IngeniousPeoplesKnowledge

We are happy and proud to launch our new Facilitation Handbook. The title “Knowledge Sharing for Change – Designing and Facilitating Learning Processes with a Transformative Impact” embodies our credo that underlies our work and in particular the events we design and facilitate: that the ultimate goal must be to bring about transformation of some sort, however that learning (in particular peer-to-peer learning) and knowledge sharing are key to such change.

The Handbook explains our own, particular approach to change processes, that builds on the idea of looking at social groups and institutions as complex systems. It contains various sections: starting with a brief general outline of how we believe we can deal with complex systems in a change context, it then draws practical conclusions on designing and delivering change events (such as workshops, meetings, conferences, …) – in particular in terms of the architecture of such events; it then creates an overview over methods and tools which allow to select and assemble them into a meaningful order that directs the event towards results.

What initally had triggered off the writing of this Handbook was the need to have some sort of “training script” for our facilitation and change trainings. We since have successfully held our first training events and are very happy about how people received and appreciated this tool. If you’re interested to learn more about possibilities and maybe a tailor-made training for your context/organisation, please touch base!

If this Handbook is useful to you, then we are very pleased. We welcome any comments, ideas, also for improvement! Please don’t hesitate to contact us!

Catherine & Marc

To download, click on the cover above or visit our “Resources & Downloads” section, where you find it under “General”

We strongly believe in the power of self-organised events and organisation, but self-organised learning takes it still on another level! However, why should something so complex as teaching and learning suddenly ignore and escape all the things we know about complex systems? Such as the prevailance of emergence? If we believe that it is important to work with life and nature, rather than against it, it should be nothing but consequent to go this path! Very impressive, we find…

In fact I have been following Sugata Mitra already about 8 years ago (at my time at Helvetas), when he did his experiments called “The hole in the wall” – and was already highly fascinated then. “Imagine if you could take this further…” I thought – and Mitra of course did! I’m really excited to see what a long way he has come!

Over the past few weeks, two persons asked me the same question that I was unable to respond to – which was very strange: They asked me: “What is your approach then?”. I asked them “What do you mean, which approach?”. One of them pointed out that in a conversation, of more than an hour, I had constantly suggested that there is something like an I-P-K approach, without ever making it explicit. The second instance was the editor of our handbook. She came back to us after her first read through asking: “You constantly use the term “our approach” without ever clarifying what it actually is…”.

I realised that although I had a sense that there is something like a red thread that runs through our facilitation and change work, I constantly tried to avoid spelling it out in explicit and clear manner. What ensued was a debate, whether it was an “approach” in the first place – or rather a method, a style, a worldview, a set of principles? But since our handbook is in the making, I no longer had a choice. Or rather a good invitation to get to terms with it. I gave it a try. Read on here:

The Approach of IngeniousPeoplesKnowledge