Process Values

On July 16, I preached a sermon at my church, the first in just over a year. Now before all you non- and anti-religious readers click off, let me hasten to say I am not a minister, I am a lay preacher, and then hasten once again to add that you are not likely to ever encounter a lay preacher who is a bigger atheist than I. But atheist is a relative term. I recently concluded the epilogue to a major rewrite of one of my early books, Seeking God, with this advice: "J ust because you can’t believe in someone else’s god doesn’t mean you can’t believe in something. Go and seek your own God." I don't believe in the anthropomorphic benign puppet master deity that is the bread and butter of Abrahamic religious communities. What I do believe in is the Word of God. My definition of God is the source of the Word of God. To me the word of God has many layers. The first layer is the quantum laws that say our Universe was inevitable and therefore it happened. The second layer is the...

I'm back. I apologize to all my loyal followers for having missed a week. Two weeks ago I talked about getting participants involved in taking responsibility for process in addition to content. That is not just a good way to get them to take ownership of what the group is doing, it may be the best way to get them to leave their positions and focus on concerns, considerations, and constraints. This month is the 60th anniversary of the founding of the National Training Laboratory which later became the international organization known as the NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Science. In the summer of 1946, Kurt Lewin and a group of colleagues were doing academic research on a collaborative approach known as Action Research . In an action research effort, the actors in a situation are enlisted in jointly planning a study of their situation, jointly collecting data and processing the data collected, jointly interpreting the research results and jointly formulating recommendations ...

I have run out of the blog posts that I write ahead. I have no idea which direction to take this blog next. But I have found that, when you don't know how to say something, you don't know where to start, the best thing to do is to talk about your stuckness, or about your confusion, or about how difficult the topic is to broach. If you don't know where to start, talk about not knowing where to start. Is that a process? I think so. In writing, doing that with your audience is inviting them to tacitly wait while you work through issues. But in facilitation, it is even more important. It is inviting the participants to take a role not only in shaping the content but in shaping the process. It is inviting them to share the facilitator's role. I used to be active in the International Association of Facilitators (IAF), even serving for a time on the Association Coordinating Team (ACT), what the IAF calls their board of directors. I was serving during the time that the IAF ca...