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. […]
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 […]
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: […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
