Creating the Conditions for Learning: Facilitation as Practice with Dr. Nyasha M. GuramatunhCooper

In this episode, Dan and Lauren welcome back Dr. Nyasha M. GuramatunhuCooper, founder of Girton Road Leadership Learning & Consulting. Nyasha's path into the discipline ran through a doctoral program at Gonzaga where she found room to ask bigger questions. One of those questions came from a student at Kennesaw State early in her career, who asked why they should be learning about leadership in African countries. In that conversation, her home region of Southern Africa had been positioned as a consumer of leadership knowledge rather than a producer of it, and unsettling that assumption has been a throughline in her teaching and writing ever since.

Resources and works mentioned in this episode include:

• Girton Road Leadership Learning & Consulting — Nyasha's consulting practice
• The Accidental Facilitator — Nyasha's workshop on foundational facilitation skills, co-created with a business partner
• Holding Space — Heidi Brooks' facilitator-development retreat through the Interpersonal and Group Dynamics program at Yale School of Management
• ILA Leadership Education Academy — Nyasha attended the inaugural LEA in 2015 and has since served on the facilitator team
• Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers: The Story of Success. Little, Brown and Company — the popularization of the "10,000 hours" concept drawing on Ericsson's research
• Heifetz, R. A. (1994). Leadership Without Easy Answers. Harvard University Press