Desiree Paulsen Facilitation

 I want to emphasize that we need to reconnect humanity through different ways of interacting and engaging. Dialogue and conversation is a better form of reconnecting humanity than just using debate.I have always found Margaret Wheatley's writing on the topics of new ways of leading, new ways of interacting and new forms of organisation very interesting and I have drawn from her work often in my practice as a facilitator and organisational development consultant. As an independent practitioner  I still use this approach in my facilitation and I am very grateful for a wonderful community of practitioners where I learnt most of what I know today! We also need to reconnect to the concepts of Paulo Freire - giving voice and conscientising in mobilising communities and civil society to fight for their rights!    "Hu man conversation is the most ancient and easiest way to cultivate the conditions for change – personal change, community and organisation...

The role of facilitators working with organizations in crisis (A reworked piece I wrote a few years ago for a newsletter for the previous organisation I worked at www.cdra.org.za) ) In organisational systems crisis should be seen as a natural part of normal organizational development. Some organisations manage to work through crisis whilst others may allow it to destroy them or refuse to see or recognize the crisis (opting for a denial or 'head in the ground' approach). Crisis may be full blown or it may be simmering underground and often presented under the guise of “we need new leadership, we need restructuring or we need teambuilding”. The symptoms are: relationships have broken down, colleagues no longer see the good in each other only the bad, gossiping has reached monumental proportions, cliques have formed often around those who have more power and those who have less (often around differing ideologies, philosophies, rank/position, gender, culture, race, ...

I cannot believe I have not blogged in a whole year!!!! Where has the time gone? As a freelance independent facilitator and consultant, domestic life has enveloped me and consumed me which means inbetween balancing work and homelife, I have no time for reflective thinking about the work that I do! So now I have decided it is time to stop and write something. I have been exceptionally busy with various kinds of social processes from group coaching to diversity appreciation training to strategic planning and organisational development processes. All of these have one thing in common - group energy and group intention. By this I mean what the group really wants to do will only emerge in the moment when people come together and if you as the facilitator will allow them to express their need and intention. This despite what you have been tasked to do with the group or even what they may have asked you to do - in many cases this will have been contracted by management or part of a set ...

The thing I love most about being a facilitator of group process - some like to call us social process facilitators - is that every process is different, and therefore demands different interventions from the facilitator. A facilitator has many different roles depending on the nature and demographic of the group she is facilitating, the purpose of the group, what the imagined outcomes are and the context in which it is happening. In the last while I have engaged with an interesting and diverse array of groups and social process, and each one had its challenges, its unexpected outcomes, its surprising revelations and its moments of inspiration. I found myself in situations where I was confident and sure of myself and in a zone of (wow I am really on a roll here, I am feeling this group and they are feeling me) to (ahem this doesn't seem to be going so well, this is not what I expected, should I say something or just shut up and allow things to unfold), to (this feels like being i...

Since this is my first post I have of course been deliberating and mulling over what should I say? I have just become an independent facilitator after having worked for an organization for 10 years, so its been a slow start to the year, but at least now I have a couple of processes under my belt, and things are getting busy, so I thought I should write something. So I've been thinking about what it is we as facilitators offer a group in a social process - what is the core, regardless of what it is you are facilitating. And I have come to realize that the best thing you can do is to firstly create and then facilitate a quality of space that transforms the way people usually connect to each other. This has a lot to do with how you start a process and how you allow a group to interact and introduce themselves. The way I have been doing this is to start the process in a particular way - here it is really about setting the scene, and sometimes you may not know the group intimatel...