Chris Corrigan emailed me in response to my post about the new book:
Book should be called Blood from a Stone: a reluctant book on creative facilitation!… Plus blood from a stone just describes so many facilitations I have done that aren’t creative at all….:-)
Yes I do feel reluctant for all sorts of reasons. Putting ideas in a book inevitably makes them appear to be more definitive than they deserve to be and to put the authors on a pedestal of some kind that could lead to trouble.
I also started to think that perhaps “reluctance” is a quality not always found in facilitators, and one that we might want to consider useful. Viv and I often talk about the value of commitment in work, but there’s a shadow side to that: the overenthusiastic or vain facilitator, whose motto is, “I’ve got a technique for that!”. To be a bit reluctant goes with stepping into the scarier and less certain territory… which is often where the real action lies.
