Soul searching, ‘signature’ and services: my dragon year (2024) in perspective

Happy 2024!

May this year – which will be the year of the dragon according to far Eastern calendars – bring you health, happiness and success, exactly in that order!

Being a native dragon myself, I hope this year will indeed be as spectacular as the past 2 dragon years I’ve had. However, last time I hailed the advent of a new year that year turned out to be the worst year of my entire life and by a long distance. So here’s cautious hoping.

Having done a bit of introspection at the end of last year to ponder what happened on this blog and in my practice, I finally completed this cycle over this very weekend, to reflect on myself, my practice and all the things that are vibrant for me this year. Some soul searching, a dash on my facilitation signature and a sharper sense of the services I provide, all reflected in my updated Process Change website.

Here’s an overview, I hope you find some value in it – it’s introspective, personal, and shared in the spirit of ‘working out loud‘ and inviting you to share more of yourself too.

Upon reading this post, feel free to contact me (see contact page) to bounce ideas, find support, or feel free as ever to engage with my posts here and on LinkedIn.

Soul searching – where am I at?

Doing a bit of inner reflection is always useful. So I did and here’s what’s coming up for me in 2024:

Refreshing my 9 why’s and my purpose statement

Using the 9 why’s (Liberating) structure, I have updated my purpose statement to something crisper:

I help and challenge everyone unlock their collaborative, facilitative, relational magic towards better human systems and/or planet.

I do this through direct facilitation and coaching/training/co-design and co-facilitation of heart-driven, ambitious collectives.
(myself 😉

Doubling down on process literacy (an active component of developing everyone’s leadership and agency)

The purpose statement is my Ikigai and it is clear that developing everyone’s collaboration/process literacy is what I’m here to do. So here’s to helping unlock everyone’s magic (one of my keywords for 2024) to see, understand, speak and use process for effective, healthy and enjoyable collaborations.

This also means I’ll keep working on unpacking what ‘process literacy’ means (as I did in the Workshops Work podcast episode of Myriam Hadnes). And I’ll do it among others in the parallel work sessions with my mate and accountability buddy Linda Howard.

Reorganising myself and my client list accordingly

Part of that soul searching also involved organising myself very practically. And it may sound anal or superficial – I don’t really care, mind you – but I’m super happy to have cracked the overview of the 5 areas of developing my practice so that I can serve my ikigai best:

Business development and acquisition (soul and client searching)
Administrative and financial management
Marketing, promotion and social media
Website management and blogging
Personal development

Following advice from Martin Garbers I have now also dedicated slots to develop my business every other week and to focus on either of these 5 areas. Let’s see where this leads.

(Photo credit: Cytonn photography / Unsplash)

And it may look funny that I include my client acquisition here and not under promotion, but the people I serve are a close part of the ecosystem of my practice, and what’s dawning on me this year is that I want to serve in particular:

Any person, team, company, network that has some basic understanding of collaboration/process, at least knowing that for instance someone who facilitates is not (just) a time keeper, is not a chair, is not an MC (read more about the differences here). This is something which I realised through my involvement in the ever excellent Never Done Before community of facilitators.
New clients, especially corporate clients that have the heart in the right place and are ready to unlock new opportunities. I’m thinking in particular of Foundations that are using private money to do some good, and also convening bodies that could do with being challenged in their practice, which leads me to the next chapter…

About my (facilitation) signature… How do I come across?

Tickled by Myriam and Thomas‘s signature bootcamp training workshop, I also reflected on what my facilitation signature.

Learn more about facilitation signature – oh and by the way this bootcamp is over but more will come!

Even though I don’t consider myself a facilitator – rather a collaboration specialist and ‘process agent provocateur’ that uses facilitative skills to unlock peoples’ and groups’ magic – I do facilitate a lot and it’s indeed useful to realise what is my unique signature, added value in a space that is increasingly crowded out.

What is dawning on me is that I’m a walking paradox and it’s great because it means I can adapt to a wider range of situations and characters. This is what I mentioned about my signature on my website:

There are many people cultivating collaboration and facilitation skills out there. What makes me distinct from them: I am a process agent provocateur. I am there to reveal and work with the paradoxes of ‘real life’. It translates as:

I cultivate both business objectives and interpersonal relationships;
I am driven by high level philosophies and values and I am at the same time ruthlessly pragmatic;
I create spaces for my clients to feel comfortable and psychologically safe, so they can at the same time be brave and dip out of their comfort zone (where learning, and magic happens);
I create grand experiences that reveal entirely new worlds to my clients – and at the same time I am happiest when focusing on the little details and the ‘everyday, mundane, magic’ that anyone can see and use;
I serve clients that have a heart and a soul – and at the same time I can help anyone who wishes to simply strengthen their collaborative/process muscles;
I love onsite meetings for the energy and options that they provide, and for the extra bit of relationship building that happens ‘in real life’ and yet at the same time I savour online gatherings as an incredible gift to conveniently work together and allow everyone’s voice and contributions to come to the fore in different ways…
But perhaps most importantly, while I’m here to serve clients and help them achieve their objectives, at the same time I challenge them with much ‘loving provocation’ to consider different options and to rethink what they’re setting out to do. In the process, I don’t shy away from ‘difficult conversations’ in the spirit of finding the crux of the matter.

What do you think?

Services – what can I do (for YOU and all)?

It was only the next logical step to reflect on the services that I provide. They are updated and reflected in the services page of my website.

Here, however, I want to specifically emphasise three services that I want to focus more specifically on in 2024:

Coaching people to unlock their collaborative, facilitative, relational magic

I have been coaching others for many years. Only very informally and almost systematically for free. I have realised, however, that by systematically coaching people informally a) I don’t actually create the best conditions for my coachees to benefit from it the most, because the informal nature means it may be less structured and woven more with other conversation bits etc. and b) I use time that I cannot dedicate to helping others more systematically. And on top of it, when people pay for services, they also care more about what they ask, what they want to get. This is a win-win and one that I want to emulate more, because I do think I have a lot of experience in collaboration, communication, facilitation, process design, and I would love to share this passion and expertise with anyone and everyone.

Getting back to ‘Group facilitation skills’ training

I have had a hiatus of several years without giving this training course – originally and still provided by Community At Work (C@W) in their San Francisco office (or elsewhere at clients) and online. I owe soooo much to C@W and making this training a reality in 2024 would be the most amazing step for me to resume this amazing collaboration and to unleash this foundational and ground-breaking training course on whoever wants to harness the most solid facilitation skill basics they need to have towards consensus-based group decision-making. So wish me luck in putting this on its rails and let me know if you’d love to join it! When I experienced it as a participant, it totally transformed my own practice, rewiring my brain on my facilitation practice. If it was so shockingly profound for me, there’s good chances it could do something similar to you!

Beyond training, doing more ‘Liberating Journeys’

And then again I still remain a training skeptic (gotta blog about it beyond this). Because a training course is not a ticked box, it’s a tick to get you started on a journey. Practice, honing skills, that is the journey and it serves a higher purpose…

We started our first Liberating Journey in the last quarter of 2023 and it has proven as rich, ‘leerzaam’ (full of learning) and inspiring as I could hope for, and more. I will definitely blog about it when it’s over in March, and another liberating journey is very likely to see the light in the later part of 2024. But in any case, if you already have some experience with Liberating Structures and actually want to use the repertoire to effect change, then contact me because this might just be what you need!

What’s next for you? You can help!

Reading all of the above, what is coming up for you?

In any case, I can use your help: Please contact me if I can help you or anyone who might benefit from my services, approach etc.

And also please share with me any contact details of people working for Foundations, corporate clients with a heart (while I will always serve a majority of not-for-profit and public entities), and convening bodies that need to get better at… err… convening!

On that note, again let me wish you a fantastic year of the dragon, may your life and work take a flight at an even higher altitude and may you feel blessed by all the magic of every moment on this planet and with other living creatures…

agilefacil