Ever since I read Eugene Eric Kim’s latest blog post on “not liking process” a few days ago, I’ve been jumping-up-and-down-excited about sharing it with others. If you are in the field of group facilitation and/or consulting work, you have most likely have run across your fair share of folks who “don’t like process.” Check out Eugene’s empathically brilliant take on how we might re-frame this common situation…

I’ve also been delighted recently, to to learn about the growing attention that is being given to creating psychological safety in groups. I recently learned about the work of Dr. Amy Edmonson, a Harvard Business School professor who, in the course of other research, stumbled across the importance of psychological safety in the workplace. Here is a direct link to her crisply brilliant TEDx talk on the subject.

And here’s a link to a longer NYTimes article on Google’s recent research in this arena…

Part of the reason these articles are of interest to me, is that I see creating group safety via  empathic reflections as one of the underlying “patterns” in Dynamic Facilitation (DF). I mentioned this recently on the Group Works Pattern Language e-mail list, as part of a broader conversation where folks were exploring the value of becoming aware of the various underlying “patterns” within each facilitation method.

In response to my post, Daniel Lindenberger referred me to a short video he and Tree Bressen made, where they are “mapping out” some of the other underlying patterns in DF, using the Group Works deck.

I really enjoyed watching Daniel and Tree’s video. If you’ve not experienced DF before, the video won’t show you how to go about applying this method; that’s not its purpose. Yet you may find still find it intriguing… and, if you’d like to see more examples of “method mapping” using the Group Works deck, there’s a whole set of other maps on this page. Enjoy!

I’d love to hear your take on any of this stuff….please feel free to leave a comment below!