Facilitation & Speaking
Our approach to facilitation and speaking is about creating safe spaces for stakeholder groups, people, ideas, resources, information, and technology to “conflict” and “connect.” We identify conflict as the creative force that allows new ideas and innovations to collide and inform adaptive solutions to complex problems. We see connecting as the creative force that allows new solutions to amplify and scale for people, communities, and society.
Effective facilitation focuses on the relationships between stakeholders rather than the stakeholders themselves. It’s about stimulating a system’s natural energy to change and increasing the learning capability inherent in a social configuration. We seek to broker, bridge-build, and weave across boundaries. We love exposing the unexamined interdependencies and hidden opportunities that arise as a facilitation process unfolds.
The crux of much of our facilitation and speaking work concerns shifting identities and cultural norms in the context of a sustainable and just transition. This is usually a component of a long-term process. Our impact is more likely to be reflected as part of an ongoing series of micro-shifts rather than a sudden, dramatic shift.
While facilitation and speaking interweave, they differ in that facilitation is more interactive and conducive to longer sessions and the co-creation of learning (versus learning transfer).
“If you truly want to understand something, try to change it”
Kurt Lewin