General George Patton (US Army, WWII) was quoted as saying, "Never tell people how to do things.  Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity".  He recognized that by unleashing people's creative talents you are likely to get the best results. 

Facilitators help you do this.  An unbiased facilitator helps your people arrive at their own decisions so that they will "own" those decisions.  When you use a facilitated approach, you maximize the chances of achieving a high level of employee "buy in".  When the ideas come from a group, that group is far more likely to work towards successful implementation than a group that's had ideas imposed on it.

This works well for decision making and analytical processes where "buy in" to the decision is important.  But what about other activities like planning, scheduling, writing instructions, technical documentation and analyzing results?  These are activities that effectively implement decisions.  They are implementation as opposed to decision making steps.  Indeed, teams may be useful for some of these activities, but do they need to be facilitated?  I suggest that even if teams are used they can pretty much be left to their own devices.  They'll muddle through successfully provided they are not a "dysfunctional team".  In that case it's not facilitation, it's team training and team formation activities that are needed. 

These activities are often left to individuals.  Those individuals are generally subject matter experts and quite capable of doing their thing on their own.  They produce a "draft" or a "strawman" output and that is then reviewed by other "team" members or other interested parties.  The comments that arise from those reviews are considered and then incorporated into the work for final "publication".

Let's take weekly scheduling as an example.  A scheduler (who is often a planner) prepares a draft work schedule for the following week.  He/ she bases the scheduling on priority (how urgent is the work?) and criticality (how important is the asset to our operations?) selecting the highest priority work to be done first and breaking any ties created due to resource constraints by using criticality.  The draft schedule is circulated to supervisors, superintendents, etc. - anyone with a legitimate say about what work gets done and when.  If they have no comments, then the schedule stands and is implemented the following week.  If they have inputs they bring them up at the weekly scheduling meeting, the schedule adjustments are agreed upon and the revised schedule is published for the following week.  In this case the scheduler is acting as a team facilitator.  There is no need for an independent, unbiased facilitator.

We can see how some processes, primarily those requiring decisions about "the way ahead", require group decisions and consensus.  Those are led by unbiased facilitators for the best results.  Other activities are really more an implementation of those decisions and require only subject matter expert input buffered with a review and revision process.