About Pattern Breaks
Pattern Breaks is a handbook for navigating the world of creative facilitation. It is for facilitators, trainers, educators, group leaders, and anyone who would like to bring more creativity out of their groups and out of themselves. It provides food for both thought and action. If you would like to cultivate creativity and aliveness in your design and facilitation, this book can help you:
• Bring more enthusiasm and ingenuity out of participants
• Become a more adaptive, improvisational, and resilient facilitator
• Gain confidence and ease in navigating challenges, and resistance
• Actualize your unique creativity for impactful and meaningful design
• Bring more fun and lightness into facilitating serious topics
• Get buy-in from clients for nontraditional approaches
• Cultivate conditions for emergence and co-creation
• Generate life-giving outcomes that serve the good of the whole
Pattern Breaks explores both ways of being and ways of doing. From concepts to mindsets to practical applications and more, this book provides a rich trove of ideas, principles, and practices, along with an abundance of activities, to apply before, during, and after your workshop or event. It focuses on two levels at the same time— you as a facilitator of creative process, and you as a creative individual.
Michelle James has combined over two decades of learnings, experiences, and insights as a facilitator and coach of creative process for thousands of participants— in corporations, nonprofits, government agencies, universities, and communities of practice— to distill what she discovered into relevant and accessible wisdom. This book is an invitation to expand your creative facilitation as you expand your creative self.
About Michelle James
Michelle James is a seasoned applied creativity facilitator, coach, and catalyst who has been using creative principles and practices, and the process of emergence, as the basis for her work with thousands of people— corporations, nonprofits, government agencies, and communities—for over two decades. Known for her original and richly textured dynamic and imaginative learning environments, Michelle presents at learning and creativity events internationally, and has been featured on many podcasts and in other media.
She founded The Center for Creative Emergence in 1999 based on her experiences with the creative emergence process that unfolded over time in her personal journey, as well as years of work with and study of various facets of creative process, organizational development and change, somatic psychology, integral theory, group dynamics approaches, psychodrama, dialogue, design thinking, accelerated learning, the arts, movement, bodywork, mythology, improv theater, systems thinking, consciousness studies, applied storytelling, and the complexity sciences. She performed full-length improvised plays with Precipice Improv for 10 years, and currently performs with Virginia Playback Theater.
If you are interested in working with Michelle, creative facilitation coaching, customized workshops or retreats, train-the-trainer programs, public events and offerings, go to creativeemergence.com.