Claude’s Exploration #6
Vous pouvez lire cet article en français ici.
This year, I committed to a year long training in Generative Facilitation, a certifying program provided by Christine Wank, founder of the Generative Facilitation Institute in Berlin.
Since last September, I have been traveling to Berlin every two months for a week of deep learning there. It has been a transformative experience.
With Christine, training is experiential : we go through the motions that we will use as facilitators. To learn the process, we have to experience them as participants.
Because generative facilitation is about opening new possibilities collectively, and collective transformation doesn’t happen without individual transformation. We are not outside of the system, we are the system. The truly new is often something that we usually rule out because it doesn't match up with our beliefs. To open up new possibilities, our inner beliefs need to shift.
Here is a tale about one small thing that changed inside me with this training, that brought a big change in my way of working with a collective.
But before I start, I feel some clarification is needed.
(you can skip that part is you already know what the heck Generative Facilitation is …)
What is Generative Facilitation ?
And I am guessing that most people would ask first: what is Facilitation ?
As Wikipedia elegantly puts it, Facilitation is “the designing and running of successful meetings and workshops in organizational settings”
To put it in a nutshell, it is providing a process for fruitful interactions in a group setting. Basically, being responsible for the process, not the content.
Now, Generative facilitation refers to “navigating journeys of collective discovery and transformation.” The Generative part refers literally to discovering as we walk where to put our foot next, discovering the path as we walk towards our direction.
The first time I came across the term “Generative” was through Otto Scharmer from the MIT, the founder of Theory U and Presencing Institute. He has a great way of describing how we can listen in four different ways. Whereas the first 3 are easy to relate to, the 4th, “Generative” listening, was somehow pushing the limits of my own understanding of things.
Downloading is listening from what we already know to confirm reality is in check with what I expect,
Factual listening is listening to find out when reality is different from my expectations, and is referred to as Open Mind in Theory U
Empathy listening is listening from the other person's perspective, getting to see things the way the other see them and emotionally connecting to that person. It is referred to as Open Heart in Theory U.
and last but not least, Generative listening is when you would listen to what becomes possible, what action could be taken or idea emerge that are truly new. It is referred to as Open Will in Theory U, because to do that, you have to let go of what you want to happen.
If the concept is new to you and you want to know more, I can only recommend you to watch this great video of Otto Scharmer from the U Lab.
It has always been a question for me, how to get to that collective generative state.
I could remember feeling completely connected to a collective on many previous occasions. That happened regularly with my team at Magic Makers, and especially when Kako Dubs and Nathalie Valiere amazing facilitation helped us connect to the feeling of the organization (the Egregore), like it had its own life.
And I guess one of the reasons I applied to this year-long training was to get more mastery on what it is, and how and when to get there.
The power of Intention
And this, I think, is the most powerful thing I learned this year.
As a company leader running Magic Makers, I had intentions all the time. Intentions for the product we were creating, intentions for how I ran the company.
If I am really honest, I had expectations.
I expected certain results from our team work, so that the company would thrive, kids would learn in our Creative Coding workshops, and money would flow in so that we could pay the salaries.
The thing is, when you have expectations, you sort of restrain the part of reality you see to what matches your expectations. And you miss on the new information and possibilities.When you are looking for new solutions, because obviously your current way of doing things is not working any longer, you have to open up your views, so you can see more than you usually do.
It was a great relief to really feel that as a generative facilitator, what I need to do is let go of expectations of how things would go, and what would be the output of the workshop.
But I still need a clear intention for the process. Actually, without a clear intention, the process I will run will probably crash.
While doing the training, I started working with a small startup on a collective intelligence process for them with the whole team. I worked on the intention with the founders, and ran interviews with most of the collaborators.
And what do you think happened ? I started having my own idea of what were the issues they were facing as a company. And in my first go at a detailed plan to run the day, I felt something was wrong, and that I was piling up the activities with an unclear feeling that something was amiss.
And then it dawned on me (with Christine’s help actually ). I was trying to ensure they would tackle what I thought I had uncovered as their key issues.
And I realized that if I wanted the day to work, I had to forget about my view and focus on creating the space where the team could discover by themselves what were the real questions the company should work on.
Because, even if the issues that I had picked up had been the important ones to tackle, what mattered was that they would see by themselves where the tensions laid, so that they could start having a feeling on what step they could take to move from their stuck position.
That’s where the real value I could bring lies. Helping them become aware of what was the collective holding that prevented them to reach their goals, that was mainly still unconscious and not shared collectively.
So my intention became to have no intention.
Or more precisely, to have no intention for the outcome, and to have a clear intention to create the space where they could collectively figure out their own issues.
With that intention clear, it became very easy to make decisions about how to run the workshop. And connecting to that intention, embodying it, is what gave me a lot of presence to bring along the participants on that path with trust.
I now embrace the paradox : I need to at the same time let go of my intention of what happens, and have a clear intention of why I am doing things.