AKIN = Integrative Process Facilitation Working Group

16th December 2016 @ FoAM BXL

Host: Luea Ritter
Participants: Ingrid Vranken, Stevie Wishart, Maja Kuzmanovic

Morning:

• Our individual aims, wishes and scales for this work ?
• Clarifying how this working group is and wants to be part of our different work lives ?
• What are the different threads within this working group and who holds engagement and commitment to which areas of focus

Afternoon:

• Systems Mapping
• Tangible commitments and engagement for the coming time
• Next steps

In detail and in progress about our work with Integrative Process Facilitation

Why and how

• Navigation skills in complexity
• Process stewards with a long term vision (our own inquiry), with clear values and ethics
• Inhabiting uncertainty and staying with the trouble
• Moving from surviving to thriving
• Lab approaches - prototyping how things could be otherwise
• Including the subtle and cyclical threshold times (e.g. seasons)
• Trans-local and trans-disciplinary work with the space in between silos (larger prototype for stystemic transition towards generative systems
• Ambient/embodied foresight and futures literacy
• Moving away from anthropocentrism and towards pan-psychism (everything around us has a sentience)

Action research

• Stewarding and supporting transitions (personal → collective → systemic)
• Process facilitation part of larger iterative research programmes (developing long term relationships)
• Bring systemic and whole systems approach into the mainstream (always on invitation)
• Action research - long term deepening into collective transition (not just one-offs here and there) but connected to a larger inquiry
• Developing our own research and writing methodology (games)

Integrative facilitation

• Our inner work supports our facilitation skills and approaches (the facilitator is an embodiment of the work)
• Collaboration → kinships (including building personal connections, doing + being)
• Multisensory experience design
• Joyful work, in the flow
• Connected to nature
• Celebration, fun, friendships and parties should be a part of the facilitation process

Process facilitation for Multistakeholder networks

• Inclusive, diverse, multistakeholder, unholy alliances engaged in discovery based strategy
• diverse, transdisciplinary networks
• Creating containers, conditions, frameworks: How can we use the potential that lays in diversity more fully and explicitly

Economic sustainability

• discerning, precise and long term relationship with partners
• valuing our work
• economically viable activities and structures

The working group functions as a Peer learning environment

• share knowledge and learn from each other
• first internally, then possibly extend towards a “guild” - creating learning environments and capacity building for embodied practice of process facilitation for others
• Apprenticeships (learning and assisting)
• Strengthening individual practice through diverse approaches
• A platform where we can learn from others as well as guide and coach
• “witnessing” each other’s work (like a fly on the wall)

Toolbox

• Sharing and testing the tools of our crafts (from pens to process techniques)
• creating a growing repository of techniques and methods
• Combining techniques from a range of disciplines to provide opportunities for multiple ways of learning (including interaction between process facilitation and methods, strategies and composing techniques from music)

Inner circle: AKIN - CORE (Committed are: Maja, Stevie, Ingrid and Luea):

• Stewards and Fire Keepers of the AKIN
• Committing to the Whole with Awareness and Clarity around Time Engagement, Resources…
• Working on the Resource-Flow
• Bringing in Contacts, Connections, … and weaving it
• Holders of Governance

Second circle: SHELL (…) involves people that:

• Share the values and principles
• Are not always present
• Carry less responsibility for the Whole
• Get asked/called regarding specific knowledge that would be needed at various points
• People the Core knows and trusts
• Can propose projects

(NOTE: this circle might be too ambiguous. we might end up having only the core and the membrane)

Outer working group circle: MEMBRANE:

• Affiliates, associated members
• Newcomers
• Single Connection with people in the Core
• Specific and new knowledge and skills (experts, specialists)
• Get invited for shorter term and specific collaboration

Existing wider networks: CURRENTS - people, organisations, initiatives within our existing networks
Potential networks: OCEAN - people with whom we don't have an established contact, but would like to involve

The CURRENTS and OCEAN are people who hold a question, inquiry or intention for a systemic shift. They are people whom AKIN can work with (beneficiaries) and people/entities who can support AKIN in developing The Work and achieving meaningful outcomes.

• Partners
• Clients
• Funders
• “Ambassadors”
• …