FS69 Social Presencing Theater with Rosie Cripps

Facilitation Stories

FS69 Social Presencing Theater with Rosie Cripps

In this episode Nikki talks to Rosie Cripps, a facilitator and evaluator who helps build social movements and evaluate complex systems, about Social Presencing Theater.

They talk about:

• What Social Presencing Theater is, its origins and some of the tools and techniques that sit under it;

• The role of the facilitator in creating psychological safety and responding in the moment without knowing the details of the issue being explored;

• How Rosie first experienced Social Presencing Theater and what interested her about it;

“with social presencing theater, you can get to the crux of the matter so quickly, and so, kind of precisely, and so clearly see what needs to change without barely exchanging any words at all.”

• A workshop that Rosie ran with Ann Nkune at the IAF England and Wales conference using the tool “Stuck”;

“Some people said it made them not just think differently, but feel differently”.

• How this experience led Rosie to attending a recent Social Presencing Theater course and the learning from that experience;

• Rosie’s thoughts on how to take this forward, including a call out for collaborators;

A full transcript is below.

Links

Today’s guest:

Rosie Cripps on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosie-cripps/

Today’s subject

Presencing Institute: https://presencinginstitute.org/

U School: https://www.u-school.org/

Arawana Hayashi Social Presencing Theater website: https://arawanahayashi.com/spt/

Social Presencing Theater The Art of Making a True Move (book), Arawana Hayashi

To find out more about Facilitation Stories and the IAF and the England and Wales Chapter

Facilitation Stories website: https://facilitationstories.libsyn.com/

And to email us: [e-mail]

IAF England and Wales: https://www.iaf-world.org/site/chapters/england-wales

The Facilitation Stories Team

Helene Jewell: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenejewell/

Nikki Wilson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolawilson2/

Transcript

N.W

Hello, and welcome to facilitation stories, the community podcast of the England and Wales chapter of the International Association of Facilitators, also known as IAF. My name is Nikki Wilson (N.W), and my guest today is Rosie Cripps (R.C). So welcome Rosie.

R.C

Hi, thank you for having me.

N.W

So to start off with, could you tell us a little bit more about you and what you do?

R.C

Yeah. So I'm a facilitator and an evaluator. I help build inclusive community-led movements and as part of this, so I've helped teach architecture students, Appreciative Inquiry, and I've been exploring the idea of universities as anchor organisations to help communities become resilient and self-sustaining. And I evaluate kind of complex, messy systems. And I usually do that using outcome harvesting, which uses lots of facilitation. So in summary, I kind of help build social movements and evaluate complex systems.

N.W

Great. And so today, we're going to be talking about Social Presencing Theater. So for listeners who don't know what it is, Please, could you tell us a little bit more about it, and how a typical session might work?

R.C

Okay, so this is very different from my day to day work. First of all, Social Presencing Theater uses mindfulness, movement, and reflection, to create quite dramatic shifts in perspective. So it can be used at an individual level, or with teams, with big organisations, or in quite complex systems around social justice issues, or climate change, or something like that. It was created by Arawana Hayashi, and she's a dance teacher. But it's mainly been applied across sectors by someone called Otto Scharmer. He's an academic at MIT and he basically coded what are the principles of innovation, and he turned them into a theory called ‘Theory U’. And that's all open source, because he wants as many people as possible to be tackling the complex issues of our time. But they together, Otto and Arawana, they co founded the Presencing Institute, and they use Social Presencing Theater as a means for helping people to progress past habitual thought patterns and into these principles of innovation in whatever context they're in. So I personally find Social Presencing powerful, because you can work through very kind of tricky issues where we might feel stuck or unable to move forward very quickly, sometimes taking you to a place of being more stuck. But at least you have different insight. But without having to reveal at any point, what the issue is or what the tricky situation is. And it can be also very bonding for the people who are doing it. So your group that you're working with, it's very bonding, even if you're working with a complete group of strangers.

N.W

And so how might a typical session run?

R.C

Yeah, a typical session. So this is tricky, because I'm new to it. And there's also lots of different methods that sit under it. Some individual based tools and techniques, and some are for very large groups. But they think the way that Otto Scharmer mainly uses it with kind of fortune 500 companies and big organisations is he uses something called 4D mapping, which was co created by I think Otto Scharmer, and Arawana. And people who also use organisational constellations, and people who use presencing more generally. And 4D mapping, basically, you map out a system using people. And then you sense together a different potential future for that system. So it allows you to see in kind of 3D what the system is currently looking like, and how it could potentially shift. And that can be really powerful. And systems mapping, because it's very malleable. I like traditionally in systems mapping, I would kind of draw out a system, and it's very fixed. Whereas in this situation, you're sensing together as a group, where are the opportunities for movement, and that can give a lot of insights into what should change.

N.W

Okay. And so what would the role of the facilitator be in that environment? And how would that be different from other types of facilitation? Would you say?

R.C

Yeah, I think, I think in that context, because you don't always know what the actual topic is, there's kind of two parts to it. So one is it's about making the situation safe, because I think generally, we're not used to moving as a society. We're not used to using movement and so the psychological safety is really important. And then the other aspect is you're going in blind. So you're kind of sensing the room as opposed to, in a normal situation, you can be kind of tracking the flow of the room by listening to people in their conversation them expressing what's, what's going on. Whereas in this context, it's much more about sensing what's happening in the room. And responding to that in that moment. So it's quite different actually supposed to be a lot more emotionally responsive to what they would normally be as a facilitator, I think.

N.W

And, and as you've said, this is quite different to the kind of tools and techniques and facilitation work you'd normally do. So when did you first come across Social Presencing Theater? And what was it that interested you about it?

R.C

So I was reflecting back recently about which of the workshops and where are the places in my life where I've had the biggest personal transformational shifts, and which have been the workshops that have made those shifts last, and they've all involved movement. And so there's two workshops I've been to in my life. The first was in my early 20s, which is kind of a week-long workshop which involved movement. And, again, involved no talking. And then I volunteered at the Never Done Before Festival, which is run by Myriam Hadnes’s community, and just stumbled across a Social Presencing Theater Workshop. And in that workshop, it was online, it was only like an hour, I think. It was people from all over the world who had never met before. And yet, even in that very short amount of time, we just did some small movements.You know, just sat at my desk, and then also some group movements just in breakout rooms, and it totally shifted my perspective. And I felt incredibly close to the people that I'd been working with, even though I'd never met them before and it was all through a computer. So it kind of made me think, Okay, I'm personally finding this stuff really powerful and interesting. But is that you know, other people's experiences. And before kind of, like throwing myself into that, I guess I really wanted to explore that further, and see if other people were getting these shifts and transformations as well. Which is why, and then I started talking to Megan Evans, he's been a kind of mentor to me, and to Ann Nkune, who I know, to a shared love of Appreciative Inquiry and time to think. So I just literally read Arawana's book, and then suggested to Ann that we run a session at the IAF Conference, which we did this year. So that's kind of how I came to it, it's not been a planned route. But I found it personally very powerful. And it's also linked in to actually, after I had children, I started dancing. And I had a complete shift really, again, in my perspective, when I just I think I lived so much in my mind, when I started dancing, I had this dance teacher who didn't teach us kind of choreographed moves, he just taught us how our body wanted to move. And I didn't know if you can actually even call it dance, it's probably just me moving around terribly, but I found it really powerful and healing, just getting out of my head and into my body. And I think that's a lot of what this is about. It's about just getting rid of those habitual thought patterns and kind of living in our minds all the time. And being in our bodies and noticing that our bodies have a lot of wisdom and knowledge that we just waste, we just waste. And the thing I found with social presencing, is we spend so much time talking especially you know, as in groups, as facilitators, we see so much talk and conversation. Whereas with social presencing theater, you can get to the crux of the matter so quickly, and so, kind of precisely, and so clearly see what needs to change without barely exchanging any words at all.

N.W

Okay. And so you've mentioned that you ran a session at this year's IAF England and Wales conference,with Ann Nkune, and so could you tell us a little bit more about that?

R.C

Yeah, so I mentioned earlier, there's, there's quite a lot of tools that sit under social presencing theater. So our IAF conference workshop focused around a method called ‘stuck’ and in that you take a situation where you're not moving or thriving or something's not moving forward, or maybe you're just kind of stuck in your comfort zone and you you're not really willing to step out. And you embody that situation in whatever form you want to take. You form a statue and you call that sculpture one and then you kind of sense in your body you let yourself move to a different future. that wants to emerge through you. You move to a second position, and then you call that sculpture two, and you give each sculpture a phrase. And that in itself sounds very bizarre, but is very powerful. So for instance, the other day, I had a situation where I had to report a huge amount of data to a group of people. And I was feeling incredibly overwhelmed. And so I put myself in this stuck position where I had my kind of arms up in front of my head, and was almost crouching down, and my word was overwhelmed. And then I moved into a second position, which gave me a lot of clarity. And I had another phrase, which was, they need to make sense of it. And so I in my head, I've been getting stuck over and over with trying to make sense of all these overwhelming amounts of data, when in actual fact, it kind of shift the perspective straight way for me in that I didn't need to be making sense, but I just needed to be presenting them with data. So that's just an example of where you might use stuck. So we use stuck. And then you start off working through your own stuck practices, even from sculpture one to sculpture two. And then you extend that out as a group. So in our workshop, and in most social presencing situations, we don't at any point, know what issue someone is working through. So you'll do your sculpture one to sculpture two on your own, and then you extend that out as a group without explaining what it is that you're working through. And the other people in our group will help extend out our stuck situation. So they become other players in the system. And they help enhance that feeling of stuck, and also give a different perspective on it. So So in my situation where I was stuck with feeling overwhelmed with all this data, I might have someone standing in front of me who's representing all the hundreds of interviews that I've done. And then I might have someone stood behind me, who is representing the people that I have to show all this data to. And then we would move together as a group, so they wouldn't know what this issue is about at all, but they might look at me and say, You look pained or, or I'm seeing confusion, something like that. And then we'd all move together with no idea where each other we're going to move or any sense of where we should move, we just move wherever feels right at the time. And then we'll move collectively together into a second sculpture. And then again, they'll give their perspective on the situation. So they might say, you know, you look freed or relieved or something like that. And the other people's insights can be just as valuable as your own. And I think for me, and our IAF session, that was what people found most powerful is working through something as a group, without anyone in the group knowing what it was about, except for that one individual. And even though as a group members, for example, I've done this a number of times, even in situations where I don't know what the person's going through, I can personally find it very moving as well. I think just by moving together as a group is very bonding in itself and illuminating. So we did that at the IAF conference, we did this stuck on our own and then stuck as a group. And then we use time to think, to reflect on what those processes felt like to the groups involved.

N.W

Okay, and so you've mentioned, I think that this session was for you a bit of an exploration of how to use this. So what were your personal kind of takeaways from that session?

R.C

I think there were a lot of takeaways, actually. I think the main thing was that it was something other people found powerful. So I went in thinking, okay, is this just me, in fact, I was there the night before in my hotel, and I was thinking, Oh my gosh, what am I doing? Because I'm going to a conference I've never been to before, co facilitating with someone I've never met before, on a subject that I've only read a book about. You know,I didn't know whether this is going to be something that anyone else would get anything from at all. So the main takeaway was, oh, wow, okay other people are finding this useful as well. And I think having spoken to a few people after the conference, they said, you know, it's one of the sessions where they were able to go deepest. And again, I think that's because they didn't have to talk about anything that they were kind of working through. So as a facilitator that's quite strange because you're kind of blind to all of that. But it's really nice to be able to create a space where people can work through some quite tricky personal issues. So yeah, there was that, that it was helpful. Some people said it made them not just think differently, but feel differently. And that, you know, someone else mentioned that there's something that they've been talking to people about for months and months and months, and just couldn't see a way out of this situation that then had done that, and then could instantly see a way through. So I was like, Okay, great. I feel like it's, it's a useful tool. So that was the main thing. I also noticed that maybe it isn't for everyone, and getting the context is going to be right. And I think for Ann and I, we both kind of felt that we recognise that it was probably more powerful, like using movement is more powerful than we originally expected. And thinking about how we prepare the room for the emotions, it can trigger as well, I think is quite important. But yeah, just the overwhelming thing I took away was the kind of desire to experiment with other people more, to try it out with other people more. And so then that evening, I think went back to my hotel room and signed up to a course in Berlin to properly train in it.

N.W

Great. And so you've neatly led into my next question, really, about that course, and what happened on the course? And what did you learn there?

R.C

Yeah, so the course was a two day course with Arawana Hayashi herself. So that was really exciting, because she kind of founded it all. And it was with 43 other people from all over the world, actually, but mainly from Europe. I think there were four people from the UK. And we went through all the different types of techniques, which she describes in her book called Social Presencing Theater. And yeah, it was, it was just incredibly insightful. There were lots of different techniques that we tried out, some, you know, just on our own, some as a whole group of 43 people, some in small groups, all that can be used in different contexts. And again, I think by the second day all of us were just feeling like, why would you bother talking anymore? It just seems like such a waste of time, when you can kind of get so much clarity and connection with others in silence, you know, just by moving together. But it's called Social Presencing Theater, but it's not about theater, it is just about moving and embodying. There's no acting element to it. There's nothing theatrical actually about it at all. It's just a way of using, thinking with our bodies as well as our minds. Yeah. So the training was fantastic, gave me loads of ideas and met loads of connections, lots of people who were also thinking about using it in all kinds of leadership scenarios. And actually some massive issues about, you know, tackling climate change and deforestation in the Amazon and all these different frameworks, people using it for and all of them finding it ,yeah, a really interesting method of breaking just habitual thought patterns and approaches to situations and thinking about things really differently.

N.W

Okay. And so I know that you, you weren't on the course very long ago. So this might be a difficult question to answer. But what are your current thoughts on how you might take it forward and put it into practice? Yeah,

R.C

Yeah, so I think main thing at the moment, which is very much just a thought process, to help serve this, but Ann and I are thinking about experimenting, doing another session at London Lab, which is linked to the London IAF group. So we're thinking about doing that in maybe September or October. And I'm personally thinking about how I built it into my work with systems thinking and systems mapping. So it's part of the evaluation work I do, we do a lot of systems thinking work. And I think using it in that context is really helpful, because it's a really malleable way of looking at how we can change and shift systems, but also even the stuck practice, which is just within individuals. You know, through all my systems based work, the one thing that stands out is that unless we change people, you know, we can't change systems. And the stuck practice itself is a way of really helping people shift their perspective on their role within a system and what they can do individually to change things. So yeah, I'm thinking about how I can build into my work. And I'm also just looking for as many people as possible to collaborate with who'd like to experiment with Ann and I on this.

N.W

Great. And you mentioned earlier that in your IAF session, you combined this with time to think, are there other kinds of facilitation tools and techniques that you think could work well alongside social presencing theater if you're building this out into something you would use in other contexts?

R.C

Yeah, I would say on that, that Ann and I used time to think at the end of the session, and we were also thinking about it from an Appreciative Inquiry perspective, because that's what both of us use primarily in our work. Having said that, at the training, it really shifted my perspective, because I think one of the things which they tried to focus on with social presencing is, is moving out of these habitual thought patterns. So they just focus on what did you do? What did you see? What did you feel? And so I think probably, I wouldn't use time to think with it anymore, possibly, or maybe use elements of time to think that not, not use exactly the same principles. And I think that also relates back to the psychological safety element as well, you're never really conceptualising with anyone, what it is you're working through, maybe not even yourself. And I think that's actually helpful, because we get so bogged down in our thought patterns. So I think keeping it very just in the moment in your body, like touching, not overthinking anything is quite important with the process. So yeah, what tools would I use it with is possibly Appreciative Inquiry, maybe as a precursor to that. And then systems mapping and any group work where you're working through individual challenges collectively as a group, maybe it's support groups or something like that.

N.W

That's great. So if listeners would like to find out more about social presencing theater, where should they look?

R.C

Okay, so there's a book by Arawana Hayashi called social presencing theater. I think it's called The Art of Making a True move. There's also a website. So Arawana has a social presencing theater website, which is really interesting. And then there's also this wider context of ‘Theory U’. So Otto Scharmer, and Arawana have a website called the U-school, literally the letter U hyphen school. And that gives a wider framework to the work as well, which is, they have loads of open source training as well, which is really interesting, if anyone was interested in that.

N.W

Brilliant and how about if people want to get in touch with you after this? Particularly as you've got a call out there for collaborators and fellow experimenters as it were.

R.C

Yeah, probably just LinkedIn is best for me.

N.W

Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Rosie. That's been really interesting. And I hope to hear more about where you, where you take this forward. But thank you for sharing where you've got to today so far.

R.C

Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. And I look forward to hopefully hearing to some people who are interested in experimenting.

Outro

H.J

So listeners, we've reached the end of another episode of facilitation stories, the community podcast of IAF England and Wales.

N.W

If you'd like to find out more about the IAF and how to get involved all of the links on our website facilitationstories.com

H.J

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N.W

We're always on the lookout for new episode ideas. So is there a fabulous facilitator you think we should talk to?

H.J

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N.W

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H.J

We hope you'll join us again soon for more facilitation stories.

N.W

Until then, thank you for listening.