Listen to Miki share her passion about this course (6 minutes):
If you have 12 minutes to spare, listen to this more in-depth interview
If you’ve ever dreaded attending a meeting – or watched in dismay as your group collapses into conflict – know that a methodology known as Convergent Facilitation offers you possible solutions.
It’s based on one simple experience: that people come together at the level of their underlying principles, needs, aspirations, and dreams, not at the level of their surface positions.
Convergent Facilitation is a highly efficient decision-making process developed by Miki Kashtan from the principles of Nonviolent Communication. It enables you to look beneath the surface and find the essence of what’s important to different stakeholders, and bring it together into one set of principles that lead to proposals and ultimately decisions. As a result, it readily produces solutions and decisions that everyone can embrace.
This method is uniquely effective, because it:
- Taps into a group’s shared purpose, and leads to decisions that everyone truly supports – without sacrificing productivity, efficiency, and forward momentum.
- Is very versatile: it may be used for fast emergency responses, for breaking through bottlenecks, or collaborating throughout the life cycle of a long-term project.
- Gives you tools to address power differences to increase the chances that everyone at the table can offer their needs, ideas, and concerns and speak frankly about what really matters to them. It even works with highly polarized groups, like the longtime political enemies who used Convergent Facilitation to pass landmark legislation in Minnesota.
Who It’s For
If you work with groups that make decisions and need to collaborate effectively, this course is for you.
- Team leaders: Reap the benefits of whole-hearted collaboration; create genuine buy-in at all levels; enjoy a more cohesive team that makes better decisions informed by stakeholder needs.
- Community organizers and activists: Learn to bring people’s core concerns to the surface and reach consensus decisions where no one is marginalized – all while avoiding long, draining, and divisive meetings.
- Facilitators: Zoom in on the source of conflicts, and learn transformative, practical options that work even when your group seems completely stuck.
- Mediators: Receive new tools to help any number of parties work towards breakthrough solutions, using a process that is transparent to all.
What You Can Take Away
- Practical, step-by-step process for discovering breakthrough solutions to problems, including those that seem unsolvable.
- Strategies that help people transcend conflicts, stretch beyond their initial positions, and embrace a decision that attends to everyone’s needs.
- Many ways of keeping a meeting moving forward without leaving anyone behind.
- Opportunities for ongoing coaching and development. Miki is passionate about cultivating a community of practice around Convergent Facilitation and her other work, and is launching the Nonviolent Global Liberation Apprenticeship Program and Learning Community for practitioners who are serious about using her approach. This will be an opportunity for you to connect with peers for many purposes, including coaching from Miki and others.
For more details, read this case study for a start-to-finish view of the Convergent Facilitation process and its transformative results.
Why Now?
While Convergent Facilitation has continued to grow in prominence and recognition over the years, Miki has declined requests to teach it online, as she was unsure how well it would work in an online forum. However, only an extremely small number of trainers at present have gathered enough experience in Convergent Facilitation to be able to teach it… People from all over the world continue to express such hunger for learning the new capacities inherent in this method. Many of them are living in places and contexts where attending a live training would be out of the question.
After much consideration – and to our delight – Miki has decided it’s time to take Convergent Facilitation to the online community, and make it possible for people everywhere to learn and experiment with it in their daily lives.
This course is designed to give you ample opportunities for practicing specific skills that are essential for Convergent Facilitation. You will maximize your benefit if you are able to register with others from your geographic area with whom you can practice face to face. Groups of 4 or 8 who register together will receive a discount.
Putting Convergent Facilitation into practice, experimenting even when not yet fluent, is, ultimately, how anyone truly masters applying the principles in a fluid way that is responsive to changing realities.
Dates and Topics Covered
Given the level of interest in Convergent Facilitation across the globe, we’re scheduling this course at a time that is most likely to be accessible to people in multiple continents: Sundays at 7:30am Pacific (California) Time, which is early afternoon in parts of South America, afternoon in Europe and Africa, evening in much of Asia, and later in Eastern Asia. We hope you will choose to support this commitment to global outreach by waking up early if you are in the Pacific Time zone.
August 12 | Introduction | Overview of Convergent Facilitation – THIS SESSION IS FREE! |
August 19 | Session 2 | Criteria Gathering: Finding the Noncontroversial Essence |
September 9 | Session 3 | Proposal Creation: Tracking as a Key Facilitation Skill |
September 16 | Session 4 | Decision Making: Inviting and Engaging with Dissent |
September 23 | Session 5 | Attending to Outliers and to Power Differences |