Although I know nothing about basketball, I’ve been thinking about something often called the “Chris Paul effect” since reading about it in Jamil Zaki’s article about super-facilitators in the Harvard Business Review.
In case you don’t know anything about this so-called effect, Chris Paul is an American professional basketball player. He has joined four different NBA teams over the course of his career. Each time, within a couple of years, that team posted its best record ever. Not because he was always the top scorer, but because he made everyone around him better.
Zaki labels Chris Paul a “Super Facilitator”, suggesting that Paul has an ability to tap into the “collective intelligence” of his teams, working with the different talents and strengths of the team, building trust in the process. He reads the room (or the court), distributes attention, trusts his teammates’ strengths, and creates the conditions for collective performance.
In futures and foresight work, good facilitation can have a similar effect.
We often focus on the method: scenarios, horizon scanning, artefacts, frameworks. But in my experience, the biggest difference between futures work that gets people engaged and acting, and futures work that flops is not the tool. It’s the quality of interaction it enables.
Futures conversations are inherently challenging. They ask people to think beyond immediate pressures, to sit with uncertainty, to hold multiple possibilities at once, and to listen across difference. Without strong facilitation, groups tend to default to familiar patterns: a few confident voices dominate, uncertainty gets rushed, disagreement is smoothed over, and the future quietly collapses back into the present.
Good facilitation doesn’t add polish to futures work. It changes what becomes possible.
It shows up in small, often invisible ways: who gets invited in, how airtime is distributed, whether dissent is welcomed, and whether questions open things up or shut them down. It’s the difference between futures as performance and futures as collective sense-making.
When facilitation is working well, groups don’t just generate ideas. They develop shared understanding and ownership. They become better able to think together under uncertainty. Which is, after all, a form of collective intelligence.
That’s why I’ve come to see facilitation as the hidden engine of futures work. The methods matter. Of course they do. But it’s how people interact around them that determines whether the future stays open, or quietly shuts down.