Facilitating Transformative Learning and Development
in Groups and Teams
Tools and leadership mindsets to support people in becoming collectively smarter, more confident and more adaptive in a complex and ever-changing world
In a world that is increasingly unpredictable, organizations and teams are being called to evolve—not just in what they do, but in how they think, relate, and make meaning together.
Most methods of working are grounded in yesterday’s logic: efficiency, control, predictability. But today’s challenges ask for something more profound—an inner shift in awareness, and a collective capacity to navigate the unknown.
Vertical Facilitation is an approach to crafting learning environments that fosters deep personal and collective growth, enabling individuals and groups to navigate complexity and change more effectively.
Part teaching, part coaching, part facilitation, and part curriculum design, vertical facilitation is a unique amalgam that offers a unique answer to one of today’s most pressing organization development and learning need:
How to develop people who can work together toward common purpose in the face of the stress and anxiety of the uncertainty, ambiguity, and volatility that characterizes 21st Century life and work.
Key abilities of Vertical Facilitation include:
Self as Instrument: Harnessing personal presence and awareness to lead transformative experiences.
Collective Sensemaking: Enhancing group dynamics to navigate ambiguity and foster shared understanding.
Developmental Design: Crafting environments that challenge assumptions and promote growth.
Relationship Systems Intelligence: Sensing the emotional energy in group settings and responding in ways that generate greater emotional coherence and awareness.
The Vertical Facilitator curriculum builds upon nearly 20 years experience and research in the design and facilitation of transformational learning experiences. It leverages a unique blend of human technologies from the fields of adult development, transformative learning, systems relationship coaching, and executive coaching, to foster powerful, and powerfully transforming, learning environments.
The Vertical Facilitator Learning Ecosystem
We see the role of the facilitator as that of transformational agent. As such, our educational programs and resources are as much about your own transformation and developmental growth as they are about developing the skills necessary for facilitating deliberately transformational learning experiences for others. Transformational learning is both of others… and Self.
We offer two program tiers. Our Tier I (Deep Dive) programs provide deep and immersive experiential training for people who are new to vertical facilitation.
Our Tier II (Mastery) programs are for people who have completed the Deep Dive and who seek genuine mastery in the art and craft of facilitating transformational learning experiences.
Our Tier I programs are tailored to two distinct roles and contexts:
Workshop Designers, Trainers and Team Coaches
For course creators, trainers, and team coaches dedicated to creating learning environments that foster deep and lasting mindset shifts.
Organizational Leaders
For organizational leaders dedicated to cultivating organization-wide shifts in mindset and in the capacity of individuals and teams to work productively together in the face of uncertainty, volatility and complexity.
Learning Journey - How it works
The Vertical Facilitator Learning Journey unfolds across three levels.
Level 1: Warm-Up
Level I is comprised of a series of free webinars and emails, along with other materials to help you get learn the basics of Vertical Facilitation.
The Warm-up is free of charge. You can join any time: you will receive recordings and other materials you may have missed.
The next Warm Up will start in the Summer of 2024 (TBA) - Register to stay in the loop!
Level 2: Deep Dive
For those who wish to bring the principles and practices of vertical facilitation into the reality of their workplaces, the Deep Dive is for you.
Those who participate in the Deep Dive will come away with the tools, techniques, and inner stance needed to successfully design and facilitate a vertical learning experience for any manner of group or team situation, whether a workshop or a team coaching engagement.
The next Deep Dive will start in the Summer of 2024 (TBA) - Register to stay in the loop!
Level 3: Pathway to Mastery
After the Deep Dive, you will have the opportunity to be a part of a structured learning community, supported by frequent “Pulse” sessions, vertical facilitation “challenges”, an advanced vertical facilitation course, and the opportunity to meet with the course leader and with one another… all supported by an online community platform.
Prerequisite: Completion of The Vertical Facilitator Deep Dive.
Expected Outcomes from Participating in the Learning Journey
An ability to confidently embody graceful presence in the face of whatever it is that is happening in the room.
A newly found capacity to “read the room” developmentally, and to respond to what’s there in ways that activate new developmental possibilities.
A readiness to stand in the anxiety of not knowing in a given moment, and to draw from that unknown to catalyze transformative learning for others.
A refined design sensibility that informs a new approach to the staging of the events and courses you lead.
A greater awareness of the inner beliefs, assumptions and triggers that trip you up, as well as the inner strengths that empower your leadership.
Your Course Leaders
Michael Hamman is dedicated to the possibility that the workplace be a site for personal, professional and social transformation. Trained in the 1980s in coaching and large group facilitation, Michael went on to train in systems thinking and methods, group dynamics and facilitation, professional and executive coaching, and in human and organization development. He is a decades-long student of the nature of human transformation, both in himself and in others.
His book, Evolvagility: Growing an Agile Leadership Culture from the Inside Out integrates this rich and varied background and experience, and provides a blueprint for what it means to be an agile leader in today’s complex world.
Lyssa Adkins is an internationally-recognized thought leader in the Agile community. She is deeply trained and experienced in human systems coaching and facilitation and she is a frequent keynote speaker. Her content expertise is agile coaching, adult human development, and working with change and complexity.
She is the author of Coaching Agile Teams which is still a Top 10 book a dozen years after publication. Her current focus is improving the performance of top leadership teams through insightful facilitation and organization systems coaching to help leaders take up the individual and collective transformation that is theirs to do
What is Vertical Learning?
In this introductory video—excerpted from the Warm-up video course—Michael answers the question “What is Vertical Learning?”. Vertical Learning is that kind of learning in which individuals and teams become more aware of the processes by which they come to understand, and align toward common action. These ‘processes’ include the interrelational and conversational activity of sensemaking, as well as the underlying meaning-making structures that determine that activity.
To the degree that people—both individually and collectively—can become aware of the processes by which they make sense of their world, they render themselves more choiceful in their actions, and understanding and motivations that govern those actions.