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

an improvisation game called “Learning Like a Dolphin.” We invited one of them to volunteer to be “the dolphin,” which Carlos Cruz (an accomplished community organizer) did, and he was asked to leave the room. The others—”the trainers”—agreed on a simple series of coherent actions they wanted the dolphin to learn to do: picking up a chair, then mov

Playing also helps us relax our tight hold on our ideas. My colleague Ian Prinsloo, a former theater director, has taught me how valuable purposeful games and icebreakers can be because they reduce hierarchy and formality, which impede contribution, connection, and equity and therefore limit creative collaboration.

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.

How Do We Decide Who Does What? Directing and Accompanying

Relationships enable progress.

Redirecting

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).

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.