Chris Corrigan Facilitation

Facilitation

Remember the very best conversations you have had? You were deeply engaged with the subject, talking and listening deeply with your friends, exploring ideas or making something new together. Your world focused down to a point and you found yourself immersed in the flow of creative exchange.

Now imagine if work were like that.

It may be in an organizational setting where conversation and dialogue helps us to understand our potential and work more creatively with one another. Or it could be in a community where deep listening and truthful speaking help us to see through some of our toughest problems. As a facilitator I want you to have these kinds of experiences with your colleagues, friends and neighbours.

My facilitation practice draws heavily on the work of Harrison Owen, Toke Paludan Moeller, David Bohm, David Cooperrider, Juanita Brown, Adam Kahane, and the many First Nations, Inuit and Metis Elders I have had the pleasure of working with and learning from. All of these people have showed us that the path of authentic conversation leads directly to deep engagement with the world around us. It opens up possibilities for solutions to our toughest problems and invites the leader in each of to emerge to help us through the biggest oollective challenges we face.

My facilitation practice emerges from these assumptions:

The wisdom we need right now is in the room.
Facilitation is not a directive practice, but rather a practice of creating and holding a container for the group's wisdom to emerge.
To get to truly creative solutions we must invite chaos and order to play together.
Leadership is about inviting passion and responsibility into the process and supporting connections for action.
The process serves the group and needs to be carefully planned but should remain totally invisible.
Co-creation is the best way to get to wise action
Process and content are equally important.
For a system or a group to function well it needs to be learning from its experience.
Groups are living systems, not mechanical systems.
All good work done in the world depends on good collaboration. Good work therefore is about both quality content and quality process.

Working with your group, I will spend time with you crafting an invitation and creating the most effective process for the task at hand. I will walk with you as a facilitator, helping your group to open to itself and find its untapped resources. And I will assist you in harvesting learning and energy from our time together so that your group may find ways to maximize its working relationships long after we have worked together.