Facilitation
and Large Scale Involvement

Facilitating with Ease!
by Ingrid Bens
Newly revised, this text is full of great resources for team facilitators, team leaders, managers, consultants trainers...anyone who works with groups, teams, or meetings. The accompanying CD-ROM allows you to customize worksheets and information to meet your needs. Practical information.
 

 APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY: Change At The Speed Of Imagination by Jane Magruder by Watkins & Bernard Mohr
Watkins and Mohr offer a detailed overview of the technique of Appreciative Inquiry, an OD process that taps the creativity of large groups to create fast, positive changes. The book traces the change tool's 20-year history and background, explores its five core processes, and offers case studies of successful projects

101 Ways to Make Meetings Active : Surefire Ideas to Engage Your Group
by Melvin L. Silberman and Kathy Clark 
101 tips, tactics, and simple strategies to brighten up meetings and move the action along while successfully fulfilling goals and objectives. Readers will learn how to prepare a meeting, warm up the attendees stimulate discussion, prompt creative problem solving, manage conflict, build consensus, and close with a bang. These tips are great for more than formal meetings. 
 

Truth about Teams: A Facilitator's Survival Guide by J.T. Huston, Ed.D.
Need a quick read on facilitating teams? J.T. Huston offers practical advice in this 150-page soft cover book.
 

Managers As Facilitators
by Richard Weaver and John Farrell
I asked the publisher Berrett-Koehler for a review copy because of my long-held belief that managers should know and use facilitation skills. The amount of work being performed by groups today necessitates a broader dissemination of these skills, particularly in management. Weaver and Farrell have combined their years of facilitation experience with an understanding of the legitimate roles of leaders to produce a book that provides much of what is needed to be a good manager/facilitator.

Large Scale Involvement

Change
The Change Handbook: Group Methods for Shaping the Future
by Peggy Holman and Tom Devane
This new offering by Berrett-Koehler is a marvelous compendium of the most effective methods for creating real change in organizations using group processes. Anyone considering large group approaches to change should review the full spectrum of available processes, and this book puts them all in one place.

Search Conferences
Discovering Common Ground: How Future Search Conferences Bring People Together to Achieve Breakthrough Innovation, Empowerment, Shared Vision, and Collaborative Action  
by Marvin R. Weisbord and 35 International Coauthors
Several years ago I first learned about the incredible power of Future Search Conferences in bringing disparate groups of people together to develop energy and action around a common vision. It was new to many of us and we needed a model to guide us. Marv Weisbord provided this model and good examples in this book. It's a powerful text on how to bring people (sometimes warring factions) together to accomplish incredible outcomes.

See also:
Future Search : An Action Guide to Finding Common Ground in Organizations and Communities

Open Space

Open Space Technology: A User's Guide  
by Harrison Owen
The companion to the above book that gives a detailed description of how to facilitate an open space meeting.

Real Time Strategic Change - by Robert W. Jacobs
Robert Jacobs has drawn on the work of Kathleen Dannemiller, Chuck Tyson and their associates to give us another approach for achieving fundamental, far-reaching, and fast-paced change that involves the entire organization.  These people have conducted strategic planning sessions with as many as 2000 participants, and this book gives wonderful insight on how that can be accomplished. Jacobs doesn't just talk concepts, he outlines a step-by-step methods for conducting these sessions along with explanations of why they are necessary. This is employee involvement on a grand scale!