Chantal Nève-Hanquet and Agathe Crespel provide an accessible and ground-breaking guide to genuinely effective group work, sharing excellent hands-on assistance for coaches and facilitators. Offering a unique selection of guidelines and illustrations for group work, the authors demonstrate the benefits of using creative action methods in practice, helping leaders discover new ways to achieve dynamic group sessions and endowing their work with new vigour, as well as pleasure. Facilitating Collective Intelligence brings together a wealth of knowledge and techniques from psychodrama, Jungian and systemic analysis to inform group facilitation. Throughout the book's four parts, key inner attitudes, questions and action techniques are explored to help facilitators nourish open and flexible forms of communication within groups, stimulate collective intelligence and foster creative approaches to collective problem-solving. With the help of numerous sensitively related case studies, the book guides the reader through the process of achieving more dynamism in group work, fostering creativity, encouraging agility and developing co-construction within groups. It contains more than thirty practical reference sheets which provide an instant aid for implementing the methods and models in the book. Nève-Hanquet and Crespel’s approach advocates the use of actions methods, specifically the ARC model, to encourage 'out of the box' thinking and develop new paths and strategies in working with teams and organizations. Facilitating Collective Intelligence is an invaluable and essential tool in cultivating effective group dynamics for all coaches, coach supervisors and consultants, both experienced and in training. Due to its clear and practical structure, it will also be useful for counsellors, coaching psychologists and other professionals who work with groups, as well as students and academics of coaching and coaching psychology.

Praise for Facilitating Group Learning "In this engaging and accessible book, George Lakey draws on a lifetime's experience to provide a highly practical resource to anyone seeking to understand and respond to the complexities of group work. The book will be invaluable to anyone trying to effect social change through groups while striving to stay simultaneously sane and employed." Stephen D. Brookfield, Distinguished University Professor, University of St. Thomas "I've been working with forms of direct education for many decades, and I found new ideas and inspirations in every chapter. For anyone involved in teaching, training, sharing skills, or leading groups, this book is an invaluable resource!" Starhawk, author, The Earth Path, Dreaming the Dark, and Webs of Power "George Lakey has inspired our union to engage in education in a way that challenges us to redefine social justice and equality in new and exciting ways. This book helps us to continue our journey to touch the souls of union members." Denis Lemelin, national president, Canadian Union of Postal Workers "Facilitating Group Learning will ease the way of all who venture into the white waters of facilitation. George clarifies the most basic, complex, and nagging challenges of facilitation, while honoring the realities of individual and social power dynamics and providing real-life examples from the path of continued growth and mastery. A rare gift!" Niyonu D. Spann, founding president, TRV Consulting and Beyond Diversity 101 "This book is a must-read for people who teach adults of any age, no matter what the subject, and care about doing it in ways that yield deep and abiding learning. Wonderfully well-written and rich with psychological and spiritual insights as well as practical strategies, it represents the fruits of a lifetime of transformational teaching and learning by one of the foremost adult educators of our time." Parker J. Palmer, author, The Courage to Teach, Let Your Life Speak, and The Heart of Higher Education

How to use group dynamics to make the right decisions? Organizations evolve in a context of change, uncertainty, and complexity. Employees need to understand what is at stake and to participate in decisions. However, if managers and leaders need to mobilize collective intelligence to succeed, they have little or no training in working in large groups. Collaborative design is a development process involving stakeholders. Workshops, led by facilitators from within the company or from external firms, take place during seminars lasting one or more days. In a complex situation such as a merger, the reframing of a project, a business choice, the launch of a product, the development of an organization, or the implementation of a strategy, they bring together from fifteen to more than one hundred and fifty participants around an objective: to analyze the situation, to find out how to deal with and solve a problem, to produce shared representations or decisions, and to commit to action. This book is based on the author's proven practices. It will help executives and managers co-design and co-facilitate these workshops so that they produce tangible results. Very concrete, it is illustrated with various cases such as a large aeronautical company, a research laboratory, an industrial SME, a professional group, a cooperative, or a school. After an introduction on collaborative design, it is organized into four parts: 1. Understanding, imagining, and giving meaning 2. Planning, projecting, and giving substance 3. Expanding, improvising, and giving rhythm 4. Planting, growing, and sustaining life Each of the twenty-seven practical sections can be approached independently thanks to a common plan: issues, keys, and examples. The book is prefaced by Gabrielle Rolland, consultant in change management, speaker and writer on leadership and collective intelligence, and author of "Seniors, votre avenir a un futur" (Laffont, 2009).

"A new field of collective intelligence has emerged in the last few years, prompted by a wave of digital technologies that make it possible for organizations and societies to think at large scale. This "bigger mind"--human and machine capabilities working together--has the potential to solve the great challenges of our time. So why do smart technologies not automatically lead to smart results? Gathering insights from diverse fields, including philosophy, computer science, and biology, Big Mind reveals how collective intelligence can guide corporations, governments, universities, and societies to make the most of human brains and digital technologies"--Amazon.com.

This volume describes, analyzes, and critiques the design and evolution of the Laboratory for Analytic Sciences (LAS), a National Security Agency-funded big data laboratory. The LAS consists of teams of intelligence personnel, who provide practical understanding of needs, targets, and tradecraft, working collaboratively with university scholars and industry partners of varying disciplines to bring their collective expert knowledge and understanding to improve the tools and tradecraft of intelligence. This book details the theoretical and practical lessons that can be drawn from the LAS for the development of cross-sector, interdisciplinary collaboration. It will inform scholars and practitioners in intelligence, communication, design, management, public policy, political science, and indeed all arenas currently grappling with the desire to engage multiple and diverse stakeholders in the research and development of innovative solutions to the world’s most challenging problems.

Twenty-four authors describe how they use Action Explorations (techniques from traditional psychodrama) for a wide range of uses, from business coaching to education to personal growth.

It may well now be the time to look for new ways of diagnosing, planning, building team cohesion, fostering innovation and implementing changes and strategies. The classic management models have been used and reused, but they have now reached their limits, unable to keep pace with today’s corporate complexity. As more and more is required in the business environment, more is asked of your organization’s personnel. Significant numbers of your employees may be experiencing withdrawal, cynicism and a lack of motivation. Dynamic management routines and sense-making priorities are badly needed in many organizations, as they seek to overcome a crisis of jaded personnel. Now may be the time to look more seriously at workshop management. On the one side, this book presents how to achieve organizational performance and efficacy with workshops designed to bring together collective intelligence through analysis, planning, implementation challenges and more. On the other side, this new perspective builds on disruptive approaches and creativity management models. It proposes an integrated framework that allows you to design your own workshop sequence to suit the specific issues and challenges you want to address. The framework is easy to adjust; simply follow the enclosed guide to achieve the desired objectives: planning organizational change, reorganizing a team, fostering cohesion, enabling creativity, developing a vision, reframing a strategy and more. To help you attain your goals, all 50 workshops are explained in detail on technical sheets containing the workshop descriptions, underlying motives, group compositions, activity illustrations and examples, timing and leadership guidelines, expectations and objectives, etc. You can use them as-is or adapt them to your liking. Kevin J. Johnson is a Management professor at HEC Montréal. His experience also includes acting as a consultant for many private and public organizations, and publishing academic research on change management and organizational behaviour. Jean-Michel Moutot is a professor at Audencia Business School. He has 20 years of experience working for large French and international corporations, helping them with strategic transformations. David Autissier is the director of the ESSEC Chair for Change and a professor at IAE Gustave Eiffel, University Paris-Est Creteil. He worked as a change management consultant in large corporations for 20 years.