Pattern Breaks (eBook)

A Facilitator's Guide to Cultivating Creativity

Michelle James (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
286 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-3126-6 (ISBN)

Infos

Pattern Breaks is a handbook for navigating the world of creative facilitation. It is for facilitators, trainers, educators, group leaders, and anyone who would like to bring more creativity out of their groups and out of themselves. It provides food for both thought and action. If you would like to cultivate creativity and aliveness in your design and facilitation, this book can help you: • Bring more enthusiasm and ingenuity out of participants • Become a more adaptive, improvisational, and resilient facilitator • Gain confidence and ease in navigating challenges, resistance, and the unexpected that comes with the creative process • Actualize your unique creativity for impactful and meaningful design • Establish environments receptive to novelty and transformation • Bring more fun and lightness into facilitating serious topics • Get buy-in from clients for nontraditional approaches • Cultivate conditions for emergence and co-creation • Generate life-giving outcomes that serve the good of the whole • And more Pattern Breaks explores both ways of being and ways of doing. From concepts to mindsets to practical applications and more, this book provides a rich trove of ideas, principles, and practices, along with an abundance of activities, to apply before, during, and after your workshop or event. It focuses on two levels at the same time-you as a facilitator of creative process, and you as a creative individual. Michelle James has combined over two decades of learnings, experiences, and insights as a facilitator and coach of creative process for thousands of participants-in corporations, nonprofits, government agencies, universities, and communities of practice-to distill what she discovered into relevant and accessible wisdom. This book is an invitation to expand your creative facilitation as you expand your creative self.

Textauszug

Introduction

Hi. Welcome to this exploration of cultivating creativity, for yourself and for the groups you serve. Creativity has been the central driving focus in my work for over two decades, and I am excited to share whatever I can that may ignite or ease your journey with creative facilitation. Creativity can be a source, a force, an energy, an act, a process, an outcome, and so much more. My favorite thing about working with it is that it’s ever-flowing, ever-changing, and ever-generating so it can never get old or outdated or be fully known. No matter how much I learn, it remains the greatest mystery … and the greatest gift.

In thinking about the title for this book, I reflected on the essence of cultivating creativity. At its core is the concept of pattern breaking: something is one way, something changes—a disruption to the norm in some form—and then something new and different emerges. Pattern breaking is only one lens from which to view creativity, but all creativity, and all creative process facilitation, contains some form of pattern breaking, so it felt like the place to start.

Every creative act is a pattern break.

While everyone is infinitely creative, we are also creatures of habit. We often don’t think to break our own patterns of thinking, perceiving, or acting without something prompting us. Or if we do, we tend to do it in a way that still reflects, ironically, our own familiar patterns of breaking our patterns. We get habituated in our ways, and tend to interact and create from our comfortable ways until the pattern disruptions come from an external source—or, until we consciously choose to break our own patterns.

Once we get in the practice of pattern breaking in one domain, it transfers to others, and we can get into a new habit of creating more consistently. This book is an exploration of pattern-breaking concepts and experiences to consider in your own facilitation.

Who This Book Is For

This book is for those who already have some facilitation experience, and understand facilitation basics, as well as seasoned professional facilitators, trainers, educators, leaders, coaches, conveners, and creatives. It is for anyone who would like to bring more creativity into their workshop design and delivery, and out of themselves and their participants, teams, or communities.

These are a few of the questions explored in this book:

•How do I get more engagement out of groups?

•How do I bring more creativity out of groups?

•How do I become a more adaptive, responsive, creative facilitator?

•How do I design for different creative and learning styles?

•How do I move a group through the resistance and creative blocks?

•How do I navigate ambiguity and uncertainty?

•What types of creative activities can I use with a group?

Why I Wrote This Book

I’m passionate about the immense transformative power of creativity, and have seen it work in real time in the most unexpected, uncanny, and life-giving ways. Not only does it bring individuals, teams, organizations, and communities into more connection and aliveness, it has the capacity to change any reality into something better.

Applying creativity into every dimension of our work, and our lives, is essential in a world where we need new ways of navigating our current situations and growing personally and professionally. Creativity offers pathways we can’t yet imagine, and can serve as the bridge from where we are to where we can be—individually and collectively.

We each have the creative agency and capacity to play a part in creating what’s next. My hope is that this book can inspire hope and aspirational ideas you can act on, in your own unique way, for yourself, and to contribute to the healing and thriving of those you facilitate and serve.

Creativity transforms walls into doorways.

What This Book Is Not and What It Is

This book is not an introductory book on facilitation, or a book on general facilitation. It assumes some level of knowledge of the basics. If you’re new to facilitation, I suggest other books or programs to learn the foundations of facilitation first. While this book contains techniques and practice templates (some with how-to step-by-step instructions), it’s not meant to be as instructional as much as it is to invite your own creative thinking about the material.

This book is also not a complete or comprehensive guide, but rather a yes-and to whatever you’re already doing. It doesn’t distinguish the type of group you are facilitating. These distinctions and decisions are left up to you. We all have different creative styles, and not everything in this book may be right for you. The offer is to take whatever resonates and adapt it for your purposes.

This book does not focus on online activities, but the principles still apply, and most of the activities can be adapted to work online, depending on the functions and constraints of the platform.

This book is an invitation into exploration and co-creation. It is more of a resource guide than a narrative. It contains concepts and practices to question, ponder, and engage in your own way. The intention of this book is to generate food for thought, open to more possibilities, and inspire you to co-create with it. It is also an invitation to play with breaking your own patterns as a facilitator of creative process, both before and when you are with clients, as well as supporting your participants in breaking theirs.

The offer is to engage with your own creative and intuitive thinking as you read it. When you notice something I missed, trust your impulse and add it into what you do. If the opposite of something I suggest works better for you, trust that. Anything in here is up for evolving and transforming to better work for you. Our creativity is large enough to contain all variations of concepts and practices in here, even seemingly opposing ones.

This book focuses on facilitating creative process specifically, and cultivating creativity using whole-brain, whole-body, whole-being approaches. It draws on over two decades of my learnings and experiences in the field. At the end of each workshop I always ask participants what was most valuable. The concepts in this book are the ones that were consistently expressed as most useful in the feedback over many years.

I’ve done my best to capture the most relevant lessons learned and insights gleaned from trial—and lots of error—with thousands of workshop participants, individual coaching clients, and my train-the-trainer programs over the years. More than a set of recipes to be followed, this books offers a variety of ingredients to be put together in your own way.

How to Use This Book

Think of this book as a buffet—pick and choose what looks tasty and nutritious, and leave the rest. All the “rules” in here are loose guidelines. My intention is for this book to support your personal journey as a facilitator, as well as the journey you take participants on, making creative ideas and activities accessible and meaningful to them.

You can read this book cover to cover, or skip around to different sections, following your curiosity. In this book, I group the principles in one chapter for easy reference, but in a workshop, I weave in the principles over the course of the day to break it up and enhance the integration. You might decide to break them up in your reading as well. Some of the sections are easy to breeze through, while others may take more reflection time.

This book is less narrative, and more nuggets. I went with distilling larger concepts, in some cases, into accessible nuggets, because many of them already are books in themselves. For example, the idea of creativity containing seeming opposing polarities of the same whole is a concept that could fill a guidebook in itself. I mention it in the book because it’s integral to facilitating creative process, but leave the in-depth exploration up to you.

The book is divided into four parts:

Part I explores concepts, principles, and ways of being for cultivating creativity in yourself and others—before, during, and after the workshop, meeting, or whatever you are facilitating.

Chapter 1 introduces a few universal foundations about creativity. Chapter 2 explores the principles for facilitating creative process. Chapter 3 focuses on being a creative facilitator. Chapter 4 is about to preparing yourself before the workshop—over time, and on workshop day. Chapter 5 goes into workshop design. Chapter 6 covers ideas for the actual workshop itself. Chapter 7 is about transforming challenges into wins. Chapter 8 is about what to do after the workshop to keep the learning and integration going.

Part II (Chapter 9) focuses on the journey you take your client on—from the initial call, to handling assumptions, to workshop descriptions—and securing the work.

Part III (Chapter 10) is a brief exploration of the bigger-picture significance of creative resilience and co-creation for a more generative world beyond the workshop setting.

Part IV (Chapter 11) offers a diverse set of templates and whole-brain experiential activities to consider integrating into your repertoire.

My...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 16.1.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Personalwesen
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3509-3126-6 / 9798350931266