Facilitating Breakthrough: How to Remove Obstacles, Bridge Differences, and Move Forward Together

This second phase is always unclear and often uncomfortable, so one important challenge for facilitators and participants is to have the patience to stay in this ambiguity long enough for something new to emerge.

Letting Go

If reaching agreements is one pole of facilitating, what is the other? It is finding ways to move forward while staying in relationship.

A team can sometimes make progress by agreeing, through debating or dialoguing, with a perspective or option that one of them had come up with previously. But more often they need to create new perspectives or options together.

Gottman’s point is that happy couples have the capacity to distinguish between what needs to be agreed on and what simply lived with.

Another exercise for suspending is to use collaborative feedback. A group of people who have been working on something present the draft results to a second group. The second group gives feedback and asks questions. The first group must write down this feedback but must not give any answers at all. (Afterward the two groups switch roles, and then t

EXPERIMENTING REQUIRES PIVOTING

I have found Scharmer’s model to be particularly useful in its description of three specific practices for shifting from more closed to more open modes of talking and listening: suspending (opening your mind), redirecting (opening your heart), and letting go (opening your will).

There is a simple model that is useful for describing and facilitating collaborative creative processes. It posits that a group of participants can create something new—new understandings, relationships, commitments, or initiatives—by working through three stages. The first stage is diverging: each person contributing their experiences, ideas, or p

How Do We Get from Here to There? Mapping and Discovering