Facilitation holds a key to world change.

Facilitation is about bringing people together, to listen to each other, to connect, to empathize, to work things out, to heal social trauma, to collaborate, and to dream.

Facilitation is about creating a space for people’s deeper selves to emerge, for people’s creativity to blossom, for people’s intuitions to come alive.

Being a facilitator is a subtle art, like that of being a healer or coach. A good healer or coach does very little, allowing the client to heal or activate themselves. Its about accessing the Tao.

Facilitation is a key to changing the political, economic, justice, legal, education, healthcare and entertainment systems. New political systems can be based on facilitation brings people together to hear each other, to empathize and to collaborate. Different demographics and groups at odds with each other through facilitation can learn to work together to find holistic solutions. Solutions and governance then emerge bottom up from the collective. New economic systems can be based on facilitating people to work together in commons and gift economies e.g. gift circles are about facilitating people to express their needs and gifts. New justice and legal systems can be based in facilitating people to come together, to acknowledge, understand, empathize and forgive. Justice is then restorative and not punitive, it comes in bottom-up circles and gatherings, rather than top-down government, police, and court imposed actions. New education systems will come from facilitating people to learn from each other in peer-based learning systems. New healthcare systems will come from facilitating people in community to support each other in healing, it will come from facilitating people to come together in circles, to open up to their subtle energetic energies, to heal each other. New entertainment forms will come from facilitating people to access their creativity and co-create with each other.

Facilitation will help us transition to a bottom-up, openly collaborative world, where its our interactations with other, that emerge our beautiful co-created reality. It allows order to emerge without the need for so much top-down hierarchical goverance.

What we need is a way for facilitation to go viral, to spread all around the world. What we need is process that allows i) everyone to become empowered to facilitate ii)people to co-facilitate together, iii) teach people to facilitate iv) activate people to create facilitation happenings v) allow simple facilitation processes to evolve into societies building blocks Here is an idea for how this can happen.

First, create gatherings called Facilitation Improv. In these gatherings everyone becomes a facilitator. The circle sits in silence to someone gets a ‘hit’, gets an intuition about what to facilitate the group in. It could be a body-centered, emotion-centered, mind-centered, or spirit centered activity. The group then does this activity. When its finished, the group goes into silent meditation, until someone else gets a ‘hit’ of what to facilitate the group in. Facilitator Improv is like co-piloting a group into deeper and deeper spaces. It opens up doorways. It also trains people to become facilitators. As different people lead different activities it offers the opportunity for other people in the circle to pick up tips and tricks. As people try different things different facilitation techniques may morph and evolve. These Facilitator Improv meetings can be held regularly. And then here’s the important point to make this go viral. People in the Facilitator Improv circle are encouraged to also start another Facilitator Improv circle. They are given advice, tips, and emotional support for starting a new circle from the others in the circle. So people would then often belong to more than one facilitator circles. So each Facilitator Circle is both a co-facilitation activity, and also guidance group to help people start more circles.

The vision is to have a global network of Facilitator Improv circles happening regularly, where people are sometimes flowing, sometimes not moving from circle to circle. Facilitator Improv circles can specialize, so they can focus on political issues, they can be fitness and body-centered, they can be about diversity and social justice. And they can evolve to these specializations from a more general Facilitator Improv circle. As a community has more and more Facilitator Improv circles, the diversity of areas they focus on will increase.

What is special about Facilitator Improv circles is that it is something everyone can do. You can start one of these circles yourself. Its not like you have to wait to the government or corporations or even some big movement to do some action. You organize people to get together into a Facilitator Improv circle, and start setting in motion new ways that humanity can relate. And as you guide others in your circle to start other Facilitator Improv circles, you are setting in motion large scale ripple effects into the world. Facilitator circles are profound in how they can shift paradigms and ‘normal’ ways of doing things. By helping set up these Facilitator circles can help usher in a new socio-econo-educ-health-political operating systems for humanity.

[this article was reprinted on the Peer to Peer Foundation website http://p2pfoundation.net/Facilitator_Improv ]

More about Facilitator Improv:

Facilitator Improv FAQ

New paradigms of leadership: from leader to facilitator to we-facilitator

Workshops run with facilitator improv