Is conflict, divisiveness & disturbance sapping the life out of groups you work with?
You. Me. Some of us. All of us. What happens when we don't agree and conflict is growing? How do we stay together when the divides are increasing? How can we work when the waves of turbulence are rising?
It’s time to do things differently. Come and learn from practitioners working at the edge and see how our stories and applied story work can provide a place where we can take shelter from the storm and find understanding and strength with each other.
Register nowThe challenges are all around us
If you – and those you work with and for – are feeling a growing amount of overwhelm and complexity, it may be because of the conflict, divisiveness and disturbance that is arising everywhere. Falling into disturbance, conflict and divisiveness robs all of us of the potential of using its combined resources to create innovation and wiser action.
Is this you?
- You are seeking ways to minimise the conflict between groups and help them work with difference in order to create more generative solutions together.
- You are looking for ways to support people to move away from the divisiveness and emotional charge that is so prevalent now and listen to each other in new ways.
- You looking for a framework that can offer more harmony, and support people to lean into deeper understanding and connection with each other.
- You already curious about how storytelling might be helpful and want to work with someone who knows their way around tools and methods that could support you.
For our third iteration of BEYOND FACILITATION,
we want to both hear from and learn together with practitioners in the field who are working directly with conflict, divisiveness and disturbance in new and effective ways. At the same time, we want to introduce a narrative method that can be applied in your upcoming projects precisely because it can support generative listening, deeper understanding, and stronger co-created outcomes.
What will happen?
Over the course of four consecutive sessions, we will work with a narrative framework to hear from senior practitioners in a variety of fields, who are dealing with the complexities of conflict, divisiveness and disturbance in challenging, real life projects. Together, we will act both as research and harvesting teams to capture the gold of their real-life experience using the Collective Story Harvest method, and experiment with using the method in a variety of circumstances.
Why This Course? Why Now?
Disturbance and conflict are rising in the world and sapping the life out of group work. As a leader or facilitator you are charged with supporting your groups to make the most effective use of their time together. But complex and innovative work depends on the foundation of group relationship and relatedness.
What can we discover from those pioneering at the edges during this challenging time?Â
Our methodology
Collective Story Harvest provides a solid framework for moving away from positionality into the role of collective sense and meaning making. Through this simple method, we can actively and generatively learn from any story, in ways that make new futures possible.Â
The Collective Story Harvest narrative methodology was born out of the field of Art of Hosting and has been used around the world in a wide variety of applications for more than a decade.Â
Working together with one of the methodology creators, Mary Alice Arthur, will help us step behind the scenes and understand the inherently strategic nature of this potent tool, while Amy Lenzo will guide us into new, innovative applications for it.
This will be a highly hands-on workshop. Action learning is one of the fastest and most effective methods of learning and ensures the results stay with you and can immediately be applied in your own context.Â
Our Practitioner Stories
We have chosen three practitioners who are experimenting in the delicate space between chaos and breakdown – a space many of us are confronting right now – in different contexts and places in the world.
Each of them is a well-seasoned host and carries their own unique blend of focus and skills.
Maria Scordialos
My upbringing within an international environment has shaped who I am, a citizen of the world able to adapt, embrace diversity, yet also stay directly connected to my own traditions and roots. It taught me to strongly love humanity and have a deep faith in our role in life. I have made this my work, which is mainly about inviting people to meet in their humanity and for their humanity.
For the past 10 years, I have found that this happens mostly in the cracks of our present world, where we loosen from our comfort and begin to seed ourselves into discovering new ways of living and working. This has lead me to offer my work in communities, institutions, organisations -- the spaces where people come together to create life.
Vanessa Reid
I work with systems in fundamental shift and transformation. I accompany and co-create with those who are on the edge of what we do not know. Those who are willing to lead, live into, and learn through, the deep changes that are being asked of us now. Transitions, transformation, this is my work.
I do this locally, globally, and online. How? By co-creating collective practice and processes to navigate times and places of chaos, crisis and regeneration. Tending the inner and outer work of our leadership, and exploring how we are complicit in the systems we want to transform. This includes the rite of passage of hospicing what is dying whilst hosting the newness that is emerging. We will find the turning points, and become the turning point.
Paul Messer
I use design thinking to work with complexity. Tapping into my background as an industrial designer, I draw real-time visual map murals and make custom objects  to support group innovation and co-design processes. As a designer, my creative drive and prototype mind thrive on constraints.
I've been engaged in the ArtHive, FabLab and FabCity movements, and I understand how creative processes can affect social change. I'm the creator of the Visual Thinking Lab and an active member of  the international visual practitioner community. I"m a co-founder of Percolab Coop in Montreal.
Join us if you are...
- Leading groups that face conflict, divisiveness and you are seeking support in helping them move beyond the disturbance to a more generative working relationshipÂ
- Searching for how to apply the ideas behind the Collective Story Harvest in effectively
- Looking for inspiration about how to host groups facing chaos, breakdown and conflict
- Seeking cutting edge ideas on how to work with big, complex issues in new ways
- Searching for a method that can both harness and focus the energy in groups in a more generative wayÂ
- Looking for support in the “groanzone” that is group process
- Wanting to actively work with other practitioners who are also exploring the edgy nature of conflict, divisiveness and disturbance
About each session
We meet on four consecutive Tuesdays, starting on April 22. Each of the sessions will take us deeper into working with the themes behind each practitioner story and their application to our own work.
The sessions take place for 2.5 hours starting at 10:00 Pacific / 1:00 pm Eastern / 19:00 Central European time.
We begin by taking a closer look at our focus around conflict, divisiveness and disturbance. How do those working at these edges see their work and what are they pioneering? Â
Then we will introduce the structure of our overall workshop and the Collective Story Harvest methodology, which will provide the backbone of this experience. We’ll outline the strategic choices inherent in each part of the methodology, and begin to co-create the Harvesting arcs we will use to work with the stories coming in Session 2
In Session 2, we step fully into Collective Story Harvest, acting as researchers into the specific threads we are most interested in learning more about as a collective and building a body of knowledge from the specific topics being covered.
We will listen to two storytellers sharing their work on the edges and what they have learned from pioneering in their own fields of focus. Our deep listening and harvests will be a gift - a fresh perspective mirrored back to them as they move forward in their work, while at the same time offering us another layer of learning from their stories.
In Session 3 we’ll hear from another practitioner experimenting with different ways to engage groups in storytelling and harvesting based on their unique circumstances. We will harvest his story in a fresh way that will help us see how we can apply his approach to new ways of working with collective issues.
This session will invite us all to stretch and notice how narrative is working in everyday life; how the world is full of stories and everyone is a storyteller, and how applying a harvesting perspective to these stories can help us make the most of any situation. We will focus on harvesting arcs that can be helpful as we face the unknown.
Making sense of the practical nature of story and harvesting helps us address and make it through the storm, seeing beyond the conflict to our common ground. All of this leads us to new practices about what there is to learn from the wisdom that can be found in the eye of the storm.
This session will lead into an experiment where we will apply our insights directly during the coming week.
In the final session, we will bring together what we learned from our experiments and the course as a whole to look for specific patterns and practical learnings we can apply going forward.. Â
We’ll end by deconstructing the Collective Story Harvest methodology, step by step, and see how each of us have gained clarity on how and where this methodology might be applied in our own field of work.
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What's my investment?
About your hosts
Amy Lenzo
A Steward of participatory practice worldwide, Amy Lenzo has over two decades of experience hosting strategic , ground-breaking, experiences, both onsite and online. Her fascination with the relationship between technology and the natural world, including human nature, has led to a deep exploration of hosting earth-connected technology in service to humanity. She is the author of a number of articles, including Using Visuals in Online Engagement (The World of Visual Facilitation, 2019), and The Central Garden: An Invitation (The Change Handbook, 3rd Edition)
Mary Alice Arthur
Mary Alice is a Story Activist working with story in service of positive system shift and for focusing collective intelligence on critical issues. She has been facilitating groups for almost 30 years and is an internationally respected process host and trainer, supporting practitioners around the world as a steward of the Art of Hosting. and is also an active Flow Game steward, with a special love of working with questions. She is the author of 365 ALIVE! Find your voice, Claim your story. Live your brilliant life.
