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 and then recreate it as an improv scene, and ask them to play it out. And then we play around, asking them to try and play it in different ways. Or we introduce “tagging” where other participants step into the scene to try different responses.
If anyone in the audience comes up with a clever analysis, we tend to stop them and say, great, go play that idea out. Funnily, their first response is mild panic – as they realise it’s one thing to do the theory and another to do the the practice.
What this play encourages, I believe, is a growing willingness to try stuff and realise nothing is written.
via Johnnie Moore’s Weblog: Holding uncertainty, living forwards.
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Viv McWaters posts her thoughts on how to connect people in large group settings. This post is a great start:
I learnt from one of my facilitation mentors, Antony Williams, that individuals generally come to groups with the need to be seen as an individual within the group (everyone likes to be recognised for being themselves first, a member of the group second) and to understand the connections. One of the first things I like to do when attending an event is to see who else will be there, and who I know, or people I’d like to meet in person. I don’t think I’m alone. Antony helped me understand that individuals are making choices and connections in groups all the time, whether conscious or not: where to sit and with whom, who to talk to, what questions to ask.
To add to this list, an activity I picked up along the way that Viv and I used with The Slips last year in Australia: have people turn their name tags around and write a question they have or a gift they have to offer on the blank side. That way, as people travel around during the conference, they can meet each other in their questions, and find out their names later.
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Back in November, I worked with my mate Teresa Posakony on a two day gathering the object of which was to work to apply brain science to policy questions on the prevention of adverse childhood experiences. On the first day I facilitated an Open Space event that brought together reserachers and brain scientists to discuss their findings and on the second day, we had panelists and Teresa ran a half day cafe to look at the implications of the research for policy making. I composed a poem at the end of the day.
As a part of the experience, we were shown a powerful video of the still face experiment, a test to see how infants respond when their care givers break the connection with them. It is very very powerful. Here it is:
Later in the day one of the panelists, Jennifer Rodriguez, referred to this video by saying that collectively, “society is the still face” when it comes to our children and youth.
That was the hook I needed for the poem, which was also informed by the words I saw and heard during the cafe. I read the poem and got a generous standing ovation.
Today I got an email from our clients which was sent by the researcher you see in the video, Dr. Ed. Tronick. Dr. Tronick was responding to our client, who sent him the poem and the recording of me reading it:
I really am quite moved by the poem and your comment about how much impact it has. When I began this work in my lab I had no idea that it might one day be so useful in getting children and families what they so desperately need. I love the poem – I will get it up in my office somewhere, especially what it brings together and the rhythm of it. Please tell Chris how much I appreciate it. It is just amazing. And more important than the SF or the poem is the work you and everyone at the conference are doing.
It is not enough to do work in the world without adding as much beauty as we can. The power resides in the songs, the poems, the images that we use to capture our collective experiences and to throw a light on how important they are to us as human beings.
Enjoy the harvest.
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From the Applied Improv Network ning, here is a great set of Improv Games for Larger Groups. For use in conferences, large groups settings, school assemblies, church services, riots and demos, sporting events, concerts, Apple store lineups, picket lines and anywhere else a few dozen people or more are gathered.
I especially like this line from Paul Levy in the discussion “There are no large groups, just tiny facilitators!”
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From my friend Jerry Nagel, a quote from guitar maker Phil Patrillo:
We send our kids to school. I call it the “brain laundry.” They teach them everything you don’t want them to know. It’s done in the name of education and fairness and righteousness, and the things of common sense and how things are done, are never explored. You get a piece of paper with your name on it, if you follow the instructions. I got a Doctorate not because I wanted the piece of paper; I got the Doctorate because my professor said to me, “You know more about this than I do and I’m the professor.” I wanted to know why things occurred. I always say that creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
That indeed is art in so many ways…it is the act of playing with space…the space between the notes that Miles Davisr talked about or the willingness to master and then let go of technique that Thelonius Monk talk about or the. In the moment, art is about knowing which mistakes to keep and how to surround them with silence and emptiness so that they can grow and come alive. Everything we do, if we call ourselves artists comes from that source.