Listening Our Shared World into Being

When might conflict inhibit creativity, and when might conflict enhance creativity? How can we be maximizing creative tension while at the same time, minimizing interpersonal anxiety?

Dynamic Facilitation is a particularly useful way for working across silos and with multi-stakeholder groups – wherever we want to tap the creative potential of differences. This highly relational and multi-partial approach to facilitation creates effective conditions for collaborative decision-making in complex situations. It is currently being used in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, in both business applications as well as in participatory public policy contexts.  This workshop offers an experiential taste of how groups can explore highly-charged issues in an emotionally safe and creative manner. Participants will:

• Gain an experiential understanding of how a relational and multi-partial approach to facilitation allows us to maximize the creative tension of divergent perspectives while minimizing interpersonal anxiety.

• Learn how to create emotional safety for both creative and critical thinking, by offering relational listening space to each participant.

• Practice techniques in fostering psychological safety, emergent process, and flow states in groups.

• Develop more comfort in relating to conflicting perspectives, as a potential source of creative energy.

About the Presenter

Rosa Zubizarreta is the Principal of Diapraxis and works with leaders and groups to catalyze creativity and collaboration. She specializes in developing organizational capacity for strategic conversations to facilitate group learning, shared systemic perspectives, and effective action. Rosa presented a MAFN 2015 Webinar on “From Conflict to Collaboration: An Overview of Dynamic Facilitation.”

Rosa brings deep content expertise in working with engaged empathy to evoke collaborative sense-making, group flow, and energetic alignment within highly diverse groups. Author of From Conflict to Creative Collaboration: A User's Guide to Dynamic Facilitation, she teaches this work internationally. Trained in organization development and action research, Rosa works with variety of dialogic practices to co-create customized participatory processes with clients. In addition to her experience with a broad portfolio of dialogic processes, including Future Search, Open Space Technology, World Café, and Appreciative Inquiry, her listening work is grounded in decades of personal practice with Focusing, Internal Family Systems, and Inner Empathy.