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Facilitation

Strategic facilitation • Social enterprise • Team decision-making • Sensitive conversations

Helping an employee-owned organisation make a high-stakes decision about its future, together

An employee-owned social enterprise needed an inclusive process through which employees could advise the Board on whether the organisation should continue, pursue a different route or wind down.

The challenge

An employee-owned social enterprise was facing an existential decision about its future.

Financial pressures, organisational capacity and questions about the health of the culture meant that continuing as before was no longer a realistic option. The organisation needed to examine what it would mean to continue, explore an alternative route, such as a merger, or wind down responsibly.

The Board was responsible for making a recommendation to the Employee Ownership Trust. But, both culturally and practically, it was essential that employees played a meaningful role in shaping that recommendation.

This created a difficult balance.

The organisation needed an honest assessment of its position without creating unnecessary alarm. Employees needed space to express what they genuinely thought - not simply respond to options that felt predetermined. The Board needed advice it could use, while remaining clear about where formal decision-making responsibility sat.

There was also an important cultural principle at stake. This was an employee-owned organisation with a strong commitment to participation and shared responsibility. A conventional top-down consultation would have contradicted the culture the organisation was trying to protect.

The process therefore needed to be as inclusive, transparent and employee-led as the culture the organisation wanted its future to embody.

What we did

The Future Works facilitated a process that moved from shared understanding, through structured exploration, to formal advice for the Board.

This built on earlier work in which the team had developed a shared picture of the organisation’s current position. This stage focused on the question: what should happen next?

Establishing a shared and honest starting point
We began by renewing three commitments for the conversation: to stay connected, stay honest and stay in touch.

The team then received a clear update on the organisation’s current financial, cultural and people position, alongside the Board’s emerging perspective. Employees had space to ask questions of clarification before being asked to form a view.

This mattered because meaningful participation requires access to the information on which a decision is being based. People could not give credible advice if different parts of the organisation were working from different versions of reality.

Making the options tangible
Rather than moving immediately to a vote or asking people which option they preferred, we helped the team explore what the different futures would actually involve.

Small groups examined potential scenarios such as continuing, merging or winding down. For each, they considered:
 

  • what doing this well would look like;

  • what would need to be true for that future to be viable;

  • what had already happened - or was already happening - that supported it;

  • and what the scenario meant for their advice or questions to the Board.


This moved the conversation beyond abstract preferences. It enabled people to examine the practical, cultural and emotional implications of each route before reaching a conclusion.

Creating multiple routes for every voice to contribute
We designed the formal advice process so that participation did not depend on being the quickest, loudest or most confident person in the room.

Employees could develop and express their views through:

  • individual reflection and written advice;

  • structured small-group discussion;

  • facilitated debate;

  • and whole-group sense-making.


The process drew on Lewis Deep Democracy techniques to surface disagreement, explore minority perspectives and prevent the group from moving too quickly towards an apparently comfortable consensus.

Advice was captured clearly for the Board, including the reasoning, conditions, concerns and questions behind people’s views - not simply a show of hands.

Closing the loop
We ended with clarity from the Board about what would happen to the team’s advice, the next stages of the recommendation process and when the Employee Ownership Trust would make the final decision.

We also created space to acknowledge the emotional weight of the process. Participants closed by identifying one ask and one offer, helping the team leave with a continued sense of connection and mutual responsibility.

What changed

The process enabled the organisation to move from a broad and emotionally charged question - Do we continue or close? - towards a more grounded understanding of its options.

Employees were able to:
 

  • develop a shared understanding of the organisation’s financial, cultural and capacity position;

  • examine what each possible future would require in practice;

  • contribute their advice through several different participation routes;

  • express concerns, disagreement and minority perspectives;

  • and understand how their input would inform the formal decision.


The Board left with clearly captured advice from the team, including the reasoning and conditions behind different views. This provided a stronger and more legitimate basis for its recommendation to the Employee Ownership Trust.

The process did not make the underlying decision easy. It made the route towards it more transparent, inclusive and trustworthy.

Most importantly, employees were not treated as an audience for a decision that had already been made. They were able to make a meaningful contribution while retaining clarity about the Board’s and Trust’s formal responsibilities.

Our 'special sauce' on this project

In a high-stakes strategy process like this, the design of the agenda is important, but the way the conversation is held affects whether people trust the eventual decision, and whether the culture emerges strengthened or damaged.

Our approach combined four areas of expertise:

1. Understanding employee ownership and distributed authority. We understood that employee involvement could not be a symbolic consultation exercise. At the same time, employee ownership does not mean that every decision is made through an all-staff vote. The process gave employees real influence while respecting the distinct responsibilities of the team, Board and Employee Ownership Trust.

2. Experience of self-management and participatory organisations. Drawing on thinking from self-management, Teal organisations and Holacracy, the process was designed around distributed participation, transparency and clear decision rights. This helped the organisation make the decision in a way that reflected how it wanted to work - not revert to command and control at the moment the stakes became highest.

3. Methods that include disagreement, not just participation. Inclusive facilitation is not achieved simply by inviting everyone into the room. Power, confidence, hierarchy and group dynamics still determine which views are heard. Lewis Deep Democracy and facilitated debate techniques enabled us to surface tension, hear minority perspectives and distinguish genuine alignment from premature consensus.

4. Independent facilitation of an emotionally loaded decision. The organisation’s leaders were not neutral observers: they were part of the situation and affected by its outcome. An external facilitator could hold the structure, notice group dynamics, challenge assumptions and protect space for difficult contributions - while freeing leaders to listen and participate rather than trying to manage the room.

Another facilitator might have helped the group discuss the available options. Our distinctive contribution was to run a credible decision-making process around them, combining honest information, practical scenario testing, employee influence, clear governance and space for both agreement and dissent.

For an employee-owned organisation, that distinction was essential. The process needed to do more than produce advice. It needed to embody the culture people were deciding how and whether to carry forward.

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