Leaving New York today. It has been an incredible four days here working with my good friends Kelly McGowan and Tuesday Ryan-Hart and Lex Schroeder, Aniestla Rugama, Alissa Schwartz, and Aswad Foster. We were running a workshop called the Art of Social Justice in which we were investigating the intersection of participatory process and social justice work. Over three days we explored a framework that Tuesday has developed and investigated with Kelly for the past year. The framework includes and transcends the gifts and drawbacks of traditional social justice frameworks and of what we know about participatory process. Tuesday is …
A great insight from Johnnie Moore on learning facilitation: I’ve done quite a bit of facilitation training this year, loads of it with Viv. We’ve pushed to get the sponsors to accept less emphasis on learning lots of techniques and tips in favour of lots of activities where participants try stuff out. One area where we play around a lot is the “difficult people” situation. We resist offering standard tricks for this. So we don’t offer formulaic models for managing difficult people, however comprehensively researched. Instead, we ask people to recall or imagine their encounters with the inevitable impossible participant …
From an interview with my dear friend Peggy Holman on enhancing creative leadership: Q: What is one practice that people could start applying today to bring more creativity into their work or their business ”¨organization? Holman: If I were to pick on practice that is simple to apply and powerful in its affect, I’d say: welcome disturbance by asking questions of possibility. Creativity often shows up in a cloak of disruption. It makes sense when you stop and think about it. If there were no disruption, there’d be no reason for change. And change opens the door to creativity. Great …
A basic diagram for hosting questions that create extraordinary conversations. In the life of organizations and communities there are times when questions arise that just can’t be dealt with in the regular course of events. This is often when those of us who are consulting facilitators are brought into an organization. We are often told that “we have reached a place where we need a facilitator to help.” Usually there is an obvious need or purpose stated right in the first few sentences of the phone call or the email. This is something that consultants like us have to bear …
I’ve been thinking on similar lines; it’s quite tempting to write stuff about faciliation to guide the “leader”… but maybe it would be more powerful to write for the participants. Steve, in fact, goes ahead and does this, suggesting 12 Acts of Courage to Change Meetings for Good. via Johnnie Moore’s Weblog: Facilitation for participants. Yes indeed Johnnie, and I see this as fundamental to the invitation process, so that participants know what they are getting into.