Rosa Zubizarreta

Rosa Zubizarreta = expert in group facilitation

Bio

"As founder of DiaPraxis, Rosa Zubizarreta enjoys helping facilitative leaders and groups work productively with conflicting perspectives. Her commitment is to developing societal expertise in the area transforming conflict into collaboration.

With a Master's degree in Organization Development, Rosa has experience with traditional approaches such as Action Research as well as newer dialogical approaches including Future Search, Open Space, and World Café. She has written a user's guide on Dynamic Facilitation, which she began studying and practicing in 2000.

In addition to her work with business, community, and non-profit organizations, Rosa's background includes clinical social work and education reform. In the personal development realm, she is a certified Focusing professional, an experienced Heart IQ coach, and has trained in Internal Family Systems therapy. She is presently earning a PhD in Human and Organizational Systems at Fielding Graduate University."

Rosa Zubizarreta works as an organization development consultant, facilitating creative collaboration and greater effectiveness in business, government, nonprofit, and community settings. Her earlier professional background includes work in education, education reform, and social services, where she gained experience with transformative education, critical pedagogy, learning communities, and strengths-based approaches. In the area of collective intelligence and the evolution of democracy, her published work includes a collaboration with Tom Atlee on his book The Tao of Democracy (Imprint/BookSurge, 2002). Her essay on the social applications of dialogue, Deepening Democracy: Awakening the spirit of our shared life together was written for the Collective Wisdom Initiative (a project of the Fetzer Institute) and is available at www.collectivewisdominitiative.org/papers/zubizarreta_democracy.htm

Within the arena of group facilitation, she has been mapping the emergence of a field of non-linear methods for working creatively with practical tasks, and is working on developing a "pattern language" of the basic principles that these various approaches have in common. Some initial descriptions of this work can be found in "Practical Dialogue: Emergent approaches for effective collaboration", a chapter in the forthcoming book Creating A Culture of Collaboration: The International Association of Facilitators Handbook (Jossey-Bass/Wiley 2006.) and on her website (http://www.diapraxis.com). She also offers workshops and trainings in Jim Rough's Dynamic Facilitation, one of these non-linear methodologies for fostering practical creativity.

She is also interested in the parallels between processes that foster emergence on a personal level and those that do so on a group level. She is trained as a Focusing teacher (Focusing Partnership is a peer-to-peer process that facilitates personal growth and creativity at a personal level) and her emphasis is offering this practice to facilitators, mediators, and other change agents who seek to foster emergence in groups. http://www.focusing.org/fots/cfp_personal_web_page.asp?customerid=1150

In the realm of spirituality, she has written several articles for Turning Wheel: The Journal of Engaged Buddhism on the creative potential of listening to diverse perspectives, and has contributed a chapter to the book Dharma, Color, and Culture by Hilda Gutierrez Baldoquin, her-etically titled "How can I be a Buddhist if I don't like to sit?" Zubizarreta holds a master of arts degree in psychology from the Organization Development program at Sonoma State University and another masters in multicultural education from the University of San Francisco."