Rhizome Blog
Here you’ll find stories of successful organising, training and facilitation, what’s new in these areas already helping us build the world we want, news of Rhizome’s activities, and news of upcoming events. Have a browse or use the search for interesting topics we’ve written on. Please do feel free to comment and leave your own reflections – we feel that we’re on this learning journey, together.
NEON’s Movement Builders, Glasgow – application deadline midnight, Sun 4th Feb
Rhizome tip: there’ll be ace organisers there for you to meet, and you might end up singing! NEON’s Movement Builders programme is a 5 day intensive training course for people working towards big systemic change. Half theory, half practical tools, this five day course puts you in a room with 30 organisers across your region […]
Taking decisions – making the topic part of the discussion
This is the first blog post in a series about decision‑making. In this and the next one, we’ll be talking about important things to get right in decision‑making, before we explore the relationship between consensus decision‑making and voting, and when to use different methods. Do please let us know what you think. There are resources […]
From Burnout to Balance, 2-4th March 2018, Bristol
Building on Rhizome’s personal resilience and burn-out work, developed together with Navigate and Ecodharma, our Grassroots Trainers’ Network colleagues at Navigate are organising a useful workshop in Bristol. From Burnout to Balance: Co-creating cultures of collective and self-care 2 – 4th March 2018, Stokes Croft, Bristol Friday 6.30 – 9pm, Saturday 10.30 – 6.30pm, Sunday […]
Making Appreciative Inquiry work – using the questions
In the final post in our series on Appreciative Inquiry, using another case study we’ll give you some more hints about how to use the questions. Do get in touch if you need our facilitation services to guide you through, and let us know about your experiences of this method in the comments section […]
Making Appreciative Inquiry work – designing the questions
In order to help you try out Appreciative Inquiry (without our expert guidance!), the next two blog posts will guide you through a foundation, questions…. The set of questions used in Appreciative Inquiry is called a protocol. I can best show how they are developed by listing the questions we used in Thanet […]
Appreciative Inquiry case study – Imagine Ryedale, part 2
Following on from our Appreciative Inquiry intro, and continuing our case study where illustrating how it was used to develop community strategies, read on to hear the impact following visiting the area over 5 years on… The project described in part 1 took place in 2002/2003. In 2008 I visited Ryedale to talk to some […]
Appreciative Inquiry case study – Imagine Ryedale, part 1
Following on from our Appreciative Inquiry intro, read the first of our case studies, illustrating how the method can be used out ‘in the field’, starting with a rural area… Ryedale is a mainly rural district in North Yorkshire. We started by working with a core group of a dozen local activists and council officers. […]
Why I like Appreciative Inquiry
Here we introduce Appreciative Inquiry, one of the tools we use in Rhizome’s facilitation and training. Over the next few months we have a series of blog posts helping you figure out how you can use the model, illustrated through case studies. Do check back, and get in touch with your comments or questions. First […]
Running Great Workshops: Friday 8th and Saturday 9th December 2017, Edinburgh
Tripod Training, a fellow training co-op, and also part of the UK Grassroots Trainers’ Network, are running a two-day workshop that looks good. Here are the details. Running Great Workshops Friday 8th and Saturday 9th December 2017, Edinburgh Training and facilitation skills are key to successful organising, campaigning and movement building. This 2-day […]
Facilitating meetings: and finally…
Continuing our year-spanning mini-series on facilitating meetings; previous episodes are still avaialable for viewing, the first about beginnings, the second about the middle. Here’s some quick ideas and methods, with one for the brave! What methods have you tried and what happened? As my last blog said, the end game in meetings has two elements: […]
Sustaining ourselves, developing personal and group resilience
What looks to be a useful workshop organised by our colleagues in Navigate, also part of the UK Grassroots Trainers’ Network, even if you didn’t go to the taster: Day workshop – Sat 25th November 2017, 11am – 4pm Fully accessible venue in central Oxford Being involved in campaigns and taking action on issues of […]
Facilitating meetings: the middle game
There’s lots of different ways to facilitate meetings, and here we share a few ideas. Meetings have diferent stages, and a well-facilitated discussion tries to go beyond ‘business as usual; read more about this and participatory decision-making here. Some years back we published a blog post about what to do at the beginning of a […]
Street Talk, an alternative way of getting people talking
Most of the face-to-face encounters you’ll find on this site involve getting a group of people into a room for a length of time, supported by training or facilitation; below is an alternative. Do please share your experiences of running discussion groups and stalls on the street. What worked, or didn’t? Do you think you […]
How not to take decisions: voting, chess and alcohol!
A while back, I attended the AGM of my local chess club, held in the room where we play, upstairs in a pub. We ploughed through the agenda in a manner that was low-key and low energy – until the very last item. The fuse was lit by Richard, a teacher who runs his school’s […]
Decision-making: refining the conclusion
Here we explore the relationship in decision-making between voting and consensus and how they can be combined, with a story from our facilitation work. For those of us for whom a debate is the best-known type of discussion, a vote is what happens when the discussion is over. Actually, decision‑making usually works best if the […]
Patterns for Decentralised Organising, London workshop 23rd September
There’s an interesting workshop coming up on 23rd September, for any fans of decentralised organising, and different ways of organising ourselves in organisations. All the details are below. Rich and Nati have been supporting non-hierarchical organisations for more than five years, co-founding Loomio (a worker co-op building software for collective decision-making) and Enspiral (a network […]
The secret life of groups, our introductory guide
If you read our last blog post, you’ll know that this is the last of a short series of three blogs to remind you of the introductory guides in our resources section. This one is on groups. The aspect of the guide that I want to develop here is active listening. I’ve always found that […]
Managing #Conflict in #coops workshop, #Birmingham
Rhizome is delivering an open workshop on working with conflict, in conjunction with Co-operatives West Midlands, on 9th September 2017 in Birmingham. In this one day training run by Rhizome coop, participants will: – develop a deeper understanding of the role of communication in working with conflict – explore and practice some of the co-operative […]
Diversity, our introductory guide
If you read our last post, you’ll know that this is the second of a short series of three blogs to introduce and share our free guides in our resources section. This one is on diversity. Our second aim is to remind you also that our blog posts and the rest of this site amplify […]
Facilitating a meeting? Introducing our free guide
This blog and the two that follow are to tell you about the resources that Rhizome offers that introduce topics crucial to us and the organisations and groups we work with: meeting facilitation; groups; and diversity. Facilitation, with which I’m starting, reminds me of playing chess. You start by learning the rules (move your knights […]
Rough consensus, or, hmmmm, is humming good for consensus?
I came across the notion of ‘rough consensus’ only recently. It is used by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a large, self-organised, international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers. It is the principal body that develops new Internet standards, which are voluntary. It is open to any interested individual. It has no […]
Come taste our workshops at the Earth First! Summer Gathering
We’ll be at the Earth First! Summer Gathering offering workshops and learning from others, getting inspired and ready to campaign and organise. Come along to our short workshops on consensus, conflict, mediation, burn-out and resilience, direct action and more. Check out their website for directions, the full programme and what you’ll need to bring, or […]
My biggest mistake…Future Search heffalump trap
Rhizome facilitators and trainers sometimes make mistakes, if you can believe it! On this blog, we share our learning when we fall into such heffalump traps from time-to-time. My biggest mistake took place at a Future Search Conference in Bristol. This method is a way for a community or organisation to create a shared vision […]
Facilitating meetings: useful tips & models
Our facilitation draws on many different models and approaches, so to mark the occasion of Rhizome’s new website, I decided to unearth useful advice and questions, to remind ourselves and for you, dear readers. I went back and re-read the blogs from 2010, the first year of our existence. I was quite impressed! There was […]
Job vacancy at Tripod Training, ‘Organising for Power’ co-ordinator
Tripod is a fellow collective of the Grassroots Trainers’ Network, and ace people to boot. If you’re near Edinburgh, it’s an exciting opportunity to work with them on a fab programme. Tripod: Training for Creative Social Action Project Coordinator Tripod is a small, independent workers’ cooperative which supports groups fighting for social, economic and environmental […]
1 website that will make you want more!
Welcome to our new website. It’s a bottom-up redesign that aims to give you the information you need about what we offer, who we are, our approaches and understandings we can’t wait to share with you, and how we can support you. From the start of Rhizome’s journey in 2010, we have evolved and learned. […]
Ways to consensus: the same outcome supported for different reasons
This by far the least interesting of the ways of reaching consensus that I have discovered. It doesn’t involve different groups exploring each other’s needs and values and thereby finding common ground. It is much more a matter of chance, and the agreement generated feels much less stable. But I think it’s worth describing it, […]
Exploring Class – a training of trainers weekend residential workshop, 3rd-6th August 2017
Do you want to strengthen your workshop facilitation skills? Do you want to help social change groups and mission-driven NGOs deal more skillfully with social class and classism in their own organisations, in their members’ lives and in the wider society? If so, Exploring Class may be for you. Our lead trainer is Betsy […]
Ways to consensus: developing shared values
If you read the earlier blog on the British Columbia Citizens Assembly (BCCA), you may recall that that the assembly recommended Single Transferable Vote (STV) rather than Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) as their preferred way of voting to replace First Past the Post. One reason for this is that the members of the assembly gave […]
Ways to consensus: Schiphol airport
One approach is to identify the different perspectives at play on a contentious issue. Here’s an example from the Netherlands, about the debate over whether to expand Schiphol airport. Stakeholders were locked in disagreement, with two contradictory views: The economic advantages made expansion essential The environmental costs meant that no expansion could be allowed An […]
Liquid Democracy and Martin Haase, German Pirate Party
On March 22nd, we published a blog on liquid democracy. It’s not always easy to understand when written in the abstract; hopefully the story of Martin Haase brings the theory of liquid feedback system to life. The one statement that most helped me understand the internet was that ‘filter then publish’ had been replaced by […]
Ways to consensus: being explicit on values
This Canadian example, the British Columbia Citizens Assembly (BCCA) is a very clear example both of the translation of values into a decision, and of the challenges in so doing. The BCCA was set up by the government of British Columbia to review the electoral system, after two perverse election results with a large mismatch […]
Decision-making in Mandorla Co-housing group
I am a member of Mandorla, which is a co-housing group in Herefordshire. The UK Co-housing Network defines co-housing as housing “…created and run by their residents. Each household has a self-contained, personal and private home….residents come together to manage their community, share activities, eat together. Cohousing is a way of combating the isolation many […]
Forum and Legislative Theatre in practice
In the middle of February, my colleague Gill posted a blog about Forum Theatre. I’d like to build on that by showing two other uses to which it has been put. First, in the 1990s, Augusto Boal, who invented Forum Theatre, linked it with politics in a procedure that he called ‘Legislative Theatre’. After being […]
‘Developing personal resilience, creating thriving groups’ workshop – 27-28 May, Manchester
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” – Audre Lorde, feminist activist & writer As people who care about the world, we know it’s easy to forget to take care of ourselves. Our movements and organisations often need a lot of dedication, and sometimes value […]
Between direct and representative democracy – ‘Liquid Democracy’
Liquid democracy is one of the most interesting ideas that I’ve come across recently. It’s a cross between direct democracy and representative democracy that takes some effort to get one’s head around. This blog is partly to help me do that and partly to see what other people think. The […]
Grassroots campaigning skillshare portal
If you’ve not come across the ‘Skillsharing Portal‘ before, it’s a way for training collectives to share their skills and experience across Europe, across languages and cultures. The website has resource guides and workshop modules that are made by and for activist groups across Europe in topics like consensus and facilitation, strategy, anti-oppression, group process […]
Reframe 2
Like many of you, our dear readers, Rhizome-folks engage with the social tensions highlighted and created by the Brexit vote in many ways, having conversations on a personal level with family, friends and strangers, and facing the direct impacts of discrimination and status insecurity stirred up by the way the referendum campaign was fought. We […]
Buurtzorg – how to be radically different
A few months ago I read a wonderful book called ‘Reinventing Organisations’ by Frederic Laloux. It borrows a framework from Ken Wilber in describing the evolution of organisations towards ones that are freer of ego and control, ones that believe in abundance and in wholeness. What makes the book wonderful, though, is not the framework […]
Forum Theatre
Recently I attended my first forum theatre performance. It was the last in a week-long series of performances of The Great Austerity Debate taking place around the country done by the Menagerie Theatre Company. They’d been commissioned by two geography researchers, Prof. Susan Smith and Dr Mia Gray, from Cambridge University. Performances have been filmed, […]
Grassroots Trainers’ Network
In mid-January we blogged about one training collective changing name and form. What we didn’t do was highlight ourselves and the other training collectives that each in our own way try to support grassroots groups striving to make the world a better place. With the forces that are swirling out there at the moment, Rhizome […]
Ways Forward…for the co-operative movement
We’ll be discussing and debating along with other co-ops tomorrow in Manchester about radical alternatives to austerity and capitalism, shaping a shared vision of a prosperous caring society based on a principles of democracy. Rhizome is looking forwards to see co-op friends old and new, to chats in the sidelines about how to build the […]
Welcome navigation
Oxford Seeds for Change has become Navigate. A warm welcome to Navigate, to ‘the field’ we plough furrows in too, of social change facilitation, training for co-ops, NGOs, campaign and community groups, and many more. The story of how Navigate was born can be found here. Lancaster Seeds for Change becomes simply Seeds for Change […]
Convergent Facilitation: a case study from Minnesota
Following on from our Convergent Facilitation blog post, here’s an illustrative case study. Child custody is often a battleground in American legislatures, like abortion and gay marriage, with the additional ferocity provided by the divorce courts. In Minnesota, these struggles have gone on for more than a decade. In the end, some opponents just avoided […]
Cherán, an inspiring example of direct action, community democracy and autonomy
In 2011, Cherán a town of nearly 20,000 people in Michoacán, Mexico, locals threw out not just the loggers that had been threatening their forests, but the politicians and police too. After years of corruption and violence, they said loudly ‘Enough is Enough’, following it through with effective action. What can we learn from their […]
Dynamic Facilitation and Wisdom Councils
In my last couple of blogs, I’ve talked about Convergent Facilitation and how it panned out in Minnesota. In this one, I’m going to talk about an approach I’ve never met in person, called Dynamic Facilitation, devised by an American called Jim Rough. I missed my chance when Andrea Gewessler of Change That Matters brought […]
Working Together: group exercise to bring out discussions around dynamics
A few months ago I dusted off an old group dynamics exercise that I’d almost forgotten about – the Tinkertoy game. I first came across it in the hallowed pages of the (now out of print) Resource Manual for a Living Revolution. Somewhere in the intervening 20 years it had slipped off my radar. I’m […]
Have you reached a decision on which you all agree? – consensus and jury service
I’ve recently finished my second stint doing jury service. Jurors are cautioned not to talk about their experience of their time as jurors but trials are held in public so I am allowed to talk about information that’s in the public domain. My first time as a juror was around 35 years ago in the […]
Trump trumps, and what's this got to do with me?
So what can we make of the US election results, and what’s that got to do with us over here? Is it a last hurrah of a beleaguered set of people feeling left behind in a changing world? Is it simply another demonstration of the dangers of populist leaders stirring up the depths of racism, […]