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

The poet John Keats had a term for this crucial capacity to stay patiently in nonconclusion until you discern that it is time to conclude: negative capability, which he defined as “being capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

Suspending means that a person is acknowledging that their thoughts about what is happening may not be accurate descriptions of what is actually happening.

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).

This requires letting go, at least for a while, of our own ideas and stories.

THE KEY TO CYCLING BETWEEN MAPPING AND DISCOVERING IS ADAPTING

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

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

In transformative facilitation, such responsive improvisation is therefore a sign not of failure but of success.

PIVOTING REQUIRES FLUIDITY

How Do We Define Success? Concluding and Advancing