Restless yearning

Transcript of this video:

A few months ago, I went to see my friend Rob in Oxford.

And when he opened his door to me

and asked how I was, I surprised myself by saying, “Oh,

I’m really bored of facilitation.”

It’s one of the few times I’ve said anything to Rob

where he’s looked genuinely startled by what I said, and,

and I realised I said something a bit unexpected…

I think you must have had this experience.

I don’t really, I didn’t really mean it.

What I think I meant was, “I’m, I’m really bored

of bad facilitation.”

and I’m often really bored

of facilitators talking about tips and techniques.

I think there are few things more tedious than a bunch

of coaches and facilitators banging onto each other about

their favourite process.

I wanted

to share a wonderful quotation I’ve been thinking

of recently by the French writer, Antoine de St Exupery,

just saying his name is kind of fun.

And it goes like this. “If you want to build a ship,

don’t drum up the men to gather wood,

divide the work and give them orders.

Instead teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

I have a kind of facilitation

and coaching equivalent of that, which is that, yeah,

I do training at facilitators,

and yes, we do share techniques,

but that for me, that isn’t where the real action is

my equivalent of yearning for the vast,

and endless sea is my instinct for trying

to find the aliveness in any conversation

and what goes on in a group of people.

I think we are so prone in this modern technological world

to coast along saying conventional things to each other,

doing what is comfortable

and not actually generating any friction or excitement

or creativity.

And what I think after years

and years of practice I’ve got increasingly good at

is having a good sensitivity for when things are

boring in a not-very-useful way,

and seeing if I can do something just sufficiently

disruptive to provoke something interesting.

And that in my view,

because I think facilitation is very much an

art and not a science.

The core of the way I do it is,

and I can’t put it better than this, a restless yearning

for the aliveness that’s possible in a group of people.

After watching that back

and having a little bit of a walk, I just wanted to add that

what I do with the restless yearning is also important.

Um, it’s no good if I just immediately act on it.

A a lot of the skill of my work is knowing when

to do something with it and when to let it percolate,

stew, ferment before doing something.