Those of you reading this blog recently will know I’m in foreign parts designing a biggish two-day event. Those of you who know me well will know that I’m never satisfied, always looking for new (and rediscovering forgotten) ideas. And those of you who know me even better will know I’d give my right arm to have a facilitation buddy or two to hang out with, toss about ideas, egg each other on. Sigh.

So I’ve turned to the next best thing, all you good folk in internet land. Some of you I know, some I’ve never met. I’ve no idea how many of you read my blog (I know, I know – there’s something I could do with google analytics to find out and, well, I really don’t care that much and I’ve never been that big into numbers. Are you out there Stephen?). If I’m only talking to myself, that’s quite okay – it gets my thoughts out of my head and on to the screen where at least I don’t forget them.

I try stuff. I like blogging. I like twitter. Facebook’s okay. Don’t mention google+ (makes me feel guilty), I’ve tried amplify, and instgram, I’ve lost count of my email addresses (they all go via gmail anyway), I quite like rapportive, I’ve just joined pin-somethingorother, I have a neglected flickr account, I think I have a YouTube channel, I subscribe to my favourite bloggers and thinkers, I just LOVE Skype – I could go on, obviously. What’s that? What about LinkedIn? Well, of course I’m on LinkedIn – I just don’t know how to use it that well. Then, in a little burst of activity towards the end of last year I created a LinkedIn Group. Wow! Just wow! I had no idea. It’s not a big group, less than 200 people – but what a generous and creative bunch.

And what I’ve learned from having a LinkedIn group is that it’s not about leading with answers – it’s about leading with questions. Real questions. Making big, bold offers by asking for help. Who knew?

Asking for help is a post from: vivmcwaters.com.au

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When I first started facilitating, and considering venturing out on my own, it was in the midst of the systems thinking era. I read Peter Senge The Fifth Discipline, and bought into the whole notion of shared visions, mental models and learning organisations. Frustratingly, I was working in an organisation at the time that was anything but a learning organisation. I completed a Masters of Applied Science that was based on systems thinking. It made a lot of sense. I read Margaret Wheatley Leadership and the New Science.

Today, 15 years later, I find myself letting go of systems thinking and embracing complexity.

Now, many aspects of systems thinking that troubled me are starting to make sense in the light of complexity: the notion that it’s even possible to map systems; the fantasy that is strategic planning – that we can predict the future and prepare for it years in advance; and the resistance to uncertainty and messiness, the unwillingness to let go of control, even when all the evidence tells us that control is not possible.

Complexity has a lot more in tune with ecology, hence I’m drawn to biomimicry; social networks; narrative, stories and metaphor; playfulness; and what we can learn of organisational life from artists, actors, choreographers, musicians, directors, writers, poets, and dramaturgs. It is a rich and diverse field and requires as much unlearning as learning.

Clearly, this journey is not about discarding that which is old and grasping for the shiny new thing. It’s an evolution. I have relied on my somewhat unreliable brain to get me this far, and I hope my brain will continue to serve me. Yet now I understand that my brain is embodied. Parts of it never get activated unless the body is activated. I recognise the importance of trust and how social media can help build and maintain trust. How values are devalued by the very act of making them explicit. How culture is often used as an excuse to not do something, because people are people, no matter where they live and what they do. We should take more notice of mavericks and outliers. Disrupting entrenched patterns is part of the work, and how fundamental rituals are to disrupting patterns. And we need to experience before we process and analyse.

I still have much to explore and much to learn from Dave’s seminar. I am confident though, that although it’s a different road that I’m travelling, it’s one worth exploring.

Fundamental to my journey and exploration is how to apply the principles of improvisation. So here’s a story about another sort of journey and how these improv principles came into their own.

The picture in this post is of the Annapurna Sanctuary region of the Himalaya in Nepal.  My partner and I were on a nine-day trek, a trek that we had put off for 30 years. The opportunity arose so we decided to take it. When this photo was taken we’d been walking for five days – through isolated villages, across rivers, over mountains, down one side and up the other. It was clear every morning, hazy, raining or snowing by the afternoon. I was slow, taking one step at a time, especially on the stone steps that seemed to go on forever. Going up was bad, coming down was worse. As we approached Machapuchare Base Camp I was in awe of the scenery. I’d also had enough walking. I wanted to stop, to drink in the scenery, to rest my legs. So the rest of my walking party left for Annapurna Base Camp where they would spend the night and I would stay put, rejoining them the next morning. Wrapped in a yak wool blanket, I sat on a bench in the communal dining area of the teahouse where I was staying. It was the only warm place. The snow came down lightly at first and then it completely obscured my view. I read for a while, finished my book. Had a cup of chai. Sat, and watched others come and go. No-one else spoke English. A group of Japanese women were playing cards. They invited me to join them. I had no idea what game they were playing so the only thing to do was to jump in and have a go. If I played an incorrect card they would all laugh and shake their heads, explaining in sign language what I should do. They also had some rituals about who got to play the first card and when you won. It was a lot of fun. I eventually worked out the game, won a couple even. It was a great example of what happens when we show up, let go, and jump in: being present to what is, letting go of expectations and needs, and accepting offers. That’s been my mantra ever since I returned from that extraordinary walk in Nepal, and it’s paying off in spades.

*I’ve actually been waiting for the planets to align to do many, many things, but for the purpose of this post, two will do.

Travelling a different road is a post from: vivmcwaters.com.au

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The brief for the Casuarina Project was to design and facilitate a community leadership program to bring together people from across the Surf Coast Shire – those in the coastal towns, where surfing and tourism reigns, with those from the hinterland where agriculture is king. It was targeted at people already active in community groups, but not yet in leadership roles. We decided not to call it a leadership program to avoid the inevitable problem of only attracting those who already saw themselves as community leaders. It was a bold and exciting approach. We wanted it to focus on developing people, their understanding of themselves and each other, and their potential in the community. We didn’t want it to be a simple skills training, duplicating what was already available.

Year one was devoted to the face-to-face sessions. We moved around to various community halls and venues – a great way for me (as a newcomer to the area) to get to know my new home. We explored such topics as the dynamics of change, understanding group roles, designing and staging events, conflict, controversy and negotiation, and planning for a community project to be implemented in the second year. In the third year, participants would be invited to mentor and support new participants just starting out.

My intention from the very beginning was to reduce dependence on me and my involvement. On reflection, maybe I did that too well! (just kidding) When Geoff Brown (a participant from that very first intake) took over the facilitating of the program after a few years, I felt quite chuffed that I’d hand-balled it on to someone so capable and enthusiastic, not to mention local as well.

There’s so much more I could write about the Casuarina Project. How I delivered it for a few years in Gippsland as well, the celebrations – especially when we invited Melbourne Playback Theatre Company to help us reflect on the experience (with hilarious results) – the friends made, the projects started, the excellent support from the CEO and the Councillors, the freezing cold halls (with dubious heating) in winter, the dreaded smoke in summer when we all raced home to make sure our houses were safe from bush fires, the laughs, the frustrations, the tears and most importantly, everyone’s generosity. And don’t even start me on the time I returned from Vietnam with bronchitis and was quarantined because it might have been SARS, hence unable to facilitate the important opening weekend.

The Casuarina Project is alive and well, with the first ever Youth Casuarina Program scheduled for October. What a great way to celebrate 10 years!

It’s evolved, as it should.

Haven’t we all?

Happy Anniversary Casuarina Project.

The Casuarina Project: Community Leadership 10 years on is a post from: vivmcwaters.com.au

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About 16 years ago, I made the leap from full-time employment and started my own business. I agonised over a business name. I wanted something that would last the distance, and not lock me in to some sort of work that I’d outgrow. I eventually settled on Beyond the Edge Pty Ltd. I was initially attracted to the word beyond. It spoke to me of reaching beyond my own knowledge and experience, and  the unknowns that lay ahead. I chose the edge because imagination was already taken.

Fast forward to 2011. The name has not only sustained me and my business for all those years, it has finally come into its own. Maybe I intuitively knew something?

I’ve been conducting a little experiment recently around the edges of work – exploring some of the approaches that can help us deal with complexity and the demands of our modern-day work.

I’ve written about my experiences of Bodystorming here, and a participant in a workshop where we looked at the tyrannies that sometimes trap us said this:

“I found [your workshop] extremely beneficial for my personal development. I learnt a lot, particularly about my own inhibitions, and how I’ve created rules that are completely artificial, unproductive and unnecessary. After some reflection, I’ve developed some simple steps to overcome my fears of failure – concentrate less on my fears, focus on doing something, embrace being average and just have a crack – be present.”

As a result, Johnnie Moore (UK) and I have begun a venture called, not unsurprisingly, The Edges of Work (web site coming soon).  Johnnie and I have been working together quite a bit lately and pushing each other to our respective edges (where it seems the most potent learning happens). For those of you who don’t know Johnnie, he is incredibly astute at seeing what others miss, likes to playfully explore serious issues and puts a lot of the organisational BS into perspective. We share an interest in complexity, ideas, connections, spontaneity and not playing by the rules!

We’re offering a one-day workshop at this year’s Story Conference in Melbourne, where the theme is Widening the World of Work. We’re going to share some of our experiences and insights around some of the challenges we face in dealing with complexity, unpredictability and demands for creativity, innovation and agility.

The workshop is on Wednesday, October 5 and there’s more information about registering here.

Our understanding is that change happens at the edge: we see it in systems and in our own lives. At the edge, we are away from the routine and familiar: it’s exciting but scary territory, but it’s where new patterns and routines can emerge. How can we, as leaders, managers, and facilitators support people in staying in the space at least long enough for useful change? We’ll share ideas for navigating edge territory, overcoming habitual patterns that give us a kind of safety but prevent us from making real change.

And we’ll share a series of activities we’ve found powerful in getting organisations and people out of stuck places, rigid arguments and unquestioned rituals and into territory where it’s possible for new work to emerge.

We’d love for you to join us. Drop me an email if you’d like more information.

Spend a day exploring the edges of work is a post from: vivmcwaters.com.au

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So I’m delighted to announce a full-day workshop with Johnnie Moore as part of this year’s Story Conference; Widening the World of Work in Melbourne. Here’s a little about what to expect:

If you’d like to register go here (and if you register before 31 August, you’ll get that cool early-bird rate)

Exploring the Edges of Work II is a post from: vivmcwaters.com.au

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Jump forward a couple of decades to facilitation training. After introducing an activity that’s a bit left of field (which really depends where you’re standing – for me it’s often fairly central, but for others can be way out there on the edge) – things like sociometry, or improv games for surfacing behaviours, or using gibberish to level the playing field in a multi-language group, or even something as basic as removing the tables – I’d start hearing this:

“That’s okay here, but it wouldn’t work with / in (insert group / country / situation).”

Bollocks.

When that voice in my head says that to me I now recognise it as my own fear, or reluctance to take a risk, which I have externalised on to the group. When I don’t listen to that voice and do it anyway, it works out just fine.

That’s not to say everything works every time, or anything will do. Mistakes are a part of facilitating, and learning. And mistakes, and taking risks, are about stretching and developing as a facilitator. Playing it safe means you probably won’t get into trouble. You probably won’t learn anything either. Your choice.

It wouldn’t work… is a post from: vivmcwaters.com.au

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Participants have been given a comprehensive manual outlining all the steps and procedures. They have a 60-minute video explaining the same. They have access (face-to-face and electronic) to colleagues with knowledge and experience.

There is lots of information about the content.

The challenge for this training is to take advantage of having people in the room. That means going beyond the information that the participants already have access to, and to move from hub-and-spoke (one-to-many) approaches. For example, PowerPoint presentations, case studies presented by a single person, in fact, any sort of presentation is what I call a one-to-many approach. The assumption behind a one-to-many approach is that everyone *needs* or *wants* to hear what someone else has decided. All done with good intention, of course. But it misses the point that the others in the room may have different knowledge or perspectives that can be shared and explored. And if you’re quick to remind me that there is often important information that people *need* to know for their own safety etc (insert any other reason) then I’ll be quick to remind you that telling people something doesn’t mean they then know it (sometimes you can’t even be sure they have heard it) and in this case, they already have access to all that background information.

Which brings us right back to how to take advantage of having living, breathing bodies in the room. Which brings me back to thinking that we have to create conditions in which the participants can have a visceral experience of learning to complement the more usual, and safer, cerebral experience of learning. More to come.

Using who and what’s in the room is a post from: vivmcwaters.com.au

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That *something* that we did last week – and will do again this week, and next – is to try and provide a series of experiences that mimic the real world of facilitating. Not a theoretical exploration, but a real, visceral experience of what it feels like to facilitate. And not just practice. Experiencing the effects of this approach or that. Knowing what it feels like to be faced with anger or cynicism or confusion or impatience or gazumping. And to actually live the principles of facilitation, experience them first hand so as we know, really know, not just theorise, that the group can generate knowledge, that being in the midst of confusion is a normal state, that paying attention to the human needs of the group and enabling connection can move a group into surprising territory. Experiencing the effects of laughter and of playfully exploring even the most serious of issues, and the impact of avoiding one-to-many processes or of simply removing the tables.

This work is exciting and invigorating, at the same time as being draining and stressful. Going beyond the expected norms, challenging the way things are done, encouraging people to their edges – it’s a responsibility and a privilege. Not to be done alone, so I’m glad to be working with Johnnie Moore who brings complementary skills to my own and pushes me to my edge – often. Together we have created something far more exciting than I think either of us could have done alone. It’s the value of true collaboration and models to the participants the power of co-facilitating, where the improv principle of ‘making your partner look good’ is embodied.

It’s a radical shift from a traditional training model – one that we hope has reverberations well beyond the people in the room.

In the midst of facilitation training is a post from: vivmcwaters.com.au

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He talks about ‘doing right’ compared with doing what is ‘expected, required or profitable’. In my own little crisis late last year I experienced first-hand the difficulties and soul-searching that comes with choosing between ‘doing right’ and ‘doing what is expected’. It helped me unearth what I think is a complicity between facilitators and clients to do what is ‘expected’ way too often, which is also not in service of others.

Schwartz talks about how we make rules and create incentives to try and control how people act. We make more and more guidelines, and give people scripts. He gives some examples of how these scripts fail us, as individuals and as a society.

He suggests we need people with virtue and character who want to do the right thing, who have the moral will and the moral skill to do the right thing, to be able to improvise novel solutions to novel problems – what Aristotle called practical wisdom.

Here’s the crux of the argument: Dealing with people demands a kind of flexibility that rules can’t encompass – wise improvisation. We need to know when to bend the rules and when to improvise, and importantly, in the service of others. (If we do this in service of just ourselves then it’s manipulation).

Psychologists have known, through decades of research, that relying on rules and incentives demoralises people. Schwartz suggests it is time for policy-makers to listen to this psychological research.

There have always been canny outlaws who subvert the rules. Schwartz calls these people ‘everyday heros’, but it’s hard to sustain this activity because they either are found out or burn out. What we need, he suggests, is system changers.

There’s a lot in this to influence facilitators and facilitation training – building practical wisdom for facilitation instead of following a set of guidelines; knowing how to improvise wisely. This is why disruptive and improvisational facilitation excites me. Maybe it’s time to shift gears from being a canny outlaw to being a system changer.

Practical wisdom is a post from: vivmcwaters.com.au

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If you can google facilitation processes and get millions of result,  watch videos of facilitators in action, read facilitation blogs, articles and even books on-line, why the expense (in time and money) of coming together for training? It’s no longer necessary to come together to get the information you need to facilitate. This is influencing my current thinking about Facilitating With Confidence (the training arm of what I do). As much as I love providing facilitation training, I think it’s a good idea to reflect on how to best use the time when people are together.

Here’s what I think facilitation training needs to offer:

A ‘field’ in which to practice, fail, learn and develop
Less content, more doing. Valuable time in a training shouldn’t be used presenting information. Get straight into doing facilitation and learn along the way. The content will emerge. This means letting go of a traditional learning schedule of pre-determined topics.

The ‘field’ relates to the training group (participants + trainers + client + venue + community even). This provides a wealth of opportunities to allow real-world learning, failure and development.

An opportunity to experience being a facilitator and being facilitated
It’s easy to forget what it’s like being a participant. It’s easy for participants to not be aware of how difficult it can sometimes be being a facilitator. Shifting between doing and being done to helps build empathy – a key attribute for facilitators.

To move beyond what is on the internet by playfully trying out stuff
Playfully trying out stuff is the key here. Trying, failing, trying something else. Knowing what it feels like. Discovering that your body can tell you you’re about to make the wrong move before your brain has had time to process the inputs and tell you the same thing. Learning to know in different ways. Doing this together, playfully. Having fun while learning serious stuff.

To develop relationships with others who can support, encourage and challenge you
Bringing people together face-to-face and having a shared experience fast-forwards connection. It doesn’t guarantee it. And it’s not the only way. It does provide some strong and weak links that may be very handy when any of us get stuck and want some serious help or simply a friendly ear.

What else would you add? What do you think are the benefits of face-to-face trainings?

Rethinking facilitation training is a post from: vivmcwaters.com.au

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