Quality posts, head and shoulders above alot of his blogging seniors. Dan Oestreich gets my vote as the new blogger most likely to get me thinking with EVERY SINGLE POST. I’m tempted to advise him not to burn himself out so quickly, but then I wouldn’t have all this great stuff to read! G’wan…get over there and chew on the food he has laid out for us.
Lifting this right from Adam Kahane’s book Solving Tough Problems: We get stuck by holding on tightly to our opinions and plans and identities and truths. But when we relax and are present and open up our minds and hearts and wills, we get unstuck and we unstick the world around us. I have learned that the more open I am – the more authentic I am to the way things are and could be, around me and inside me; the less attached I am to way things ought to be – the more effective I am in helping to …
If you are a facilitator and you haven’t seen this, take note that a new book is forthcoming from the international Association of Facilitators on facilitation practices. It is edited by Sandy Schumann and features Sam Kaner, Roger Schwarz, Lisa Kimball, Chris Hogan, Marv Weisbord and Sandra Janoff, Reinhard Kuchenmueller, among many many others. It’s out in February at $75 US which is a hefty price, but this might well be the first and last facilitation book you ever buy.
There is a famous quote attributed to Albert Einstein that goes something like this: If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I knew the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.� AS a facilitator it�s sometimes hard to be in that place � what Sam Kaner calls �the groan zone� � where confusion, frustration and divergence live. The process of assembling patterns of meaning in a group is labourious but it …
Recently, my facilitation practice has increasingly involved helping people to set a simple vision for their work and then to invite them to find a place for themselves in that vision. In Open Space we call that �passion and responsibility� but the truth is those two dynamics are the yin and yang of getting anything done well. Focussing groups on passion involves facilitating seeing. I find especially that �what if�� questions help a lot in this respect. Asking �what if� proposes a future, but doesn�t worry itself with the details. And it also allows each person to immediately see themselves …