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In systemic intervention, boundary critique is important. This means explicitly exploring the inclusion, exclusion and marginalization of both people and issues. Most of the practitioner's attention in boundary critique is usually focused on relationships between stakeholders (i.e. the participants in the intervention and those who might be affected by it). A significant focus is also the remit of the intervention: those things that need to be directly addressed or bracketed out in order to make a difference that is meaningful to a broad range of stakeholders. What is often less visible during boundary critique is the personal and/or professional identity of the practitioner, and the impact this may have on both relationships with others and the construction of people's understanding of the issues they are grappling with. This paper reflects on a project promoting environmental health through Māori community development that reveals the importance of personal and professional identity to systemic intervention. It is argued that it is impossible for practitioners to set aside their identities and become ‘neutral’ modellers or process facilitators. When this appears to happen it is because the practitioner's identity has been (often invisibly) constructed to legitimate his or her activities, and these activities do not transgress the expectations of participants that flow from their understanding of the practitioner's identity and role. Nevertheless, even though practitioner identities inevitably impact on the trajectory of interventions, at least some of their implications can be explicitly acknowledged and managed as part of systemic intervention. Some examples of management strategies are provided. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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What managers do in terms of managing groups of people in the workplace, or interacting with different stakeholder groups, requires similar skills to those of the process facilitator in management consultancy. There are different views of the role of the facilitator in the management literature that have been advanced as ways of aiding group processes. This article offers an account of how the role of facilitators might be extended towards a process of `critical facilitation'. The view that we present is elucidated through our using an exemplar of our application of this approach. This mode of facilitation was used by us as part of a research initiative aimed at exploring standard setting in the National Health Service in a region of the UK. It involved facilitating peer-group and multi-agency workshops involving six cross-organizational groups. By using this exemplar we show how facilitators might intervene in group discussions and become involved in various ways in the challenging of statements made, as part of the process of discourse. Our view of how statements can be scrutinized is based on a pragmatized version of Habermas's concentration on different types of validity claims that may be invoked in speech situations. We suggest that critical facilitation does not consist of assuming an uninvolved (more or less detached) attitude, but rather of developing an orientation of openness to discourse. We rely to some extent on Habermas's view of what discourse might involve, although we do not concur with his requirement that the search for consensus must inform the process.