219 - Unlocking Collaboration: Lessons from Zen about Facilitation with Sunni Brown

Keynote speaker, published author, zen student, innovator-in-residence, and facilitator — Sunni Brown has a whole village’s worth of knowledge, but, somehow, contains it all within just one conscientious and clever human.

Sunni’s fingerprints can be found on many resources and THINGS you’ll be familiar with as a facilitator: Gamestorming, The Doodle Revolution, and Deep Self Design.

Safe to say, Sunni is well-placed to discuss the finer details of collaboration — and to highlight some of the ways we might learn about it more deeply from unexpected sources. Explore the art of zen and facilitation, how to get out of our own way, and why a dispassionate facilitator can be more helpful to a group than an overly committed one.

Find out about:

• What Sunni has learned about facilitation since becoming a student of Zen
• How our work might change if collaboration was seen as a skill, rather than an outcome
• How to help a group walk the thin line of doable discomfort
• Why a saviour complex is a fatal flaw for facilitators — and how to avoid it
• Why you can recover from poor workshop design, but not poor trust-building
• How to take responsibility for our emotional responses, so we can remain in service to the group
• Why facilitators see big changes when they stop taking resistance personally

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👉 What happens when being “professional” gets in the way of being human? My new podcast Unprofessionalism explores the rules we’re taught to follow at work, and what happens when we break them. Listen here: https://unprofessionalism.buzzsprout.com/  👈