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What do we need to watch out for and what are important things to consider when we want to introduce and offer Convergent Facilitation processes within our personal, community, or organizational settings?
Rachel gets coaching from Roni after a CF process with a 6-people group where a stakeholder with power says they are happy for the others to do a CF process and don't want to participate with in the meetings because of mistrust.
Rachel gets coaching from Roni about a situation with a 6-people group where a stakeholder with power says they are happy for the others to do a CF process and don't want to participate with in the meetings because of mistrust.
Together with Nadja who initiated this conversation Magda and Roni share about their experience with different decision making approaches, incl. CF of course.
People who have had CF training have been experimenting with adapting some of it's principles into a project they are working on, and have been talking with Paul Kahawatte about it. In this call they are asking him some questions, based on that experience.
Menaka used the 3 steps that Paul shared in the coaching call for breaking down NCEs inside a story she wrote. Paul and Menaka met to explore the facilitation and sensing NCEs of what's important to people in the story.
Menaka used the 3 steps that Paul shared in the coaching call for breaking down NCEs inside a story she wrote. Paul and Menaka met to explore the facilitation and sensing NCEs of what's important to people in the story.
Menaka used the 3 steps that Paul shared in the coaching call for breaking down NCEs inside a story she wrote. Paul and Menaka met to explore the facilitation and sensing NCEs of what's important to people in the story.
Menaka used the 3 steps that Paul shared in the coaching call for breaking down NCEs inside a story she wrote. Paul and Menaka met to explore the facilitation and sensing NCEs of what's important to people in the story.
We get opportunities for integration every day. How do you support your family in resolving disagreements about what to do? What do you do when people at work keep arguing about the best way to finish a project? Bring your small and big decisions to explore how to apply CF and find solutions that work for everyone.
Unless we attend to power differences, we are likely to miss the needs, perspectives, ideas, and concerns of the people with less power. Finding ways of inviting and integrating them leads to wiser and more robust solutions.
What can we do when someone in the group is creating challenges for us? Bring your experiences with people that frustrate you, don't make sense, or you just wish would talk less often. We'll explore how to tranform our relationships with outliers and navigate judgements that come up for us.
How can we experience more harmony and happiness on a daily basis? How can we teach children to collaborate? How can we transform longstanding conflicts with our partners into dilemmas that we are motivated to solve together? Practicing Convergent Facilitaiton at home can help. Bring the situations that annoy you the most and we'll see what's possible.
Get ready to role play! We'll plan to play a simple game to practice distilling the Noncontroversial Essence of someone's position. I'll bring a low-stakes scenario so we can practice this essential Convergent Facilitation skill in a relaxed and supportive setting.
One-on-one CF Coaching on real-group scenarios brought by participants that they are needing coaching to share CF in their communities.
Facilitation is an art and requires reading the room very quickly and in detail. This is especially true when it comes to dissent, because often people feel either vulnerable or agitated while sharing a different perspective or concerns. In this session we will practice what it would be like to follow your intuition and how to follow it while facilitating. Please bring your own situation(s) so we can work with real life examples.
Roni coaches Michael one-on-one on sharing CF while mediating a dispute between a US Government employee and his management.
The CF facilitation is a process of discovery of what’s important for a group and how this can be attended to. Curiosity and reflecting back support me in this discovery. You are invited to explore together in what ways it could be supportive for you and what are the ways you would like to express your curiosity and reflect back what you heard. Note, English is Magda's second language and sometimes it is a stretch for her to express herself precisely and understand others instantly. Making it visible helps Magda to relax. (for CF Newsletter and Cf Website)
Roni coaches Menaka one-on-one on 4th Sundays of the month to facilitate CF at the Housing Colony she lives in. Note, Scheduled call can cancel,change depending on Roni and Menaka's needs so please check the website schedule before joining the call.
Formulating threshold questions is one of the most playful parts of CF as we learn to discern what level of stretch we can create to gather the exact amount and quality of information to move the decision making process.
Paul coaching Rachel on framing the question for the high school Rachel’s son studies in w/ Paul Kahawatte [31 Jan 2022]
WatchPaul coaches Rachel one-on-one to share CF at the High School her son studies in
Roni coaches Menaka one-on-one on 4th Sundays of the month to facilitate CF at the Housing Colony she lives in.
Get ready to role play! We'll plan to play a simple game to practice distilling the Noncontroversial Essence of someone's position. I'll bring a low-stakes scenario so we can practice this essential Convergent Facilitation skill in a relaxed and supportive setting.
Folks are encouraged to bring whatever examples,topics,issues they want to practice and we’ll craft a session plan out of that!
One of the key skills of CF is to be transparent about the choices we make as the process is unfolding. This builds trust as we model collaboration by involving people in when and how to transition from one step to the next. However, there are potential pitfalls when revealing what lives in us in any particular moment. In this session, we'll practice how to express transparently as well as explore when to be transparent or not.
Let's talk about how to get started in supporting collaborative decision-making. How do you find opportunities to apply CF? How do you know what to do? What if it doesn't go well? Bring your challenges and fears!
In this call we will look at the challenges of finding NCEs, in a practical way. Using scenarios, we will have space to slow down those more difficult moments and practice finding the Noncontroversial Essence together.
Convergent Facilitation principles and practices aren't only for big fancy meetings or professional facilitators, we can apply them in our every day lives too! Whether you are making decisions with your family or figuring something out with your co-workers, CF can be helpful even when it isn't a formal process. Bring questions and ideas from everyday life and we'll explore them together.
We will be exploring how it is to be an outlier and extracting from the wisdom of your experience ideas or principles about how to engage with outliers so that it serves everyone (outlier, group and facilitator). This CC is offered by Magda in English which is their second language and is a stretch for them.
Unless we attend to power differences, we are likely to miss the needs, perspectives, ideas, and concerns of the people with less power. Finding ways of inviting and integrating them leads to wiser and more robust solutions.
We will explore the practical tools that support us as CF facilitators in increasing willingness and how to apply them to situations brought by participants.
Interested in facilitating a large (25 person or more) multi-stakeholder group decision? Already in the middle of one? Bring your questions, challenges and concerns. Possiblilites of what we can cover include coming up with strategies for getting as much alignment as possible before the first meeting, what to say to kick off that first meeting, how to keep things moving forward with large groups of people, and what to do if there's only token or no representation of a particular stakeholder group.
Get ready to role play! We'll plan to play a simple game to practice distilling the Noncontroversial Essence of someone's position. I'll bring a low-stakes scenario so we can practice this essential Convergent Facilitation skill in a relaxed and supportive setting.
Get ready to role play! We'll plan to play a simple game to practice distilling the Noncontroversial Essence of someone's position. I'll bring a low-stakes scenario so we can practice this essential Convergent Facilitation skill in a relaxed and supportive setting.
CF challenges and Phase 2, Forming a committee and proposal creation? w/ Verene Nicolas [14 Aug 2021]
WatchIn this call, we’ll engage with participants’ own CF challenges, as well as explore specific issues and questions surrounding Phase 2’s committee formation and proposal creation.
Convergent Facilitation isn't only for big important meetings and professional facilitators! Convergent Facilitation principles can be useful for everyday life, whether you're making plans with your kids, coming up with solutions with your spouse, or guiding a tense PTA meeting from the sidelines. Bring your questions and stories from daily life and we'll look at them together.
How often do you find yourself wishing that someone would finish talking, and yet you continue to just listen without doing anything about it? As facilitators, it's critical for us to know when and how to interrupt, and to stregthen our ability to actually interrupt, even when it feels uncomfortable. Let's explore how to navigate those moments with effectiveness and care.
Come with your real life situations and you'll have a chance to practice with lots of coaching and support.
Get ready to role play! We'll plan to play a simple game to practice distilling the Noncontroversial Essence of someone's position. I'll bring a low-stakes scenario so we can practice this essential Convergent Facilitation skill in a relaxed and supportive setting.
As CF facilitators, our quality of presence is the most vaulable resource we have to rely on. On this session we will explore some of the inner obstacles that may come up when facilitating, and how to transform them. Some examples, attachment to an outcome, judging participants, judging ourselves, taking things personally, losing track, etc. Please bring your personal examples.
Mattering and trust is core currency within CF. In this session we dive into the role of NCE's to capture what is most important to a person, moving it from a single persons position to a criteria that is held by everyone, and the deeper listening skills of uncovering what is important and converting it to criteria.
Come with your real life situations and you'll have a chance to practice with lots of coaching and support.
Those of us who love Nonviolent Communication and Convergent Facilitation often want to share the joy with others. We might think that everyone wants to learn everything about these wonderful tools for attending to everyone's needs, and feel surprised when people seem disinterested or even irritated. This coaching call is an opportunity to explore effective approaches for sharing principles and practices from Convergent Facilitation. Please bring your challenges and insights!
We will look at how to navigate transitions when we choose to intervene to shift the direction. This will include role playing different scenarios with coaching.
Come with your real life situations and you'll have a chance to practice with lots of coaching and support.
Do you have questions about applying Convergent Facilitation in your work with social movements? When we are supporting decision-making as part of social change work, we can encounter all sorts of dynamics that may not come up in other scenarios, all-volunteer groups, people who are overworked and underpaid, the assumption of Consensus process, strong ideological thinking, trauma related to the issues that people are passionate about, and more. Please bring your experiences and questions related to using CF in these kinds of contexts and let's explore it together.
Mattering and trust is core currency within CF. In this session we dive into the role of NCE's to capture what is most important to a person, moving it from a single persons position to a criteria that is held by everyone, and the deeper listening skills of uncovering what is important and converting it to criteria.
How do you respond when a participant accuses someone else of derailing the process? What do you do when you realize you've made a mistake, you don't know how to proceed, or you're triggered to a point of being unable to continue facilitating? Bring your own challenges and we'll explore how to support you and the group, increase trust, move the group toward purpose, and honor your limits.
We will look at the different pieces to track throughout the 3 phases of Convergent Facilitation, and how to navigate transitions when we choose to intervene to shift the direction. This will include role playing different scenarios with coaching.
Learn how to use the App and help Convergent Facilitator Barb Bickford prepare to use it for a real Convergent Facilitation process she's leading.
Sometimes people have strategies that are diametrically opposed to each other. When does it make sense to find the noncontroversial essence underlying each of them and when does it make sense to find a noncontroversial essence that applies to both of them?
Come with your real life situations and you'll have a chance to practice with lots of coaching and support.
Unless we attend to power differences, we are likely to miss the needs, perspectives, ideas, and concerns of the people with less power. Finding ways of inviting and integrating them leads to wiser and more robust solutions.
An anchor of our playful exploration of reframing, the art of guiding a group by choosing which stories to tell about what is happening. Roni will offer a brief framing on framing, followed by a game of whose frame is it anyway? Don't worry, we'll still have time for coaching, so bring any specific challenges from your CF practice.
Formulating threshold questions is one of most playful parts of CF as we learn to discern what level of stretch we can create to gather the exact amount and quality of information to move the decision making process.
Mattering and trust is core currency within CF. In this session we dive into the role of NCE's to capture what is most important to a person, moving it from a single persons position to a criteria that is held by everyone, and the deeper listening skills of uncovering what is important and converting it to criteria.
Paul answers questions about the CF process.
Sometimes people have strategies that are diametrically opposed to each other. When does it make sense to find the noncontroversial essence underlying each of them and when does it make sense to find a noncontroversial essence that applies to both of them?
We'll welcome the new year with a playful exploration of reframing, the art of guiding a group by choosing which stories to tell about what is happening. Roni will offer a brief framing on framing, followed by a game of whose frame is it anyway? Don't worry, we'll still have time for coaching, so bring any specific challenges from your CF practice.
You will have an opportunity to sit in the facilitator chair and practice your skills related to holding a Convergent Facilitation process. Please bring your own situation(s) so we can work with real life examples. We will practice the whole process or certain phases depending on your preference. You will be able to dial the difficulty level to best serve your learning. And you will have lots of support.
How to compensate for power differences interfering with collaboration w/ Aya Caspi [07 Dec 2020]
WatchIn this session we will explore how to attend to power differences as CF facilitators so that real collaboration can happen at every phase of the process, resulting in a robust decision that includes all needs and truly works for all.
In this session we will look at and practice using a couple of the key variables within thresholds, and we may explore how to use thresholds in sequence.
You will have an opportunity to sit in the facilitator chair and practice your skills related to holding a Convergent Facilitation process. Please bring your own situation(s) so we can work with real life examples. We will practice the whole process or certain phases depending on your preference. You will be able to dial the difficulty level to best serve your learning. And you will have lots of support.
In this session we will practice finding the Noncontroversial Essence, exploring and strengthening this ability that is at the core of CF. We will get into some of the nuances of working with NCEs.
How are you doing as a Convergent Facilitator? Are you aware of your strengths and challenges? What is your plan for growing your skills over time? In this session we'll play with different approaches to self-assessment and feedback so you can discover what works best for you. We'll also practice how to prioritize and integrate learnings so you can get the most out of future coaching calls and CF activities.
You will have an opportunity to sit in the facilitator chair and practice your skills related to holding a Convergent Facilitation process. Please bring your own situation(s) so we can work with real life examples. We will practice the whole process or certain phases depending on your preference. You will be able to dial the difficulty level to best serve your learning. And you will have lots of support.
Challenges encountered during CF facilitation and Practice of Self-Connection w/ Verene Nicolas [25 Oct 2020]
WatchPeople who encounter specific challenges or have questions about how to navigate certain situations whilst facilitating a CF process will have a chance to explore those with me and the group. If we have time, we'll also practice how to discern what is alive in us when we facilitate and what and how to share it with the group to reach our purpose.
You will have an opportunity to sit in the facilitator chair and practice your skills related to holding a Convergent Facilitation process. Please bring your own situation(s) so we can work with real life examples. We will practice the whole process or certain phases depending on your preference. You will be able to dial the difficulty level to best serve your learning. And you will have lots of support.
Determining where to set the Threshold of Willingness is essential for maximizing creativity and conserving the group's energy and your own. If it's too high for the context, you risk squelching input. Too low, and resentment mounts and fatigue grows. Lisa looks forward to in depth exploration and practice of this skill with you!
Sometimes people have strategies that are diametrically opposed to each other. When does it make sense to find the noncontroversial essence underlying each of them and when does it make sense to find a noncontroversial essence that applies to both of them?
One of the key skills of CF is to be transparent about the choices we make as the process is unfolding. This builds trust as we model collaboration by involving people in when and how to transition from one step to the next. However, there are potential pitfalls when revealing what lives in us in any particular moment. In this session, we'll practice how to express transparently as well as explore when to be transparent or not.
Magda will be leading a practice session on finding the Noncontroversial Essence. She says, In my opinion Noncontroversial Essence is the essence of Convergent Facilitation, because in order to make a decision that everyone in a room is supporting, we usually need to name what people have in common. This is a chance to develop your capacity, flow, and confidence in this key part of Convergent Facilitation.
Paul will be leading a practice session on finding the Noncontroversial Essence. This is a chance to develop your capacity, flow, and confidence in a key part of Convergent Facilitation.
Practice, Practice, Practice. Facilitated Role Plays with Lots of Support w/ Magda Baranska [31 Aug 2020]
WatchMagda will offer a session focused on practice using Facilitated role plays with lots of support. You will have an opportunity to sit in the facilitator chair and practice your skills related to holding a Convergent Facilitation process. Please bring your own situation(s) so we can work with real life examples. We will practice the whole process or certain phases depending on your preference. You will be able to dial the difficulty level to best serve your learning. And you will have lots of support.
Magda will offer a session focused on Following intuition while asking for and engaging with dissent. Facilitation is an art and requires reading the room very quickly and in detail. This is especially true when it comes to dissent, because often people feel either vulnerable or agitated while sharing a different perspective or concerns. In this session we will practice what it would be like to follow your intuition and how to follow it while facilitating. Please bring your own situation(s) so we can work with real life examples.
Magda will offer a session focused on Following intuition while asking for and engaging with dissent. Facilitation is an art and requires reading the room very quickly and in detail. This is especially true when it comes to dissent, because often people feel either vulnerable or agitated while sharing a different perspective or concerns. In this session we will practice what it would be like to follow your intuition and how to follow it while facilitating. Please bring your own situation(s) so we can work with real life examples.
Verene will offer coaching on Thresholds. The capacity to both integrate dissent and discern willingness is one of the key skills that differentiates CF from other methods of collaborative decision making. It includes asking carefully crafted show-of-hands questions, according to a low to high threshold spectrum. In this session, we will practice when to lean towards a low, medium, or high threshold, as well as how to craft the questions themselves.
Testing the autogeneration of the showcards.
Roni is inviting everyone to practice some peer coaching and feedback. This is a great opportunity to think about how you can help others collaborate more effectively and care for everyone's needs. Wouldn't it be wonderful to share and integrate CF principles with everyone in our lives?
One of the key skills of CF is to be transparent about the choices we make as the process is unfolding. This builds trust as we model collaboration by involving people in when and how to transition from one step to the next. However, there are potential pitfalls when revealing what lives in us in any particular moment. In this session, we'll practice how to express transparently as well as explore when to be transparent or not.
On this call, Lisa discusses strategies for maximizing collaboration when time is tight. Topics discussed include how to let go of attachment to outcome in the face of time pressure, strategies for raising the threshold of willingness while lowering the stakes, how to check to see what the cost of having a majority vote if time runs out will be for the group, what to do when you can’t find the noncontroversial essence in the moment, and how to describe what Convergent Facilitation is so that a group has enough context to buy into the process.
Sometimes people have strategies that are diametrically opposed to each other. When does it make sense to find the noncontroversial essence underlying each of them and when does it make sense to find a noncontroversial essence that applies to both of them?
On this call, Lisa discusses strategies for attending to power differences. Participants listed all the ways they’ve seen power differences show up in meetings and practiced interrupting someone with lots of power to hear from other members of the group.
On this call, Paul explores the Convergent Facilitation skill of finding the noncontroversial essence in what people say matters to them about a decision.
On this call, Mars explores the Convergenet Facilitation process arc and non-linear applications. While CF has distinct phases, in real life they often don’t unfold in order. Mars offers examples of how the process may flow and how to remain flexible when planning and facilitating.