This is where we met tonight - at the Metroparks Furnace Run, a wonderful facility with a year-round meeting space with heat and A/C and lake that costs $100 a day! Thanks to all who shared great food, resources, links, support and learning at our second quarterly facilitation gathering. Thanks especially to Kathleen Pichola who arranged the space and got out of cardiac emergency care in time to join the conversation (seriously).

From the 2 plus hour conversation on personal facilitation styles and "What do you hide behind your facilitation kimono that noone else sees?" came powerful reflections and dialogue on: when to follow and diverge from "the plan", the importance of facilitation as the creation of relationships, the power of deep listening and synthesizing diverse ideas into shared vision, creating the right questions, and facilitation as leadership.

At least two learning communities will emerge: 1) sharing tools and methods, and 2) the business of facilitation - what to charge, how to contract engagements and such. Stay tuned for more details on when and where these will meet.

Also stay tuned for the fall gathering, details yet to be decided. In the meantime, this is a very very rich community of talent. Tap into it any way you can.

To simply add a post, go to the admin page and fill in the Title, Entry body, Primary Category areas and then click on Save at the bottom. To edit any post, click on Entries in the left menu, click on the title of that post, edit the content/body and save it again. You can also select additional categories to associate with any post. All categories are listed on the right side menu on the blog/site.

Here are some useful things to post:

In the "Mentors" category - post your mentoring profile including areas you mentor in, a summary of your mentoring experience, and your contact info and links

In the "Resources" category - post any good reads, links, upcoming conferences and the like in the areas of facilitation and related areas of learning and practice

In the "Advice" category - post any questions you want facilitation advice on so anyone can add advice and links to resources in the commenting for that post

What do we want people to say about the Community Of Practice 20 years (one generation) from now:
- "How we made a difference in their organization"
- We were a model for sharing
- Facilitators support each other
- Repository for Best Practices. It better's their career.
- Experiencing other people's facilitation style.
- Retreat for facilitators
- Network enables who to go to for specific resources for various projects. Not Cleveland centric in 20 years.
- Business community needs to know us here.
- Define the resources clearly

What are immediate things we want to see, share, and take respondsibility for?

- Jack: Mentoring. There's already 12 people.
- Susan: Event planning

Next event notes:

CASE [pig farm]. Squire's valley farm.
Cleveland Zoo
Libraries
Healthspace
Outdoor spaces?
Family life center on 306

What would be meaningful for our next event?

- Getting to know each other
- Posting to the website when you're facilitating an event: calendar
- Building technical capacity
- Sharing learning, resources, and practice

Communities of Practice have domains that are self-organizing. One model: Quarterly meetings with an hour set aside for domain updates. Each domain has it's own integrity of learning.

Can it be as simple as a potluck dinner at one of the metroparks? Can it include an excercise? There was that energy at CASE and people wanted more.

We can do Open Space for each quarterly gathering - possibly around a different question each time, such as: "How can facilitation make a transformative impact in organizations?" We can also use Open Space to incubate domains.

Two themes for future events:
- Nuts and bolts of setting up a business practice.
- Favorite links
- Getting feedback on our facilitation styles

Maybe we can create a calendar (George Nemeth is now working on this) where people can post events other facilitators can attend and observe for learning and feedback

Next steps: locate a free or close to free outdoor venue for a June potluck. If you have suggestions, post them as comments here. The ideal: everyone takes resposibility for their idea and does the research. The planning team can then in our next meeting sort through the ideas, talk, and decide on a good path.

By the way, there is no "chair" of this Community of Practice or its planning team. It will be self-organizing as it's been so far - meaning that leadership is shared.. Jack Ricchiuto will in the meantime take responsibility for convening the planning team. If you want to participate in the next planning meeting, contact Jack @ 216.373.7475.

More about me at: www.designinglife.com

Notes from the 3.11.05 Launch Event

This afternoon, 35 Cleveland area facilitators engaged each other for the first time in two hours of conversations that participants described as "electric", "enlightening", and "outstanding." They represented government and grassroots organizations, independent corporate types, a Taoist healer, and CPA. There were people from every generation representing every continent. No one managed, led, directed, controlled or facilitated the conversations, including of course the Open Space conversation on raising perceptions of the value of facilitation in the communities represented. It was people trusting themselves to be themselves in new conversations. Ordinary magic.

What emerged?

So much knowledge energy and wisdom that it would be good to create support groups for each other to share successes and problems that we ran into. Investigate technology options for that.

The need to build awareness around who we are as a community. Who else is doing this work? And building awareness in the community. How facilitation can build value in your organization/community etc.

Fantastic openness and deep level of support in this community which is excellent.

What would make a local facilitation community of practice valuable for us?

Get contact information so as to share info sessions etc

Develop a bio of each person, that captured each person’s assets in facilitation. Increasingly co-facilitation is needed.

People that need facilitators, people that what to enhance their skills, people who want to sell their skills.

If we met every 2 months and bring these discussions to deeper knowledge.

The ultimate is to get back together again. I would like to reinforce the relationships that we made today. We should change the methodology so that we learn something everytime we come.

A website as perhaps hosted by 3M

Interactive website enables the conversation to keep going.

Ed envisions facilitation group learning and complex learning is how we do things in NEO. Open networks of collaboration in Universities and libraries and neighborhoods and counties and across counties….this is how we will build the civic space. Could this group be the seeders of a large revitalization of the civic space. People will come together and reclaim the civic space, sharing information and sharing conversation.

People looking for ways to build their capacity and using technology. How do we use the people in the room to teach us how to grow our skills in online facilitation practice.

* Get away from the "enemy/other people's problem images"
* Harvest collective wisdom & make it explicit
* Identify common interest/collective agenda
* Allow leaders of group to be participants instead of leaders
* Bring more objectivity to the process
* Process of slowing down to get in touch with "What Is" that allows ground to be built
* Creates order to the process and allows order to emerge from multiple fugures
* Moves the process along in a timely way
* In a constructive, respectful manner, allows others' input to augment ideas of leadership
* There is a deeply spiritual dimension to good facilitation - it uncovers the deep connection that we share ... wow moments
* Good meetings don't just "happen" - it takes training and skill
* Good meetings create time and money savings and increased innovation resulting from idea sharing

How do we quanitify value?

* Before/after surveys of participants
* Follow up well after 3-6 months
* Is there a way to get independent feedback?
* From who's point of view?
* The positive effect of good facilitation is very subtle
* Clients are more willing to try facilitation if they've seen it work
* How can we showcase facilitation more in the business community?
* Maybe have more facilitated pieces at big suit/panel/powerpoint events and meetings
* The drivers: stuck crisis > quantifyable result
* Challenge: managing expectations up front
* After Action Reviews - learning organization; everyone takes of their "stripes" - group consensus about what worked

What is the demand for facilitation?

* Sometimes we need mediation before facilitation - we need mediation to create the "space" for facilitation
* Demand is difficult to recognize - people tend to have lost the skill to have "conversations"
* Conversations are messy
* Political leadership is driving away from conversations - not toward it
* People want to connect - people want conversation
* "Consumers" need to know how to "ignite the fire"
* Demand arises when people begin to see the value of conversation
* To see the value they must experience it
* People who need it the most demand it the least
* Facilitation sometimes leads people to "uncomfortable" places, when they shut down and withdraw from the conversation
* The demand for "community engagement" is sometimes disingenuous

How to sell facilitation as a stand-alone service/product

* A $3M question in NE Ohio
* 1/3 prep + "x" + 1/3 report - it's more than the facilitation event ("x" = activity)
* Legal questions are one of the few places where it's clear a facilitator is needed
* Often confrontational situations don't want a facilitator because people would have to air their issues
* This however is a positive - facilitation as a way of supporting greater group honesty/authenticity and responsibility than it would have otherwise
* We need to have a concrete focused endeavor/product to have someone (e.g. jane Campbell) see the need for facilitators to work on it - that is, sell the product - doing specific proposal
* Present stories of successes to sell your skills
* When attendeed leave a facilitation session feeling good about themselves and what they've created, they will "buy" the product of facilitation