Explore the hidden treasures of complexity, experience tricky Liberating Structures, and deepen your leadership & facilitation practice in this 6-week, online live cohort-based course.
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Intuitive Facilitation Studio
Learning new tools is vital. But it’s only one part of leading and facilitating great teams and groups.
How do we facilitate shifts and big transformations in systems we support, or work within? What about tensions and conflicts? Navigating power dynamics and lack of guaranteed safety? Courting elephants in the room? Observing and improvising with what is – rather than 'missing the boat'?
Participants can feel disconnected if we as facilitators aren’t alive to what is emerging and what is possible in the moment - the good, bad, ugly and lovely. And it can be hard to let go of your plans and adapt - harder still if what emerges is emotionally complex. And yet, if we ignore and avoid the discomfort, we make already complex and uncertain situations more opaque. We become another barrier to the magic that's always ready to emerge.
How can we both distribute participation and control through good design, while simultaneously be radically open to what emerges?
Developing your intuition and adaptability supports connection and shared purpose amongst everyone. Working with conflict, navigating sticky situations, and following emerging needs can be tough work in the moment. AND the answers to these challenges are right in front of our noses! - grounded in our embodied experience as facilitators, community builders, business leaders, and participants.
We'll use a handful of structures to help us go deeper into WHAT we are facilitating. We'll use these to learn about some key characteristics of complex, adaptive systems, and learn when and how these same structures can be practised.
Using helpful peer support formats and improv playtesting, we will deepen our development as practitioners through live, collaborative play. Throughout this process, we will uncover areas for improvement and innovation, gain confidence together AND have fun.
We'll look to places in your work or community where you can immediately invite others together into participatory processes, and begin applying what you are learning in Studio. By helping groups of humans collectively witness each other's capability to do, make, think together more, we contribute to a more participatory, inclusive, AND radically innovative future.
You yearn to advance your facilitation skills for the sake of positively shifting the systems you work with.
You want to learn AND practice with a community of like-minded peers, gathered for the same purpose.
You are a practised facilitator and/or leader who has some familiarity with various breakout and full-group formats (i.e. any from Art of Hosting, Liberating Structures, Gamestorming, Design Thinking, Circle Practice, Deep Democracy, etc.)
I joined the intuitive facilitation studio because, even though I’ve been running community events with discussion components for years, I often found myself “winging it.” Sometimes the conversations flowed beautifully; other times they fell flat.
When the opportunity arose to join this studio, it felt like exactly what I’d been looking for—a chance to move beyond set structures and explore what happens when things don’t go according to plan. I wanted to learn how to navigate uncertainty, how to stay grounded when there isn’t shared agreement in a room, and how to plan for the unexpected in gatherings that can head in any direction. Through this experience, I’ve learned that facilitation isn’t about always knowing what to do; it’s about making space for not knowing, trusting myself in those moments, and creating an environment where others feel comfortable enough to participate fully. I’m coming away feeling far more rooted in my own internal awareness and identity as a facilitator.
Overall, this has been a wonderfully nourishing experience—challenging in the right ways, supportive in all the ways that matter, and genuinely transformative. I leave feeling grateful, inspired, and more confident in who I am becoming as a facilitator.
Stefan belongs to a select group of distinguished facilitators who have been instrumental in spreading Liberating Structures worldwide. His knowledge and experience in facilitation are outstanding, but what truly sets him apart is his remarkable sensitivity to current ideas and group dynamics.
The Intuitive Facilitation Studio is the second course I’ve taken with Stefan. The first introduced me to Liberating Structures, completely transforming how I approach facilitation. This time, the focus was on adopting a systems perspective, combining advanced tools like Ecocycle and Panarchy with personal growth through Robert Kegan’s and Lisa Laskow Lahey’s Immunity to Change.
The course teaches you not only to navigate complex group dynamics with precision but also to push your own boundaries as a leader. Since taking this course, I’ve gained the confidence to handle larger, more complex groups and a deeper awareness of how to lead authentically. If you’re ready to elevate your facilitation practice, master advanced tools and challenge yourself both personally and professionally, I highly recommend this course.
I was inspired to sign up to this course because I found the first Liberating Structures programme and was keen for a refresher, to come back to some practices with a new, more experienced lens.
I learn so much better through practice, compared to reading my old notes or a theory in a document. Stefan is such an engaging facilitator and makes it easy and fun to play around and practice. It's also great to be in a space with other practitioners and learn from each other's challenges and experiences.
The course has given me more confidence in using new frameworks as well as adapting according to the needs of my audience, as well as access to a group of peers with whom to keep learning and practising.
This is a brilliant course if you're keen to be a catalyst to help groups unlock innovative thinking in a safe space.
Stefan Morales, Chief Nerd Officer & Studio Convenor
Been at this participatory leadership & “facilitation” thing for nearly 20 years across a broad variety of sectors. From social enterprises, to neighbourhoods and communities, to purpose-driven companies, to the worlds of government and transnational orgs. I’ve worked in these spaces, and I’ve consulted with them for the past 5+ years.
I'm agnostic about specific approaches to this work: I believe that all the different methods, schools of thought, etc. are just the side-effect of marketing efforts of various thought-leaders and practitioners. (We're just trying to differentiate ourselves from each other and make tidy little packages of our practice!) But this work has always eluded singular frameworks, etc. Of course, some are incredibly helpful - and I host other courses on this, some here at Working Together, and some at Greaterthan (the Liberating Structures Studio being the most popular, 10 cohorts and running!).
When engaging with fellow practitioners, I lean in the direction of using and contributing to open source, commons-accessible methods and theories. And when working with teams, orgs, community groups, etc. I try to naturalise the methods I use as much as possible, so that we can work within the language and culture of their group (and not be worrying about learning too much jargon together).
A lot of learning will take place in the sessions through breakout and full-group discussion and practice. While I appreciate full group engagement from my cohorts, life can get in the way! Recordings and course materials will be made available async each week to help you catch up if you miss a session.
Each class is 2 hours, plus 1-2 hours of work outside of class time in various optional peer support containers. But you can expand that as much as you like with your own studio practice. I am guilty of nerding-out on this and have an endless supply of optional resources available to students digest on various aspects of our work.
This studio focuses on the human elements of facilitation—supporting the seemingly 'natural' development of connection, trust, intuition, adaptability, etc. of groups—and we will work at developing our own individual skills in opening up possibility space for others by practicing together (using various participatory methods like improv, Liberating Structures, etc.). We will also be encouraging ourselves in active practice outside of studio time (making invitations in your immediate workplaces, community, etc.). So, the only prerequisite is to come in with a "roll-your-sleeves-up" mentality, and a willingness to practice together.
If you are newer to facilitation, you can still take this of course! We all have the resourcefulness and capability to deepen this work. And/or you can take my self-led course "Anyone Can Facilitate." If you are curious about various methods and tools (the various libraries or 'toolkits' for facilitation), I recommend joining an upcoming cohort of Liberating Structures Studio at Greaterthan to experience a broad palette of design options.
We'll be practicing what we preach! LOL Each session is a balance between connecting as a cohort of learners through various interactive group activities, digesting content and getting support from mentors in the field (we usually have special guests in our cohorts - past guests in this and related cohorts have included Keith McCandless, Lyssa Adkins, John Perkins, and more!)
I don't typically offer refunds - I'd rather transfer your seat to a future cohort! ;) - but if it's an exceptional circumstance, just email me and we can figure something out!
Just email me at stefan[at]workingtogether.io if you have more questions :)