Nourishing the Facilitator. Advancing the Practice.
The Facilitators’ Muse™ is a living knowledge ecosystem for: facilitators (internal and external), emerging practitioners, and professionals exploring facilitation. Professional facilitation is a practice-based discipline in which practitioners apply and continually refine professional knowledge, skill, judgement, and wisdom through experience, reflection, inquiry, learning, and stewardship.
The Facilitators’ Muse™ brings together reflective practice, Action Research, literature review and collective learning to develop practitioner knowledge and professional wisdom, then shares and applies that knowledge through publications and learning experiences to strengthen facilitation practice and contribute to the profession.
A Living Knowledge Ecosystem
The Facilitators’ Muse™ (TFM) begins with a simple idea: professional knowledge is constructed, not simply acquired.
Facilitators develop professional judgement and practical wisdom through experience, reflection, inquiry, research, dialogue, learning, and continued practice.
TFM creates opportunities for practitioners to reflect on experience, explore significant questions, develop practitioner knowledge, share what they are learning, and contribute to the continuing development of facilitation practice and the profession.
How The Facilitators’ Muse™ Works
The Facilitators’ Muse™ begins with experience. Through reflection, practitioners notice questions worth exploring. Inquiry draws upon practitioner experience, Action Research, community conversations, literature and research. What is learned is interpreted, tested, shared, applied, and returned to practice—creating new experience, new questions, and continuing professional learning.
- Experience creates questions.
- Reflection helps us see what matters.
- Questions lead to inquiry.
- Inquiry develops practitioner knowledge.
- Knowledge strengthens practice.
- Improved practice creates new experience.
Who is The Facilitators’ Muse™ For
The Facilitators’ Muse™ is for: facilitators (internal and external), emerging practitioners, and professionals exploring facilitation who want to think more deeply about practice, learn from experience, contribute practitioner knowledge, and continue growing throughout their professional lives.
Whether you are developing your practice, exploring an important professional question, contributing to an inquiry, or considering what comes next, there is a place to begin.
Facilitation Is a Practice Profession
Facilitation is a practice profession in which professional judgement is continuously refined through experience, reflection, inquiry, learning, and stewardship.
Professional knowledge is constructed, not simply acquired. And professional growth is a lifelong process of learning, judgement, wisdom, and contribution.
Methods evolve. Philosophy endures.
What The Facilitators’ Muse™ Does
Reflective Edge™
Thought-provoking questions, quotations, dilemmas, and stories that stimulate ongoing professional reflection.
Action Research
Practitioner inquiry that explores significant questions arising from facilitation practice and develops useful knowledge from experience, evidence, dialogue, and reflection.
Publications
Blogs, newsletters, journals, books, card decks, and other resources that synthesize and share practitioner knowledge.
Learning Experiences
Facilitated workshops, cohorts, conversations, and other opportunities to apply, test, and extend knowledge in practice.
Ways to Engage
There are many ways to enter The Facilitators’ Muse™ knowledge ecosystem. Begin with the kind of engagement that fits where you are now. TFM creates different ways for practitioners to reflect, inquire, learn, develop knowledge, share what they are learning, and strengthen practice.
We observe in order to explore.
We reflect in order to understand.
We inquire in order to interpret.
We learn in order to apply.
We contribute so that knowledge and practice can continue to be refined.
Explore
Encounter ideas, questions, resources and perspectives
Reflect
Pause, notice and consider
Inquire
Investigate questions, assumptions, research findings, and emerging practitioner knowledge.
Learn
Develop and apply new understanding.
Contribute
Share experience, insight and practitioner knowledge.
Featured Learning Experience
Pathways to Clarity: Exploring the Encore Career Path™
Pathways to Clarity: Exploring the Encore Career Path™ is a reflective inquiry process designed to help professional, experienced, and certified facilitators at a threshold, as well as those curious about facilitation, understand where they are, clarify what matters now, and discern what is truly next.
There are different ways to begin this work, depending on where you are in your journey.
A 6–8 week guided experience for discerning what is truly next.
Explore Your Journey As a Facilitator
A Facilitators’ Journey is a key reflective activity within the See phase of Pathways to Clarity: Exploring the Encore Career Path™. It helps you look back across your life and facilitation practice to notice the experiences, turning points, people, choices, and patterns that have shaped the practitioner you have become.
The purpose is not to create a résumé or document every milestone. It is to make your experience visible—to step back, see your journey as a whole, and begin identifying what has mattered, what has changed, what continues to call your attention, and what your accumulated experience may be telling you now.
Within Pathways to Clarity™, this reflection becomes part of the foundation for the discernment that follows: understanding where you are, clarifying what matters, and considering what may be next.
You can use it on its own as a reflective exercise, or as your first step into the deeper discernment work of Pathways to Clarity™.
Begin Where You Are
Whether you are questioning, transitioning, or ready to act, there is a pathway forward.
Stay Connected to The Muse
The Facilitators’ Muse™ is a continuing conversation about facilitation practice—what we experience, what we question, what we are learning, and what we can contribute to the profession.
Follow new Reflective Edge™ questions, Action Research inquiries, publications, learning opportunities, and emerging practitioner knowledge.