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 …
My good friend Jon Husband, of Wirearchy fame, has been touting the benefits of Qumana for a while now. I have been playing with various builds since last spring, and it seemed like too much work to figure out everything I needed to know. So I set it aside. But now the basic versio works so well that I don’t know that I’ll ever go back to using the Blogger dashboard. Qumana is a great tool. A million uses abound… Thanks Jon.
Thanks to Bob at the Turtle Island Native Network I have learned of a number of the indigenous peoples in the Andaman Sea who have been decimated by the tsunamis. Here are some links to some articles on them. While it seems true that groups like the Sentinelese have eschewed contact with outsiders up to the present day, still some of these articles treat these peoples as endangered species, so if you can get past the unsophisticated cafe anthropology(prmitive, negrito, etc.), there is some news in there. For more details about the tribal peoples in question, here are some better …