classic approach to her role. Some clients have been concerned that her age could be off-putting to some people, who may not give her the respect she deserves. On three occasions, potential clients have been open that this was the basis for not hiring her. It is this that is part of what drives her to work with several membership groups for facilitators to create space to improve the diversity of the facilitation community and help more people recognise it as a viable career option.
The creativity she has developed through her love of drama has definitely become Camilla’s USP and she enjoys being able to combine creativity and helping people within her work, even using LEGO Serious Play as a key tool in her toolkit. She also draws on the wealth of experience that she gained from working in different countries and cultures. Camilla is currently co-leading the organising group for a conference for anyone interested in facilitation in Birmingham in April –
Facilitate 2023: Celebrating and sharing the diversity of facilitation
If you would like to contact Camilla to know more about her work and how she can help your organisation –
https://www.camillagordon.co.uk/
Twitter – https://twitter.com/CamillaGordon
Linkedin – https://www.linkedin.com/in/camilla-gordon/
