An unsung treasure for facilitators and civilizations

Back in the mid-90’s I discovered Jim Rough’s Wisdom Council format and began promoting it through my network as a way to increase the co-intelligence of a community. I loved the design of it – every 3-12 months randomly selecting one or two dozen ordinary people to reflect for a few days on what their community needed and to bring their conclusions back to their community. It is promoted today by Jim’s Center for Wise Democracy.

There are many different initiatives that are using the term “Wisdom Council” these days, and all of them have their own gifts to offer. What I particularly appreciate about Jim’s approach, is that instead of tapping the wisdom of a group of elders, it is about tapping the wisdom of ordinary people, on behalf of the larger whole. The basic idea is to gather together a diverse microcosm of that larger whole. This microcosm is then invited into a conversational “greenhouse” environment, where they are supported to engage their best creative efforts toward understanding and addressing the needs of that larger whole.

By 1999, however, I was becoming concerned that I knew little about Dynamic Facilitation (DF), the process used in the Wisdom Council. I decided to take one of Jim Rough’s workshops, which happened to be during the same week of the big 1999 WTO protests in Seattle. It was an exciting week, during which I realized that DF could have transformed people’s efforts to deal with the WTO.

 

I came away extremely impressed with DF’s potential. Over the following years I took a few other DF courses and was involved in some gatherings using DF, including a Wisdom Council in Ashland, Oregon http://www.wisedemocracy.org/rvwc/index.html/. I came to the conclusion that DF was the most powerful process I’d ever seen for transforming conflict into breakthroughs – a skill sorely needed in our world today.

 

I’ve written my own description of the process here
http://www.co-intelligence.org/P-wisdomcouncil.html/. I invite you to explore it and the descriptions on Jim’s website
http://tobe.net/DF/DF/how-it-works.html/. In this video interview
, UK consultant Alex Nairn offers an excellent description of DF. If you want to delve further into it, check out the DF manual by Rosa Zubizarreta. She’s agreed to offer my readers a free pdf of the 2008 version, for which you can contact her through her website at http://www.diapraxis.com/. (I coaxed Rosa to a DF training early in 2000 – and it changed her life. She returned the favor by helping me create The Tao of Democracy.)

A fascinating development is that DF and its various offshoots – Wisdom Councils and Creative Insight Councils – have taken off in Austria and Germany. In this video “From Consumers to Citizens”
, Manfred Hellrigl, director of the Office of Future Related Issues for the state of Vorarlberg, Austria, discusses with a Swedish audience the Wisdom Council’s unique potential for social change.

 

While my own focus has been on DF and the Wisdom Council as tools for social transformation, it’s worth mentioning that this approach has also shown great benefits within organizational settings. As one example, here is a video of a Wisdom Council that was held at Swisscom.

Matthias zur Bonsen, the gentleman who is facilitating the Wisdom Council, is the one responsible for originally bringing Jim over to Germany to teach. Previously, Matthias had brought Harrison Owen to Germany to teach Open Space Technology, and Marvin Weisbord and Sandra Janoff to teach Future Search.

Meanwhile, back here in the U.S., Jim is offering a DF training in the Bay Area at the end of January http://tinyurl.com/aopke3j and Rosa is offering a DF training in Ottawa March 1-3 http://dfottawa.eventbrite.com. She and Jim do trainings in numerous locations at various times and are responsive to special requests. Rosa’s site is http://www.diapraxis.com/. Jim’s is http://tobe.net/.

 

Rosa has been exploring the leading edge of DF in a number of ways:
* Her theory of why DF works, which she described in her Masters thesis and her manual, revolutionized my understanding of its dynamics. For some of her more recent theory see her article in the latest “OD Practitioner” journal http://tinyurl.com/cqngrcf .
* She advocates methods like Dialogue Mapping http://www.cognexus.org/id41.htm for a high-tech harvest of the nonlinear unfolding of DF’d conversations.
* She has been a pioneer in a promising new application of DF – Creative Insight Councils – which address a particular issue or public concern in conversations involving ordinary citizens, experts, and stakeholders as peers seeking a breakthrough.
* She explores the relevance of DF to the full range of human systems – from national and global affairs, through organization and community issues, down to interpersonal and individual healing and transformation. In her trainings she often uses DF to engage a group in helping an individual, and she sees her personal practice – the inner-listening, personal development process called Focusing http://www.focusing.org/ – as tapping similar dynamics to what DF taps in groups.

 

For an intriguing story about how a participant from one of Rosa’s recent DF workshop has been exploring the subject of polygamy in Pakistan – using both DF and Focusing – check out the article at the bottom of this message.

 

As I sense into what will be most needed in 2013, our collective capacity to translate conflicts and “impossible problems” into breakthrough solutions and new directions seems to rank very high on the list. The little-known treasure of Dynamic Facilitation and its various leading-edge offshoots could and should play a major role in enabling that capacity in all of society.

 

I invite you to consider it seriously in your plans for enhancing your facilitation skills, your options for convening conversations, and your aspirations for your group, your community, your country and our shared planet and future.

 

Coheartedly,
Tom

 

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Dynamic Facilitation, Focusing, Pakistan and Polygamy

 

by Rosa Zubizarreta

 

For the last several years, Pat Omidian, a medical anthropologist, and Nina Joy Lawrence, a community mental health practitioner, have been teaching Focusing to local aid workers and human service workers in Afghanistan
http://www.focusing.org/newsletter/sif4-2-2004/sif4-2-1.html

Since Focusing is a deep “inner listening” practice that involves a great deal of welcoming, reflection, and emergence, Pat was very inspired by the parallel energetics of Dynamic Facilitation. She began looking for opportunities to weave DF in to the work she is now doing in Pakistan. And then, a week ago, she wrote me an excited e-mail about a workshop she just led: “We did it! It worked!”

“I introduced the activity as an example of how to work with a community AND also as a metaphor for our ‘inner guests’ [a Focusing concept]. Each person would have a chance to speak and would be heard all the way through to the end of whatever they wanted to say. Then they would be
asked, “What would you do to solve this problem?”

So off we went! The first woman said all she felt about the horrors of polygamy and how it would hurt her and her children. The husband was dividing the scant resources between more people when he took another wife and driving her and her children deeper into poverty. Her solution was: men can take more wives only if the woman and her children do not suffer from neglect. Then another spoke up about how in Islam men have the right to marry but what can women do when men don’t treat women well…

 

And a man said, “I want more wives because I need more sons to protect the family and village – it’s a war here. I think we need to take care of each wife and the children. When we can do that, we can have more wives.” Another said. “Look, I am getting old and this wife is also old. Her sons will care for her but she cannot care for me. I need someone who can. My solution is to allow me to marry again so that I am taken care of.”

[Rosa’s note: Pat is not “just letting people talk”, she is doing the kind of deep listening work we do in Dynamic Facilitation and also in Focusing: she is listening deeply to each person’s contribution, acknowledging it, welcoming it, appreciating it… reflecting it back, checking to make sure it has been understood… asking if there is a ‘more’ there…. She is also “protecting” each person’s contribution, by not allowing interruptions or cross-talk.]

“The exploration continued for a while and something was beginning to shift. We had 2 pages of solutions on the wall and I stopped the group to look at how the solutions were changing. The big shift came when one woman said, “There are so many of us who are now widowed from the wars and we have children who also need protection. Who will care for us?” The solution was that men should marry again but they need to marry the widows so that the community stays whole and protected. And then one person said, “This is what the Quran means when it says men can marry again! It’s to protect the widows and orphans, not to please themselves!”

 

And then the group started into a fresh problem.. the protection of the widows and orphans caused by war. After a bit we stopped this one and I asked if there were people in the group who wanted to try it. Several stood up and gave it a go. Did pretty well too!

 

I thought it was brilliant. The group could see the shift and the growing wisdom in the process. They also got to see me step between two people who started to argue, and ask them to talk to me so that each person could be heard without judgment or goals.”

Afterward, Pat and I have continued exploring what had happened in her “real-play”. Pat wrote, “While it was a ‘role play’ of a village with a problem, the women and men in the group also understood the issues and I think their comments were real — based in reality and in their own opinions.”

 

As an anthropologist, Pat also offered an interesting perspective on my title for this post: “…the topic of polygamy is one that Westerners have so many biases about… Here in the West, we do polygamy as serial polygamy, leaving the woman usually in poverty and without support (I doubt the stats have changed much in the last 20 years!)…”

 

Here’s to the real possibility of using Dynamic Facilitation, as well as other kinds of transformative, solution-focused, problem-dissolving approaches, to create significant shared breakthroughs with regard to our own social policies…

with much love,

 

Rosa

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