Volume
The Art and Science of Facilitation: Creating Sacred Space for Collective Flourishing: Creating Conditions for Human Flourishing Through the Practice of Holding Space
The full facilitation volume: holding space as a craft with mechanics, not a temperament.
1 chapter · 80,521 words
"Holding space" is usually spoken about as though it were a quality of person. It is a set of skills, and they are teachable: how a container is opened and closed, how much structure a group needs at a given moment, what to do with the silence at minute four, how to intervene without taking the group's work away from it.
This is the long treatment — preparation, opening, the middle where facilitators lose their nerve, conflict, closing, and the facilitator's own condition, which determines more of the outcome than any technique in the book. It is written for people who will be in the room next week.
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Elsewhere in the Canon
How this book was made. Many volumes in this house were written with machine assistance. That is the author's declared working method, not a thing found out later, and the practice is itself a published paper with a DOI — Externalized Cognition: A Developmental Theory of Human–AI Co-Creation. The argument, the judgement and the name on the cover are the author's.