Removing Barriers to Collaboration
Facilitating processes for others means facilitating your process too. Facilitators spend a lot of time preparing material and frameworks for setting up and running effective group processes. They may assemble resources relevant to the focus of their group. They attempt to anticipate some of the problems, concerns, and challenges that may present themselves so that they’ll [...]
The current Presidential election is doing it’s best to capitalize on potential differences between the candidates, even where they don’t exist. There are so many issues upon which people take strong positions believing they are right and others are wrong. How important is it to hold on to positions and beliefs that disconnect us? And [...]
The deeper we delve into any subject, the more complex and intricate it can become. I think it’s common to think that to become an advanced practitioner of facilitation, or any art for that matter, requires a move in the direction of increasing complexity. While a deeper and/or broader scope of knowledge and experience is [...]
After a coaching session with a client the other day, I noticed a pattern that has shown up in many other areas of my life that I thought would be useful to explore with you and other group leaders. Without sharing details, the first half of the session was a meandering affair with the sharing [...]
A few weeks ago, I went on a week-long canoe camping trip with several friends into the Boundary Waters Wilderness area of Northern Minnesota. I’d never gone camping for this long before and never in canoes either. With six people, three canoes, and several hundred pounds of gear, we set up and broke down camp [...]
Much of what we do as group leaders is help our clients make some kind of change. Whether we’re talking about a change to a huge system or a change in a single persons life, the things that stand in the way of change are similar if not the same. The following ten steps will [...]
Most of what goes on in a group happens below the thinking level and below participants conscious awareness. Given that most innovative, creative, inventive, and visionary developments are born at these deeper levels, progressive teams will benefit by developing awareness of them. It is the facilitator’s job to bring these deeper levels into awareness to [...]
I love the Apprentice TV series hosted by Donald Trump. In a recent season, Donald recruited a cast of 18 celebrities, competing against one another on various business tasks. Each week the winning team leader is awarded a sizeable check to donate to their favorite charity. A very interesting thing happened in one episode. In [...]
Intention and Correspondence The idea that we create our reality is as old as the ancient Hindu Vedas, which state that Atman (the individual) is Brahman (the cosmos). This suggests that the whole of experience somehow resides in our consciousness, and that it is our consciousness that shapes, attracts, or otherwise brings about what seem [...]
The Dualistic Nature of Values and Internal Value Dynamics According to John Tropman in his book “Making Meetings Work, he claims that many traditional conflict-management approaches make assumptions that get in the way of possible solutions. One of those assumptions is that individuals are clear about their values. In other words, “they have a well-ordered [...]
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