Discover Collaborative Convergent Facilitation with Paul Kahawatte
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Episode #13: “Efficient Collaboration Through Convergent Facilitation” with Paul Kahawatte
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How can we ensure everyone wins? In this episode with Paul Kahawatte, you’ll discover the power of Miki Kashtan’s convergent facilitation and non-controversial essence. Using these tools, we can discover what people truly need and find a way to incorporate that into a solution that works for all.
Paul explains how we can look toward something more transformational and visionary while addressing the practical steps to get there. By integrating different needs, we can create something much more powerful and creative than if we don’t.
After this conversation, Duncan was filled with hope that we can truly create a win-win future. Join us on that journey.
Highlights in this episode:
Duncan and Paul talk about how convergent facilitation can bring divergent voices to collaborative decisions
Discover the power of convergent facilitation in creating win-wins
Understand why we can’t get what we want without collaboration.
Learn why binary choices force us to compromise
Paul introduces the “non-controversial essence”, which helps us understand the why behind someone’s position
Understand the magic of incorporating everyone’s needs to create a better outcome.
Uncover why it’s important to realize that everyone matters, and how this can lead to better solutions.
Duncan and Paul ponder why people don’t use the process more, and how that could change.
“What convergent facilitation does is shift from a competitive game to a collaborative game, from a zero-sum to a positive-sum game.
So in a competitive game where it's me versus you and everything that I lose means you win everything you win means I lose, it makes sense. There's a logic to me, fighting with you to try to get as much as I can for me because it's me versus you. But in convergent facilitation, by building this shared list of criteria that we are looking at, how can we work together to meet all of these criteria sufficiently so that everyone can genuinely say yes to what we come up with at the end?
We've actually just switched the game from me versus you. There's no incentive for me to win over you if I can win with you. I have this little phrase in my head, “win-win, there's nothing to lose.” There really isn't anything to lose if I'm getting what I want out of a solution.
And I think that sometimes people can enter a process with quite a lot of kind of adversarial orientation towards each other or low trust or like, okay, I'm gonna try this out. I dunno if it's gonna give me what I want, but I'm gonna try it. And through the process of coming out of a competitive game into a collaborative game, it's no longer incentivized to fight with you.”
About this week’s guest:
Paul is a mediator, facilitator, and trainer, with a depth of experience in supporting people through conflict, collaborative decision making, and the process of developing their systems and ways of working together. He draws on a number of approaches in his work, including Convergent Facilitation, Restorative Circles, Nonviolent Communication (NVC), Aikido, Focusing, Relational Neuroscience, and multiple others.
Paul currently focuses on supporting groups and projects working for social and environmental justice, and he has also worked as a community mediator. He is currently exploring movement-building and radical approaches to democracy. He is passionate about helping people come together in transformative ways to organize their collective power and find ways forward that genuinely work for all.
Connect with Paul:
Go to the info-packed episode page for resources from this episode.
What’s coming next?
David Dean is joining Duncan on the Omni-Win Project Podcast on Tuesday, 27th September.
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