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

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

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).

Suspending is such an important practice for transformative facilitation that many of the exercises Reos uses in workshops are specifically designed to demonstrate and enable it. For example, we often ask participants to write their ideas on sticky notes, sheets of flip-chart paper, or a physical or virtual whiteboard, which can be easily viewed an

We can only relax if we are working in a context that enables us to loosen our grip on our habitual patterns of thinking, relating, and acting.

How Do We Decide Who Does What? Directing and Accompanying

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

THE KEY TO CYCLING BETWEEN MAPPING AND DISCOVERING IS ADAPTING

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.

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.