What do set facilitators bring to the party? (And do we need them?)

This account of practice discusses the learning of a set that met for five years as part of undertaking a research degree. It focuses on questions relating to the role of the facilitator that emerge from the experience of an action learning set that was first helped by an external facilitator and that, after 18 months, became self-facilitating. Key to our success as a set was the openness to the emergent learning about the process; each difficulty we faced (as a set and individually) was taken as an opportunity for deepening our learning about set dynamics and facilitation. This article shares some of the highs and lows of our journey, illustrating how we learned to be an effective set that became self-facilitating.