A self-led field guide for leaders who want better collective thinking without carrying the room.
Learn practical participatory leadership practices that help groups make sense of complex situations and arrive at clearer, more resilient decisions, together.
If you lead meetings where the stakes are real, you’ve probably felt this tension:
The people in the room are capable.
The topic matters.
But the conversation doesn’t quite do the work it needs to do.
Important perspectives stay quiet.
The group converges too quickly.
Decisions are made before there’s real shared understanding.
Not because people don’t care - but because the way participation is structured makes it hard for groups to think and contribute together well.
Participatory Leadership: A Field Guide is a self-led course for leaders who want a more reliable way to help groups make sense of complexity and arrive at clearer decisions - without forcing consensus, relying on authority, or carrying all the thinking themselves.
The practices here only become real when you try them, in real meetings, under real conditions.
That’s where participatory leadership is learned.
Most meetings don’t fail because of the people in them.
They fail because of structure.
In most organizations, meetings default to familiar formats:
presentations
managed discussion
open debate
brainstorming
These formats feel efficient and professional.
But under pressure, they quietly concentrate attention and influence in a few voices.
The result:
key risks surface too late (or not at all)
groups agree before they understand
“alignment” replaces real sensemaking
decisions look clear in the room and unravel afterward
If the work is simple, this mostly works.
If the work is complex, uncertain, or high-stakes (which it often is) - it doesn’t.
When participation is narrow:
intelligence is underused
dissent is delayed
errors compound quietly
Teams rarely fail loudly.
They fail politely.
People nod.
They defer.
They move on with decisions they don’t fully understand or own.
Leaders then absorb the cost later - in rework, resistance, and decisions that need to be revisited.
In complex work, the limiting factor is rarely intelligence.
It’s:
not enough participation
not enough candor
not enough diversity of interpretation before the group converges
The solution isn’t better opinions, stronger facilitation, or louder leadership.
It’s designing participation so groups can:
think together before deciding
surface what matters without confrontation
build shared meaning before shared action
That’s what participatory leadership enables.
And that’s what this Field Guide is for.
Participatory Leadership: A Field Guide is a self-led, practical course that introduces a small set of repeatable leadership practices you can use in real meetings to help groups:
make sense of complex situations
think at full bandwidth
reach clearer, more resilient decisions
share responsibility for outcomes
This is not about becoming a facilitator.
It’s about becoming a leader who knows how to structure participation so the group can do its best thinking.
Inside the Field Guide, you'll learn how to:
Create conditions where contribution is expected and supported - not optional or performative.
Surface difficult truths through structure, not confrontation or forced vulnerability.
Hold uncertainty long enough for better insight to emerge, without stalling momentum.
Help groups interpret what’s happening before deciding what to do.
Distribute thinking, judgment, and ownership so you’re not carrying everything yourself.
These practices are designed to work:
in routine team meetings
in cross-functional discussions
in high-stakes conversations with senior leaders or stakeholders
whenever clarity matters and certainty is limited
Most leadership training focuses on:
communication skills
confidence
personality
persuasion
This Field Guide focuses on practice and structure.
Small shifts in how participation is designed change:
who gets to think
what gets said
how meaning forms
how decisions are made
When structure changes, behavior follows -
without asking people to be braver, louder, or better than they are.
That’s why these practices hold up even when:
power differences exist
people are risk-averse
the topic is sensitive
the leader doesn’t have the answer
This is not something you “complete” and move on from.
You use it:
before a meeting, to decide how to structure participation
during a meeting, to shift the conversation when it gets stuck
after a meeting, to reflect on what worked and what didn’t
Each practice is meant to be tried, adapted, and learned from.
That’s how participatory leadership is built - through use, not theory.
This Field Guide is for you, if you:
lead meetings where decisions matter
work in environments with uncertainty, tradeoffs, or complexity
want better collective thinking without chaos or loss of control
feel the weight of carrying the group’s sensemaking yourself
care about outcomes, not performative alignment
don’t regularly lead groups
want icebreakers or team-bonding activities
are looking for a certification or facilitation credential
prefer familiar meeting formats, even when they underperform
Self-paced, on-demand
Short, focused video lessons
Designed for immediate use in real meetings
No prior facilitation experience required
You don’t need to change who you are.
You change how participation is structured — and practice from there.
If this Field Guide doesn’t give you practices you can actually use -
and doesn’t change how you approach real meetings - you shouldn’t keep it.
👉 14-day money-back guarantee. No questions asked.
Participatory leadership isn’t about letting go of responsibility.
It’s about creating the conditions where responsibility can be shared.
Start the Field Guide 👇
Stefan Morales, Field Guide
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).
I work with peers and collaborators, from Susan Basterfield of the world of Teal organizations, to Lyssa Adkins of Coaching Agile teams, to Nakia Winfield of anti-racist fame, to my lovely partner in love and life, Heather Cosidetto. Read more about me on linkedin, and core collaborators on our about page: