March 8-11, 2012 Thursday 5pm arrival, Sunday 3pm departure.
Location: Out of town retreat 1-2 hours driving distance of Toronto, ON.

Leading and facilitating groups, communities and change means 'befriending conflict,' having the self-awareness to effectively manage and facilitate conflict and find the emergent creativity and innovation within group conflict. Conflict management is not only a technical skill but an adaptive one. It means being able to stay centered and awake when working with volatile emotions and conflict, knowing the role you play, understanding the impact of your communication, and knowing your triggers, and how they escalate or de-escalate conflict. The adaptive skill of leadership is based on the idea that the leader’s or facilitator’s subjective experiences play a key role in the group’s process of change.

This first module offers a foundation in working with conflict. In particular we will focus on:

• Sitting in the Fire - working with the triggers and personal issues that prevent us from being more effective working with conflict and change.
• Roles and fluidity – understanding the roles in the conflict as parts of ourselves, seeing the conflict as an inner and not just outer process, so that we gain comfort and fluidity being able to facilitate the various sides and roles in the conflict.
• Rank and marginalization – working with the dynamics of rank and marginalization as both inner and outer experiences, and using personal power as a leverage to influence systemic and seemingly intractable power dynamics.

May 11-13, 2012. Friday 8:30 am arrival. Sunday 3pm departure.
Location: TBA, downtown Toronto.

Deep Democracy offers a method and framework for engaging and harnessing the power and potential of the whole organization; it is a large group facilitation method that can work with all voices and positions, even those in conflict with the mainstream position. This requires robust facilitation methods that can work with roles and polarization, the dynamics of power and marginalization, as well as ‘edges’ and hotspots. This module focuses on:

• Developing eldership and hosting skills which invite in diverse, dissenting, and marginal positions and roles.
• Consensus skills - framing the direction without marginalizing the road not taken.
• Awareness of your own agenda, bias, siding, rank and how that closes down the conversation.
• Uncovering ghosts – bringing in the hidden roles, moods or atmospheres that hold key information and can get things moving again.
• Working with roles and polarization – making difference useful by ‘unfolding’ : going deep into the meaning and information of a role.
• Holding down the ‘hot spot’ – volatile moments in interaction that hold the key to transformation.

Oct. 12-14, 2012 Thursday 5pm arrival. Sunday 3pm departure.
Location: Out of town retreat 1-2 hours driving distance of Toronto, ON.

Leadership and facilitation skills are only as powerful as the person carrying them. Who you are – your story, style and personality - is a filter through which you bring forth your talents. Your struggles, communication style, even your wounds and weaknesses create a unique leadership story, or brand, that is your most stable way of leading. In addition, we bring with us our social identity, and the vestiges of our ancestry: social identities, generational patterns, behaviors, beliefs, and the habits of history. Whatever those who came before us didn’t finish, we carry forward into the present. This module will pick up where Module I left off, on the self-development of the facilitator and leader and focus on:

• How the force of history and our ancestral dreams impact our work, vocation, and ease in the world at large. How well we feel in the world, and how able we are to thrive and grow in the world is in part influenced by these historical pressures, ghosts and the unfulfilled issues of our ancestors.
• Identifying and using the gifts of our ancestors without being held back by their limitations and unfinished issues– working with the chronic obstacles and blocks and other habits of history that impede our development in the world.
• Social identity and wounding– discovering the gifts and also the limitations of social identity, how to work through the limiting effects of our personal history.
• Altered states and edges – how our limits, biases, and triggers create altered states, one-sidedness, and challenge our neutrality and effectiveness. We will learn how to work with our own altered states, edges and inner diversity, as a way to stay present and effective as facilitators.

January 18-20, 2013. Friday 8:30 am arrival. Sunday 3pm departure.
Location: TBA, downtown Toronto.

This finale module addresses the challenges of applying facilitation and leadership skills to extreme conflict situations, intercultural conflict, and situations with potential violence and volatility. Groups often come together to address social injustice and inequity, and often trauma and abuse intersect with conflict, making it necessary for the facilitator to have both inner centeredness and advanced skills. This module will focus on:

• Inner work methods for staying detached and useful during extreme or volatile conflict, such as personal attack, challenges to leadership, chaotic processes and potential violence in the public space.
• Understanding the ingredients that turn a conflict into an intense one, the factors that lead to escalation, recognizing escalation and de-escalation signals, and knowing how to facilitate de-escalation.
• How to prepare for working with an intense or extreme conflict. Developing a tool kit of inner work techniques for recovering from fearful, "frozen", or other altered states of consciousness that arise from working with intense conflict.
• Practicing skills and interventions for working with personal attacks on the facilitator or leader.