Pattern Breaks: A Facilitator's Guide to Cultivating Creativity

By Michelle James

Pattern Breaks is a handbook for navigating the world of creative facilitation. It is for facilitators, trainers, educators, group leaders, and anyone who would like to bring more creativity out of their groups and out of themselves. It provides food for both thought and action. If you would like to cultivate creativity and aliveness in your design and facilitation, this book can help you:

• Bring more enthusiasm and ingenuity out of participants
• Become a more adaptive, improvisational, and resilient facilitator
• Gain confidence and ease in navigating challenges, resistance, and the unexpected that comes with the creative process
• Actualize your unique creativity for impactful and meaningful design
• Establish environments receptive to novelty and transformation
• Bring more fun and lightness into facilitating serious topics
• Get buy-in from clients for nontraditional approaches
• Cultivate conditions for emergence and co-creation
• Generate life-giving outcomes that serve the good of the whole
• And more

Pattern Breaks explores both ways of being and ways of doing. From concepts to mindsets to practical applications and more, this book provides a rich trove of ideas, principles, and practices, along with an abundance of activities, to apply before, during, and after your workshop or event. It focuses on two levels at the same time—you as a facilitator of creative process, and you as a creative individual.

Michelle James has combined over two decades of learnings, experiences, and insights as a facilitator and coach of creative process for thousands of participants—in corporations, nonprofits, government agencies, universities, and communities of practice—to distill what she discovered into relevant and accessible wisdom. This book is an invitation to expand your creative facilitation as you expand your creative self.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9798350931266

Book preview

Introduction

Hi. Welcome to this exploration of cultivating creativity, for yourself and for the groups you serve. Creativity has been the central driving focus in my work for over two decades, and I am excited to share whatever I can that may ignite or ease your journey with creative facilitation. Creativity can be a source, a force, an energy, an act, a process, an outcome, and so much more. My favorite thing about working with it is that it’s ever-flowing, ever-changing, and ever-generating so it can never get old or outdated or be fully known. No matter how much I learn, it remains the greatest mystery … and the greatest gift.

In thinking about the title for this book, I reflected on the essence of cultivating creativity. At its core is the concept of pattern breaking: something is one way, something changes—a disruption to the norm in some form—and then something new and different emerges. Pattern breaking is only one lens from which to view creativity, but all creativity, and all creative process facilitation, contains some form of pattern breaking, so it felt like the place to start.

Every creative act is a pattern break.

While everyone is infinitely creative, we are also creatures of habit. We often don’t think to break our own patterns of thinking, perceiving, or acting without something prompting us. Or if we do, we tend to do it in a way that still reflects, ironically, our own familiar patterns of breaking our patterns. We get habituated in our ways, and tend to interact and create from our comfortable ways until the pattern disruptions come from an external source—or, until we consciously choose to break our own patterns.

Once we get in the practice of pattern breaking in one domain, it transfers to others, and we can get into a new habit of creating more consistently. This book is an exploration of pattern-breaking concepts and experiences to consider in your own facilitation.

Who This Book Is For

This book is for those who already have some facilitation experience, and understand facilitation basics, as well as seasoned professional facilitators, trainers, educators, leaders, coaches, conveners, and creatives. It is for anyone who would like to bring more creativity into their workshop design and delivery, and out of themselves and their participants, teams, or communities.

These are a few of the questions explored in this book:

•How do I get more engagement out of groups?

•How do I bring more creativity out of groups?

•How do I become a more adaptive, responsive, creative facilitator?

•How do I design for different creative and learning styles?

•How do I move a group through the resistance and creative blocks?

•How do I navigate ambiguity and uncertainty?

•What types of creative activities can I use with a group?

Why I Wrote This Book

I’m passionate about the immense transformative power of creativity, and have seen it work in real time in the most unexpected, uncanny, and life-giving ways. Not only does it bring individuals, teams, organizations, and communities into more connection and aliveness, it has the capacity to change any reality into something better.

Applying creativity into every dimension of our work, and our lives, is essential in a world where we need new ways of navigating our current situations and growing personally and professionally. Creativity offers pathways we can’t yet imagine, and can serve as the bridge from where we are to where we can be—individually and collectively.

We each have the creative agency and capacity to play a part in creating what’s next. My hope is that this book can inspire hope and aspirational ideas you can act on, in your own unique way, for yourself, and to contribute to the healing and thriving of those you facilitate and serve.

Creativity transforms walls into doorways.

What This Book Is Not and What It Is

This book is not an introductory book on facilitation, or a book on general facilitation. It assumes some level of knowledge of the basics. If you’re new to facilitation, I suggest other books or programs to learn the foundations of facilitation first. While this book contains techniques and practice templates (some with how-to step-by-step instructions), it’s not meant to be as instructional as much as it is to invite your own creative thinking about the material.

This book is also not a complete or comprehensive guide, but rather a yes-and to whatever you’re already doing. It doesn’t distinguish the type of group you are facilitating. These distinctions and decisions are left up to you. We all have different creative styles, and not everything in this book may be right for you. The offer is to take whatever resonates and adapt it for your purposes.

This book does not focus on online activities, but the principles still apply, and most of the activities can be adapted to work online, depending on the functions and constraints of the platform.

This book is an invitation into exploration and co-creation. It is more of a resource guide than a narrative. It contains concepts and practices to question, ponder, and engage in your own way. The intention of this book is to generate food for thought, open to more possibilities, and inspire you to co-create with it. It is also an invitation to play with breaking your own patterns as a facilitator of creative process, both before and when you are with clients, as well as supporting your participants in breaking theirs.

The offer is to engage with your own creative and intuitive thinking as you read it. When you notice something I missed, trust your impulse and add it into what you do. If the opposite of something I suggest works better for you, trust that. Anything in here is up for evolving and transforming to better work for you. Our creativity is large enough to contain all variations of concepts and practices in here, even seemingly opposing ones.

This book focuses on facilitating creative process specifically, and cultivating creativity using whole-brain, whole-body, whole-being approaches. It draws on over two decades of my learnings and experiences in the field. At the end of each workshop I always ask participants what was most valuable. The concepts in this book are the ones that were consistently expressed as most useful in the feedback over many years.

I’ve done my best to capture the most relevant lessons learned and insights gleaned from trial—and lots of error—with thousands of workshop participants, individual coaching clients, and my train-the-trainer programs over the years. More than a set of recipes to be followed, this books offers a variety of ingredients to be put together in your own way.

How to Use This Book

Think of this book as a buffet—pick and choose what looks tasty and nutritious, and leave the rest. All the rules in here are loose guidelines. My intention is for this book to support your personal journey as a facilitator, as well as the journey you take participants on, making creative ideas and activities accessible and meaningful to them.

You can read this book cover to cover, or skip around to different sections, following your curiosity. In this book, I group the principles in one chapter for easy reference, but in a workshop, I weave in the principles over the course of the day to break it up and enhance the integration. You might decide to break them up in your reading as well. Some of the sections are easy to breeze through, while others may take more reflection time.

This book is less narrative, and more nuggets. I went with distilling larger concepts, in some cases, into accessible nuggets, because many of them already are books in themselves. For example, the idea of creativity containing seeming opposing polarities of the same whole is a concept that could fill a guidebook in itself. I mention it in the book because it’s integral to facilitating creative process, but leave the in-depth exploration up to you.

The book is divided into four parts:

Part I explores concepts, principles, and ways of being for cultivating creativity in yourself and others—before, during, and after the workshop, meeting, or whatever you are facilitating.

Chapter 1 introduces a few universal foundations about creativity. Chapter 2 explores the principles for facilitating creative process. Chapter 3 focuses on being a creative facilitator. Chapter 4 is about to preparing yourself before the workshop—over time, and on workshop day. Chapter 5 goes into workshop design. Chapter 6 covers ideas for the actual workshop itself. Chapter 7 is about transforming challenges into wins. Chapter 8 is about what to do after the workshop to keep the learning and integration going.

Part II (Chapter 9) focuses on the journey you take your client on—from the initial call, to handling assumptions, to workshop descriptions—and securing the work.

Part III (Chapter 10) is a brief exploration of the bigger-picture significance of creative resilience and co-creation for a more generative world beyond the workshop setting.

Part IV (Chapter 11) offers a diverse set of templates and whole-brain experiential activities to consider integrating into your repertoire.

My Creative Facilitation Journey

After I graduated from college, I started searching for ways to express more of myself in my work. In that search, I had an aha-moment experience—a full-on embodied felt sense of the unknown (a.k.a. the void) as an alive place filled with creative potential from which things emerge—which inspired my focus, passion, and eventually my work, around creative process. That started my lifelong quest to better understand creativity, which included many contemplative walks along the river, trying to weave together insights I was getting with what I was learning. I was exploring how to weave together my own creativity and aliveness with making a living. I didn’t know how to do it at the time, and it took several years, but it eventually became my mission to infuse more creativity and imagination into the knowledge and information-centered workplace.

The void is not empty. It is filled with

creative potential waiting to be cultivated.

My search led eventually to the first iteration of my business with that focus. I started following my curiosity into everything I could around creativity, facilitation, adult learning, philosophy, human potential, spirituality, organizational development, and psychology, among other things. I took workshops, read books, took art and improv classes, got certifications, attended conferences and events, joined special-interest groups, and started a creativity network. Those adventures led to meeting so many amazing people along the way, who supported me in one way or another through my more challenging times.

I initially had a lot of fear in front of groups. My fear came with a chatty and judgmental internal evaluator that I could not simply think my way out of. That led me to explore all kinds of practices to help quiet the judge and move through the fear. Then, after a car accident, CoreSomatics™ and other body-centered modalities got me into more body awareness—which led to understanding how important the body is in creative process, and birthed my Creative Body workshop series. Around the same time, improv theater was helping me get past my deep fears of public speaking and making mistakes. What I experienced doing improv was life-changing, in and out of work, and improv-based workshops became a core part of my offerings. Also, what I was learning from working with my coaching clients, and in my creative projects, gave me insights into creativity, emergence, and the patterns that emerged. These elements came together to form my first set of services.

I was super excited about what I was learning and creating, and had thought all my organizational clients would naturally be as excited as I was, but the opposite was true at that time. I met with huge resistance, including a lot of eye-rolling and nay-saying in the first few years (late 1990s, early 2000s), which became a great—though not always fun—teacher. In the process, I learned many ways to not do something. I committed to finding ways of making what could be considered woo-woo accessible to, and valued by, corporate, nonprofit, and government groups—both in getting the work, and in using nonconventional (at that time) approaches in the workshops. I learned by experimenting, and discovered more of what worked by trying a lot of things that did not.

That discovery process motivated me, and at times forced me, to become more conscious about how I frame the day, when I use an activity and why, how I introduce an activity, how I make it accessible, how I get buy-in for the nonconventional approaches, how to make it both psychologically safe and still challenging enough to go to the creative edges, how to handle the resistance, and other learnings I’ll share in this guide.

The journey from being an awkward, uncomfortable facilitator to someone who feels most at home when facilitating has been, and still is, a process. This book includes some of the ways of being, doing, and perceiving that helped me. My hope is that it can be helpful to you as well, and inspire your thinking about what else might be.

PART I

Before, During, and After the Workshop

Chapter 1

About Creativity

Before getting into the principles and practices for facilitating creativity, let’s do a short dive into basic fundamentals because they are universal elements embedded in the nature of creativity. They are foundations in creative process already at play, whether we facilitate it or not. Included in this chapter are three brief overviews of much richer, deeper concepts.

The Dance of Opposites

Creativity comes to life at intersections. It thrives on opposites—engaging the polarities until something new emerges. Polarities can seem like opposites at first glance, but they are actually two different interdependent expressions of a larger whole. When we can accommodate polarities, instead of focusing only on one right way, idea, or solution, we have a more creative ecosystem, with the different parts dancing together.

Creativity moves us beyond either/or to a place of both/and, where the polarities interact as dynamic parts of an expansive creative playing field, not limited to one side. There will be various lists of opposites in this book to invite thinking about how to design and facilitate with the polarities in mind. Some polarities related to creative process include:

Diverge and Converge

The creative process needs time for both divergence and convergence. Divergence explores, discovers, yes-ands, and accepts to expand the creative playing field—to increase the field of potential from which to draw. All ideas are accepted without judgment in this part of the process. Convergence discerns, focuses, fleshes out, filters, and uses what is relevant and leaves the rest to narrow the creative playing field. (Psychologist J. P. Guilford coined the terms convergent thinking and divergent thinking in the fifties. In the sixties, Alex Osborn and Sid Parnes popularized the terms with their Osborn-Parnes Creative Problem Solving Process, which is still widely used and adapted today.)

Next-level solutions emerge from engaging the unpredictability and expansiveness of divergent thinking first, and then applying the narrowing of convergent thinking to ground the new ideas into practical understandings and action steps. Creative thinking is using both divergent thinking and convergent thinking. The graphic contains words typically associated with divergence at the top, and convergence at the bottom.

In every group meeting or event there are some who lean more toward being divergers (comfortable in open space, adding on, blank canvas, exploring and playing around with), and others who are convergers (analyzing it, making it make sense, taking actionable steps). We are both divergers and convergers in our lives daily, and some people are equal in both areas, but most have leanings. Divergers like to keep exploring longer than convergers, who want to move the action forward. Divergers think in tangents and adding on, while convergers think in lines (a to b) and efficient routes.

In improv theater there is a game called Color/Advance (see Chapter 11 for details). Color is about giving the context (sensory details, environment, feelings, etc.) and advance is the action (the plot—what happens). It’s an improv game because both color and advance are what make an engaging story. I loosely relate color more to divergence and advance more to convergence in group dynamics. While both color and advance make for a good improv scene, they also make for a more creative, dynamic, engaging workshop or meeting—creating enough space for diverging/coloring and enough space for converging/advancing for moving forward.

When not given space, both types can act out from their shadow side, consciously or unconsciously. If we stay in the divergent side for too long, convergers tend to check out. If we skip over diverging, and try to go immediately into convergence, the divergers, who process a different way, may sometimes take the group into irrelevant tangents. The best way to keep everyone engaged is to design in time for both.

Emergence

Emergence is a creative process of birthing something new into the world. As with any new birth, there is a dynamic tension between expansion and contraction—between pushing forth and maintaining the status quo. In understanding this tension, and working with it—not fighting it or denying it—the emergence process becomes much easier because it’s already how nature naturally creates.

This requires giving up old approaches in service of emerging new ones: either/or’s giving way to more both/and’s. Either/or means a choice between one or another—this or that. Something/someone wins and something/someone loses. With compromise, each side reduces their original version until an agreement is reached, leaving everyone with less-than. Consensus, boiling an issue down to a common denominator upon which all can agree, is often also a process of reduction. Something is usually lost for all involved as the alive creative edges give way to the comfort of the most people.

In emergence, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. In the context of co-creative groups, it is a co-creative yes-anding with others and with the unexpected. It includes that which is most important to each person and space for the unexpected elements—and a third way emerges that is greater than both sides. In order for this to happen, original versions (status quo) give way to the emergent version (the new expansion). Emergence is an expansion, not a reduction.

There is an inherent order in emergence—a coherence—but because it contains elements of the unknown, we often miss opportunities to cultivate its richness. It means designing for something new to emerge that is not fully predictable based on what already exists. And that means we, as facilitators, have no more knowledge or control of what will emerge than anyone else in the room. That takes trusting the process, trusting yourself, and trusting the creativity in everyone in the room.

So often in a creative emergent process, what emerges doesn’t fit neatly into our preconceived expectations. The creative unconscious, below the surface of our conscious awareness, contains more wisdom, information, and creativity than that which is consciously known to us at any given time. So what emerges can be surprising, disjointed, nonsensical, seemingly ridiculous as it emerges. Creativity is messy.

It’s important to not discard it just because it’s not what we thought, or hoped, it would be, or should be. Instead, we can engage it, play with it, learn from it, and cultivate it out until it starts to look like something. We’re often called to expand who we are and how we think in order to be with the new emergence. If we follow what’s emerging, we start to make sense of it as we go, and often find it’s something that not only includes our original vision or idea but exceeds it. The same is true when facilitating group creativity.

Creative energy ignites the dynamic

communication between the

unformed and the forming.

Facilitating creative emergence means creating the conditions for emergence. This means leaving space in our design for something new and unpredictable to surface, putting principles over prescriptions, and using the dynamic integration of opposites (planning and improvisation, incubation and activity, etc.). Pattern breaking helps create the conditions for something new to emerge.

Chapter 2

Principles for Facilitating Creativity

Chapter 1 explored some of the larger ideas about creativity as the foundations upon which the rest of the book stands. Chapter 2 goes into the principles specifically for facilitating creativity that can inform your interactions with your own creativity and that of your participants.

Staying in the Creative Zone

The Creative Zone is the zone between stability and chaos. In my role as a facilitator of creative process, my task is to keep participants on their edge of chaos. If it’s not challenging enough, and everything is predictable and familiar, they go by rote and there is no real learning. On the other hand, if the design is too