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, resistance, and the unexpected that comes with the creative process
• Actualize your unique creativity for impactful and meaningful design
• Establish environments receptive to novelty and transformation
• 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
• And more

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.