Viv has written about rethinking facilitation training and I agree with her. That’s not unconnected with having done some very interesting work with her this year and planning some more in February.
We need to acknowledge that the net now makes it dead easy to get information online and that we need our face-to-face events to do the stuff that is harder to do online. That means not sitting listeing to lectures and data dumps which we can do much better at our computers where we can control the speed and level of repetition to suit ourselves.
When we meet I think we need to push the limits a bit and be more playful and experimental. As Viv says this involves thinking about the field we create together, the space we open to learn and connect.
I also love her point about having an opportunity to pulse between facilitating and being facilitated. Viv and I explored this a lot in some of our work and it’s been one of the more thought provoking things I’ve done. In fact it starts to raise interesting questions about whether facilitation is, really, a transitive verb at all: is it really something done by one person to another – or it that really just manipulation?
