Photo Credit: Season’s Greetings from a snowy Ashland

A visual summary of the Liberating Structures processes that shaped our workshop. A complicated process for a complicated network, but lots of fun facilitation skills that we are excited to share! Credit: Drawn by Nancy White, Liberating Structures

Community of Practice leaders, Network partners and FAC Net staff met this week in Ashland, Oregon. The intention of the meeting was to take the pulse of the Network’s Communities of Practice (which include working groups focused on topics such as landowner and homeowner outreach and community wildfire protection plans). To kick things off, we grappled with the reality that the FAC Net is complex. It became clear that Communities of Practice couldn’t mature unless we stepped back and looked at the Network as a whole, as well as the context in which it operates. So the group adapted on the fly with techniques from Liberating Structures (a facilitation model) to think about the big picture and shifted the conversation to questions like “What’s happening in the Network? What should be happening? What should be changing?” We considered all of these questions with the Network’s desire to create better wildfire outcomes in mind, generating a rich conversation regarding our Communities of Practice and many other Network elements. We look forward to continuing the journey with the rest of the Network in 2017.

Community of Practice leader Forest Schafer practices telling the story of what happened during our time together. Stay tuned for the roll-out of this workshop’s story. Credit: Allison Jolley, FAC Net

This diagram is what Liberating Structures calls an “eco-cycle.” This is a way of assessing where various approaches and strategies are in terms of their development. Note that in this picture, the eco-cycle flows from “birth” to “maturity” to “creative destruction” to “renewal.” This diagram will likely look like a confusing image of jargon to most readers, but we can’t wait to unpack it further with the Network. We also renamed the stages to better fit our specific Network: strategies such as particular Communities of Practice were either identified as being “emergent,” “continuing,” “dissolving,” or “evolving.” Credit: Drawn by Nancy White, Liberating Structures

Thank you to all who joined us, and we look forward to connecting with the rest of the Network on the workshop’s outcomes!

Please note that comments are manually approved by a website administrator and may take some time to appear.