Facilitating Authentic Participation: Transformative Steps to Empower Groups

In this revealing step-by-step guide, master group process facilitator James M. Campbell takes you behind the scenes of the usually hidden planning and diagnostic process leading up to the “magic” of guiding a group process that allows the group’s deepest wisdom to be shared in a feasible action plan that everyone is motivated to accomplish. What may look simple, effortless, and easy to accomplish is the culmination of an intensive series of consultative stages of preparation requiring the listening, analytical, and collaborative skills of a master facilitator. This is the text that shares the process that the author taught in university-level courses in Europe after a lifetime of innovative process work with groups on four continents.Jim has written elsewhere: "…people know that participating in creating their destiny is an essential part of their humanity... The process whereby people are enabled to experience this combination of the freeing of their humanity and the ownership which generates commitment and motivation is truly transformative. By the force of their own experience people realise that they can participate in creating their future and the future of their organisation or community. Thus people experience themselves as responsible for their destiny, and so resignation and despair are transformed into hope and belief-in-self. People’s anger and frustration at their disenfranchisement is transformed into energy invested in creating their destiny."This conviction—that authentic participation is transformative—has been the foundation of Jim’s work as a facilitator.