Over on LInkedIn, Bryan Stallings pointed to a 2017 post at the International Association of Facilitators site that contains a set of definitions of facilitation. I don’t remember contributing to that article, but I quite like what I said at the time: “While facilitation traditionally means ‘to make things easy’ I think we need a new definition that means ‘to host the struggle together.’ Good facilitators help create a container for people to work with difference and diversity to make good things happen.” That’s pretty good, I think. It describes what I do and it describes a shift in my practice over …
The other day on the Art of Hosting facebook group, my friend Cedric Jamet asked folks for some materials about the four fold practice, which is the basic essence of the Art of Hosting. Toke Moeller weighed in with his latest posters from a session he was leading with graduate students in sustainability leadership. Toke was, of course, one of the originals who put the four fold practice together and like all good generative frameworks, it has changed over time and it gets expressed in different ways depending on context. But the essence is that it balances self-awareness and focused …
For much of the past few years my facilitation and evaluation practice has been steadily merging together. When I FINALLY came across Cynthia’ Kurtz’s body of work, Participatory Narrative Inquiry a few years ago, I felt simultaneously validated and challenged. Validated in that the participatory facilitation work I have been doing since I stumbled on Open Space Technology in 1995 met the complexity work I have been in since 2005 and the developmental evaluation work I’ve been doing for the past ten years. Challenged in that it opened up new streams for my practice, and that has been gratifying. Nowadays …
James Gleick, the author of the classic book “Chaos: Making a New Science” has written a terrific review of Jill Lepore’s new book “If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future.”The book covers the origin of data science as applied to democracy, and comes as conversations about social media, algorithms, and electoral manipulation are in full swing due to the US election and the release of The Social Dilemma. Gleick’s review is worth a read. He covers some basic complexity theory when working with data. He provides a good history of the discovery of how the principles of “work …
Facilitators are getting inundated with panicky requests to host meetings online. Some of us have the tech know-how to do this, and others don’t. Clients are feeling pressure and urgency to get teams up and running online and folks are hoping the important meeting that they have been working with for months can suddenly go online and get the same kinds of results. Here is some stuff to help you out. Slow down. Just because you are not hosting face to face does not mean you are not hosting. Make sure that you do the due diligence in designing and …