Facilitating Breakthrough: Reading Club Reflections Part 5

Chapter 10 & Conclusion

This series of reflections are based on Adam Kahane’s new book Facilitating Breakthrough: How to Remove Obstacles, Bridge Differences, and Move Forward Together, and the reading club Anne Heberger Marino @leantocollabs organized. We meet once a week from Oct. 28 to Dec. 2 in 2021.

You are invited to join our book club conversation through this mural board @leantocollabs has created. Please feel free to put stars on the ideas you connect with and add your own ideas in the middle.

This is the last gathering for our book club, hence the last blog post in the series. It has truly been a rewarding journey! A favorite sentence from the book for one of our book club members is “There is no future without opening up to one another, with sincerity, as fellow human beings”. This is exactly how I felt participating in the book club: we all opened up with sincerity and treated each other as fellow human beings. If we could model this type of behaviors as a community of facilitators, we would certainly open the hearts of the teams we facilitate!

We felt so enlightened by each other’s presence that we all decided to keep this connection going. Anne said she may start another slow reading book club, and of course we all immediately signed on to the idea. Amy, Anne and I are actively planning to host a series of “Facilitators’ Salon”. So, stay tuned!

The conversations that take place during the book club are always inspiring. In this gathering, we covered many deep topics: Can you see yourself as part of the problem? How might facilitators get beyond resistance? How might we exemplify equity and justice in facilitation? In this blog post, I share my current thoughts on these topics, but each of them deserves further thought and attention. I will continue to hold them close as I continue my facilitation practice. Sometimes we need to live into the answers, instead of sporadically coming up with the answers.

Can you see yourself as part of the problem?

Boston College leadership professor Bill Torbert once said to me, “The 1960s slogan ‘If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem’ misses the crucial point…