Wild Card Night Tonight

 To celebrate (and let go) of 2021, SFN is hosting a wild card night on zoom.  

Monday 13 December at 5:30pm (join earlier to test your AV equipment and chat with colleagues)

For our last session in 2021, come along to reflect on the year and celebrate the SFN community. It's a wild card night! We will invite colleagues to offer and run a short piece highlighting some aspect of facilitation practice. Some with a focus on online engagement.  Bring a glass of champagne to share with your zoom colleagues. 

Session on Zoom 

https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/85190411826

Come along with or without an offer - to host a short activity and share some ideas and skills. 

Join the party.

SFN sessions coming soon  in 2022

February - Sandy Killick on Adam Kahane's "Facilitating Breakthrough"
March -  Rollo Browne  |  Exploring our Theories of Change 
April  - Walking at Uluruu - facilitators' connecting to the 'Statement from the Heart'
May - Elyssebeth Leigh on Cynefin and Complexity

Facilitation Degustation: A taste of facilitation across NSW Health | SFN Zoom session | Monday November 8 at 5.30pm

NSW Health is the largest employer in the Southern Hemisphere. It is comprised of many diverse organisations, yet the ultimate outcome is the same: a positive patient experience. This session will explore how facilitation is used to achieve this outcome.

with Gene Johnson, Nicky Baker, Lily Pho, 
Claudia Green and Annie Fleming

On Zoom at 5.30pm  November 8, 2021

https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/85190411826

Click here for more detail

Observe - Action - Pattern! Understanding facilitation through design patterns | SFN Zoom session | Monday October 11 at 5.30pm

 Zoom session at     https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/85190411826

Patterns are everywhere. They can be formed by a set of lines, shapes, or colours. They can be repeated movements or sounds, or a series of actions. Research shows that human brains detect patterns in their environment all the time because it makes learning easier. This is called probabilistic learning. 

This session will invite you to explore design patterns as a way to make sense of facilitation as a practice. Inspired by the work of Christopher Alexander in architecture and Peter Goodyear in networked learning, Dewa and Sandris will discuss thenotion of design patterns and how it can be applied as a mindset to understand facilitation and share practical knowledge. This will be a hands-on session supported by research, so join us to better understand your work through a pattern language.

Dr Dewa Wardak and Dr Sandris Zeivots are Lecturers in Educational Development with the Business Co-Design team at the University of Sydney Business School.

Dewa is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) and has a background in Learning Sciences and Technologies. She is interested in educational design for multimodal learning. With a keen interest in networked learning, she investigates how technological tools facilitate learning and teaching in higher education. She is currently teaching a unit ‘Action Research in Business’ and continues mentoring women from minority backgrounds to attain higher education qualifications. 

 Sandris investigates how to design and implement innovative learning experiences that are engaging, meaningful and purposeful. With a professional background in experiential learning, Sandris explores how to design impactful events to strategically improve the experiences of learners through experiential education, emotional engagement and learning spaces.

The Power of Play - with Dimitrios Papalexis September 13 5.30pm on zoom

 

This session will cover the value of introducing more play and spontaneity when it comes to facilitating and hosting. How can we can get business done while also focusing on building relationships, being creative, having fun and sharing our gifts especially during times of lockdown and isolation.

Monday 13 September at 5:30pm on Zoom (but come along at 5.15 if you want to test your connection)

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89784552110

The session will provide a safe and playful space for participants to embark on an exploration of storytelling, relationship building and creative activities that will hopefully inspire them to introduce more play and blend different creative tools and approaches in their facilitation, fostering spaces of deep connection, co-learning and transformation.

Dimitrios Papalexis is a consultant, creative facilitator, space holder and storyteller. He is the founder of Soulgen, a social enterprise that collaborates with young people, diverse communities, organisations and councils for bottom up social change and impact. Dimitrios is also a published author and he hosts his own podcast show: The PoWEr of CommUNITY. Having lived in 3 different countries and speaking 4 languages, he is part of many diverse communities and ecosystems; an avid learner with a passion to create safe and energizing spaces of deep sharing, co-learning and transformation. 

To learn more about his work visit:    http://www.soul-gen.com.au/

Change Management is Dead - with Allison Tsao August 9th

Change management tools and methodologies rely on change being predictable and linear. However, anyone who has been part of a change initiative knows that change is anything but predictable. Rather, most organisations who pursue change are actually pursing transformational change - a type of change that fundamentally challenges the identity and values of the organisation.

Facilitating and sustaining this type of change takes a completely different mindset and set of skills. Join us for this session to learn about what it takes to facilitate truly successful change and what alternative model, tools and practices facilitators could instead be leveraging when facilitating transformational change. Allison started her career as a management consultant at Deloitte and Accenture in New York City. After moving to Sydney in 2014 and obtaining her masters in Organisation Development, she began to notice the sublet shifts between change management and transformational change and how most organisations who wanted change were going about it in a counter productive way. 

Allison has been working in Transformational Change for over 15 years. Her experience with over 30 organisations globally and frequent conversations with other change practitioners in the industry have led her to declare that "change management is dead!" Instead, we should be focusing on healthier, more energising, and more sustainable ways to facilitate change. One that honours the whole person and an individual's desire to make meaning of change and have agency in the process. SFN members will remember Allison from her marvellous session in March 2020 on Facilitating HIgh Performing Teams in the Age of Complexity

Welcome to the Great Unknowing - with Kristina Dryza Monday 21 July on Zoom

Finding a New Compass

Monday 12 July at 5:30pm on ZOOM 

Join us on zoom at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89784552110

Cognitive reasoning can’t lead to transformation in an unknown world. We can no longer understand the world in a logical, sequential manner, so how can we perceive the world (and ourselves) differently, so that we can act differently? 

 

Kristina Dryža is recognised as one of the world’s top female futurists and is also an archetypal consultant and author. She has always been fascinated by patterns and feels we are patterned beings in a patterned universe. Her work focuses on archetypal and mythic patterns and the patterning of nature’s rhythms and their influence on creativity, innovation and leadership. 

See you on Zoom on Monday night!!

Beyond Limits Learning - A framework for fostering complex, integrated learning | with Chanah Wainer

Monday 21 June at 5:30pm on ZOOM (late notice because of Sydney Covid outbreak)

Join us on zoom at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89784552110

Beyond Limits Learning offers a new framework for learning and education design, based a unique, philosophical and ontological understanding of the nature of "learning" itself.

 

A little less about the facilitator, and a little bit more about the experience and outcomes of the learning process, this session will offer participants the opportunity to experience learning through the cycle of Awareness, Attention, Application and Action, and to strengthen their grasp of the "deep things" they "always knew", in this first ever test run of the BLL framework.

 

Chanah Wainer is a passionate educator who began her career as a high-school teacher. Quickly realising her keen interest in Learning Sciences, she began orientating her career towards teacher-education. Chanah now works casually in a liaison role at UNSW while establishing her own consultancy, and recently submitted her Doctoral application to study complex, integrated learning for initial teacher education. As a yogi of almost 20 years, Chanah has maintained a potent determination to leave this world better than she found it. Developing the Beyond Limits Learning framework, which offers learners the potential to beyond the conceptual separations of "knowing" and "doing", of "thinking" and "feeling", is just one of the many ways in which Chanah uses her creative energy, and intention, to serve society and, indeed, humanity. 

 See you on Zoom on Monday night!!

Your self awareness as a facilitator - with Andrea Jones ZOOM SESSION on April 12 at 5.30pm

This session will look at ways to enhance the wisdom within you, by understanding more deeply your responses and reactions whilst facilitating groups. Having an awareness of your triggers and unconscious responses is a first step in your emotional resilience and self care as a group facilitator. This session will introduce you to the Groupwork Centre’s model of self-awareness ‘The Community of Selves’, creating a space for you to explore and play. Venue: Zoom: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/85095315092 Time: Zoom room opens at 5.15 pm. Session begins at 5:30 pm SHARP

About Andrea Andrea Jones is passionate about effective communication and the creation of a collaborative space for the wisdom of individuals and groups to be shared. As a facilitator at Groupwork Centre, Andrea focuses on assisting groups and individuals to effectively work together, to have courageous conversations, to deal with conflict and to work through processes to help create authentic, resilient and successful organisations. The Groupwork Centre is a values-based organisation that harnesses the wisdom and experience of individuals and work teams. Our work is founded on principles of self-awareness and compassion, designed to give individuals and groups the skills and processes to achieve their goals. We use simple processes that are unique, highly accessible and thoroughly road-tested. We’ve been tailoring them to help our clients since 1984.

NIne Things You Need to Know - with Ian Colley (at UTS on March 8th)

Your meeting is coming up. Your purpose is clear, and the people who need to be there are coming. You have settled on an overall structure for the event such as world café, solutions focus, or design thinking. Then you think – what can I do to make this event as engaging as possible? There are nine things I think about process design to make the experience as rich as possible. I’d be very interested in the tenth thing, if you care to offer it, on our next Monday night together. In the past decade I have been teaching facilitation skills to other professionals. The course has grown out of thirty years of experience as a facilitator – building on successes but mostly learning from things that have gone wrong. And I’ve borrowed heaps (stolen?) from great practices and practitioners I have experienced. I wrote the facilitation course for IAP2 Australasia and have also just finished a book on the craft of facilitation ‘Dancing with the Beast’ reflecting on these thirty years of experience doing and teaching facilitation. This session reviews some gems from this experience.

Brave conversations in the face of climate change: with Tania Leimbach| SFN 8 February | 5:30PM

Ideas to support brave conversations, emotional resilience and action in the face of climate change - with Tania Leimbach Many people find it difficult to discuss climate change. It can feel awkward to raise the subject at work, around the dinner table or at the pub.  Australian society is still avoiding registering the long-term implications. The “climate narrative wars” have created a kind of paralysis in recent years. This session is based on the understanding - eloquently expressed by Dr Rebecca Huntley - that we need thousands of everyday conversations about the climate to enlarge the ranks of the concerned, engage the disengaged and persuade the cautious of the need for action. There has been an explosion of work on climate change communication. If you want to be a more empowered and successful communicator, there are ways to  apply sound communication principles in your life, drawing on the wealth of knowledge emerging in environmental psychology. Each of us can do this in a way that is authentic and in line with our own values.  Live and Face to face at UTS!!! Venue: Face to Face Building 10, Level  5, CB10.05.580. Time: 5.30pm to 7.30pm