ABSTRACT
For three years, with colleagues at Action Learning Associates, I have been facilitating a programme of Leadership Facilitation Skills (LFS) for emerging and senior leaders in the creative and cultural sector. The programme is based on the idea that by teaching the skills of action learning facilitation in small groups, through total immersion in the experience of facilitating, participants will learn the skills of action learning facilitation while also reflecting on their experience of leading in cultural organizations. Participants, evaluators and commissioners regard the programme as 'highly successful'; what I set out to do in this chapter is share something of what I saw participants learn about facilitation and how this changed the way they thought about leadership. I found the method and ethos of action learning are well suited to providing an experiential learning programme about leading, one that gives learners a first hand sense of the shift from old paradigm leadership, (notions of command and control) to new thinking about organizing and leading. Writers like Margaret Wheatley talk about how ideas from quantum physics and complexity illustrate the importance of leaders in today's world learning how to facilitate process, nurture relationships, become better at listening and respecting one another's uniqueness, (Wheatley 1999). Action learning provided a creative environment for participants to explore how they might incorporate these dimensions into a more facilitative style of leadership.
