Recently I helped a UK NGO with their decision-making process to choose between five campaign options they’d prepared and consulted their wider network and allies on. It was interesting to try to get the balance right between giving space to hear summaries of options and feedback and ask questions about both, and getting to the […]
There are many ways to prepare people at an event for what may happen. The notion I find myself using most often is the four roomed house: This version is 4rooms.gif from loosetooth.com. Those of you with particularly good eyesight may be able to see that it acknowledges a man called Claes Janssen and his […]
I wrote this for the column of this name in the Guardian Saturday magazine. They didn’t use it, so Rhizome blog readers have exclusive access! Phew, they’ve all settled down at their tables. Was I clear enough on what they had to do? At table 3 that bloke in the suit is doing all the […]
Adam and I co-facilitated a two day workshop with an international NGO about it’s future shape and governance. Two proposals were on the table. As we talked about them a tsunami of thoughts, reflections, ideas and contentions emerged. We scribbled furiously and summarised often and the group began to understand a shape to the discussions. […]
My experience this week with members of the Detention Forum, working with fellow Rhizome member Hannah Clayton, crystallised some emerging thoughts about facilitation in general and facilitation training in particular. First, I feel that some facilitation training sees facilitation as a discipline, as a body of knowledge to be passed on, albeit that that knowledge […]
After the workshop I participated in at the end of March, I’ve continued a dialogue with Caroline from Insider Autism Training. We spoke about ways in which the training could have been made more experiential. That led us to the question of “experiencing what?”. Experiencing autism is clearly not possible, and we agreed that there’s […]
The UK government lurches from crisis to crisis. They announce a policy initiative. There’s an immediate and fierce backlash. And then they fudge something to avoid too much humiliation whilst letting the powers that be go about business as usual. Hardly what I’d describe as ‘government’. However on one level I like the aspect of […]
I spent the afternoon in a workshop on autism and social change groups. The trainers were all on the autistic spectrum (diagnosed or undiagnosed), as were several other participants. The rest was a motley crew of activists and activist facilitators like myself – or NT’s as I now know that we’re known (neuro-typicals). As well […]
In early February, Matthew and I delivered a facilitation training for staff at the World Development Movement, which had developed out of a Rhizome discussion last November with all seven facilitators. We had talked then about the difficulties of delivering meaningful training in a few hours, a single day. We understand why this happens – […]
Charles Leadbeater, an expert on innovation, once wrote that just as Adam Smith was the key to the eighteenth century, so the key to our era is Delia Smith. Delia, he said, is the example par excellence of how we can learn say cookery from recipes, whereas our ancestors mainly learned from their mothers’ knee. […]
