“Most workshops are dysfunctional—this one wasn’t!” read one evaluation from the first NewSSC workshop in 2004. Appreciative feedback like that may feel like validation for the any workshop or collaborative processes that you facilitate, but how well can you articulate or support the principles or theory about personal and group change that underlie those processes? Moreover, how would you lead people who experience the dysfunction in many workshops, collaborations, conferences and meetings into making the effort to create something more fulfilling?

This four-session Collaborative Exploration (CE) is intended to allow participants to delve into the principles or theory that underlie your own workshop or collaborative processes and develop plans to make those processes more effective in some sense(s) that you deem important. Activities will, as they have in CEs since 2013 (and NewSSC workshops since 2004), build on what the particular group of participants contribute and employ a range of tools and processes so as to support and learn from each other's inquiries. The topic means that the processes of the CE (and NewSSC workshops) and the ways they make space for people to "connect, probe, reflect, and create" will end up being subject to compare-and-contrast with other approaches to workshops and generative group interactions.