Why
this course?
We
have been running the basic facilitation course (Developmental Approaches and
skills in group facilitation) for the last 3 years. One of the areas that many
participants found interesting and fascinating in that course was the idea of
working with emergence which we worked with briefly. CDRA has for many years
believed in and practiced working with emergence as one of the most
developmental responses in a complex world as well as one of the most natural
and developmental ways of working from the ‘inside out’ and generating learning
and finding solutions to problems from individuals and groups themselves. Many
people wanted to know more and to explore how one facilitates emergence. It is
for this reason that we have developed this course.
In ‘A Simpler Way’
Wheatley and Kellner-Rogers asks: ‘How could we
organise human endeavour if we developed different understandings of how life
organises itself?’
Our answer is: We
know that in nature the most sustainable forms of life are emergent and there
are examples of how this works in social processes, thus we need to learn how to
work with and facilitate emergence if we want to know how to work with
complexity and organise ourselves so that we contribute to organisational
sustainability and social transformation.
We
need to find innovative ways of organising and facilitating since the old ways
are often not yielding what we need.
Purpose :
This course is for
practitioners, leaders, managers, facilitators and development practitioners who
want to enliven and build their practice, enhance their skills as facilitators,
so that they are better able to work intuitively and in the moment. It is for
organisations who need to solve complex problems. It is also for those who want
to generate learning from within and improve existing programmes or courses so
that they become more rich and dynamic, participatory, indigenous, relevant and
truly owned by groups and communities themselves.
This course offers
an opportunity to develop a deepened understanding of and practice of working
with emergence and will look at the role of the facilitator in facilitating
‘emergent unfolding processes’.
What is unique
about this course:
By emergence we
mean working out of a developmental approach that sees individual and groups as
already developing and thus we as facilitators are intervening at a point in its
development. If we want to be truly developmental and open we then work with an
understanding that a group instinctively and intuitively knows what it wants to
do and has inherent knowledge – as facilitators our role then is to help the
group on its path of development and make conscious what it needs to do next, or
surface its learning so it is shared and made clearer. Facilitating emergence
involves: surfacing what is living in a group, facilitating learning from the
group itself, helping to make conscious the dynamic process of a group as a
living system and the facilitator within it and allowing learning to emerge from
the interactions and relationships between participants, and then between
participants and facilitator. It is about harvesting and harnessing the
learnings and helping a group make sense of it so they know what to do with it
and where to go next – the ‘sense making’ occurs between the group and the
facilitator and both have an equal role in contributing to what may emerge –
there is an even balance between facilitator and group. This is an approach that
can be worked with on its own through completely exploratory open processes with
no particular agenda or it can be worked within existing, structured processes
to open up new possibilities and innovations.
“If development
itself is about emergence from the inside out, what then is the contribution
that developmental practice as a discipline brings to the world, and what does
it ask of its practioners?”
– CDRA Annual Report 2003/4.
This course is
about building a practice that facilitates the innate development of living
systems in relationship to each other…’from the inside out and back again’.
Developmental
practitioners do not bring development but intervene into the ever-evolving
development processes that exist in all living systems. And development
practice, like any other emerging system, is shaped by the relationships of
which it is part. How we relate to our practice and where we position ourselves
in relation to others is therefore central to what we do and our identity as
practitioners.
If you are wanting
to explore this aspect of yourself and your practice, then this is the course
for you.
What we will
explore:
-
The role of
facilitation in group organisational processes
-
The context of
development and social process – what is our struggle and why are we drawn to
emergent approaches
-
Theoretical
perspectives to emergent thinking and concepts developed out of emergent
social approaches
-
The conditions
for facilitating emergence in organisations
-
Developing and
co-creating effective meta-skills in working with an emergent approach
-
Group theory, the
role of groups, group leaders and the role of leadership in groups
-
The emerging
organisation – elements of emergent organisations
-
Theories of
change and how this relates to working with emergent change
We will have worked
with:
-
Knowing and appreciating self as an emerging interdependent
entity (quoted from 2003/ 2004 annual report)
-
Exploring and practicing authenticity (in relationship to self)
and building authentic community (as a group)
-
Working with
difficult moments, power issues, diversity,
-
Tapping into intuition and developing intuitive abilities
-
Working with emergence through the course itself
-
Opportunities to
practice facilitating emergent processes
and working with a developmental
approach to facilitation
-
Understanding and working with a group as a living system
-
Exploring change processes which are often chaotic and
unpredictable
-
Methodologies that encourage emergence – e.g. Dialogue and
conversations, Open space and World Café
-
The challenges involved in working with emergence
Methods and
approaches:
-
Observation and
reading organisations and social processes
-
Making meaning,
interpreting, analyses
-
Synthesising
-
Using questions
to go deeper
-
Using listening,
conversation, dialogue, story telling
-
Working
creatively through poetry, art, movement, eurhythmy, clay work
-
Personal
development exercises
-
Mini-facilitation
practice sessions
-
Facilitation
tools and aids in working with emergence
Contact Pauline Solomons
for application queries:
pauline@cdra.org.za
Contact Desiree Paulsen for curriculum details:
desiree@cdra.org.za
