This is a non-conventional creative teacher, change-maker, and community builder exploration program.

The current online track started in September 2024 and will run till April 2025 on the following dates, from 11:00 till 16:00 Brussels time.

September 20th 2024
October 11th 2024
November 7th 2024
December 18th 2024
Jan 21st 2025
Feb 17th 2025
March 14th 2025
April 25th 2025

Cohort meetup day - December 18th 2025.

Since the cohort has started, we have closed the registrations. Please contact us if you'd like to be informed about future cohorts.

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Where this starts from

When we are working with groups around a specific topic, be it to learn new content and skills, conduct a big room planning, build a product roadmap, run a retrospective, host an offsite, start a new initiative, prepare and create a cooperative art performance, streamline a community process, we are basically facilitating the work for others. And although we may have designed a script for the workshop, at some point, something unexpected happens, which throws a spanner in the works.

Kishotenketsu provides a space for facilitators from all around the world - whether they’re seasoned facilitators or just starting – to continue their work in all ease, and not be threatened or unsettled by unexpected events and change of plans.

The best way to learn facilitation skills is by doing it, so this learning track focuses heavily on practice. The program is hybrid and lives in many concurrent spaces: participants practice I love with each other and guests in live online (synchronous) sessions, with their peers and colleagues in their respective workplaces, using non-synchronous online channels such as Telegram and WhatsApp, and sometimes randomly meeting up with each other at some place in the world.

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What this is

This is the post-information age. Everything is Google-able, and what isn’t will soon be created by AI. At last, education, learning, and the facilitation of processes are regaining the freedom to dig deeper and go beneath the surface of providing info and getting people to know things.

Learning in professional environments is rarely organic, a lived experience, and often not without pressure. For 45 years, and over a lifeline stretching from Japan over Southeast Asia to India, the Gulf, the Middle East, Africa, Europe and South-America, Francis Laleman (click for bio), has been sourcing inspiration from the most unexpected, cross-cultural sources - and experimenting with a large variety of unconventional formats – in search of restoring community work and organizational learning to their rightful place.

In the late 2010s, a chance meeting in Brussels with Charles-Louis de Maere (click for profile) brought about unique creative and collaborative spark – which led to the Kishotenketsu movement.

The idea

The insight that community processes (like for example organizational learning) work best when they describe natural phenomena originated during a prolonged residency with marginalized communities in Bihar, India, where Francis reportedly learned most of what he has on offer.

The link with narrative patterns came from the Dutch video & conceptual art practitioner and cultural theorist Mieke Bal.

Kishotenketsu is the name of a natural narrative pattern taken from East Asia. Natural narrative patterns offer a unique mixture of nature and human imaginary – permitting for models, theories, knowledge, and skills to be extracted from immersive experiences triggering curiosity and abundant enthusiasm.

Here is kishōtenketsu in its four beats:

Ki — is where we get to know the space and the different elements in it
Shō — is where the immersion starts to unfold
Ten — is the twist, where we are flashed with insight and understanding
Ketsu — is where we regain stability and take stock of what has happened

Read more about natural patterns and Kishotenketsu here

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The program

Kishotenketsu exists in many guises and version – as an in-company or in-residency multi-day retreat, an online study club, random pop-up activities, or dedicated CCA’s in schools.

The program you are looking at here, runs in global cohorts sharing facilitated webspace for a full year, with eight monthly six-hour online get-togethers, non-exclusively focusing in turn on eight aspects of the art of facilitation and being a facilitator.

It’s like digging deeper and deeper into the root system of the tree of learning systems:

In the course of this rough, indicative program outline, and always with the focus remaining on practice by the participants, the following learning topics, and/or others, may or may not come to our common use:

Program outcome

Upon completion, all program participants are certified by their peers and other members of the fastly growing Kishotenketsu community, and you will “go home” with a relevant, artful certificate proving as much.

But much more than being certified, you have learned the skills. And you are familiar with the world of a vast, diverse, and wild bunch of people and their work that have inspired Kishotenketsu, a/o (in no particular order) Augusto Boal, Paolo Freire, Rabindranath Tagore, Johan Huizinga, Herman Teirlinck, Satyajit Ray, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Yoshi Oida, Fukuoka Masanobu, Gregory Bateson, Ken Robinson, Muhammad Iqbal, Maria Montessori, Tan Yun-Shan, Nishida Kitaro, Watsuji Tetsuro, Augustin Berque, Jacques Lecoq, Kenya Hara, Helen Pankhurst, Lev Vygotski, and many more.

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For whom

This is for the curious. This workshop is for you if organizational development and learning are your passions. Whether you are an instructional or process designer, a (learning) experience or UX designer, organizational developer, facilitator, trainer, educator, social worker, systemic facilitator, HR specialist, or any role related to competency and talent in individuals and groups - for change.

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Your facilitators:

Francis Laleman is a Singapore-based Asia Studies specialist, Sanskrit and Pali teacher, and non-conventional educationist, designer, and facilitator, who moved from academics (pursuing a doctorate in historical Buddhism in India) to being an apprentice monk, and from there to social work, the Agile movement, Scrum mastery, and the world of learning theory, learning design, and facilitation.

Francis has been designing, using and teaching non-conventional facilitation methodologies for more than 40 years - in Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Hong Kong SAR), the Gulf (Emirates, Oman, Kuwait), the Middle East (Syria, Lebanon), South America (Argentina, Uruguay), and Europe and the UK.

Francis Laleman Link Tree

Charles-Louis de Maere is the proud father of three teenagers and work as a facilitator of learning with many organizations throughout the world. Charles-Louis started his career as a Systems Administrator crafting beautiful Perl and Bash scripts to maintain the systems over different continents. After a couple of years he moved to the Software Development team and soon realized that technical problems were the easiest to solve... the real challenge lies in getting human beings to align. That's where he started exploring the ingredients that contribute to cooperation, through regular retrospectives, holding the space for folks to speak out and come up with their own plan.

Charles-Louis has been exploring how storytelling, visual thinking, improvisation and more support the uncovering of how we're working together for the past 15 years, working online and in-person in Peru, West-Africa (Burkina Faso, Benin, Niger), East and South-East Asia (Hong-Kong, Indonesia, Vietnam and Philippines), Europe, Switzerland and the UK.

Charles Louis on LinkedIn

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Reading and merch

Kishotenketsu merch is available from the Beyond Borders Web Shop.
Back up reading: book and articles.

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What people have said about this

cooperative learning, safe space. I loved the (very) creative approach. what a refreshing way of introducing theory through immersion in practice, from the first moment onwards.
this program is a must-do for every trainer, teacher, facilitator.
francis is a most inspiring trainer. just observing him at work means so much to me. he makes you think creatively, kicks down a whole series of conventionally accepted models - and offers fresh alternatives to creative learning which exactly fits the needs of the trainees.
I am truly astonished by what I have learned in just a few days. I have discovered a whole new way of being a trainer, of providing interactive sessions - and francis helped me explore how I can apply all these newly acquired insights and tools at my own workplace.
(participants in earlier editions, 2020-2021)
I love attending anything by Charles-Louis. I love the fun in his voice, in the rhetoric, in his stories, in his philosophy, I love how he is talking to the human and creative part in us, giving us the opportunity to introspect and make the tools he shows our own.
(Marwane El Kharbili, PhD, Düsseldorf, 2021)

Here are some great testimonials from the 2022 cohort:
Francesco Bianchi - Jalaja Pillai - Cloe Berthiaume-Poulliot - Brent Que

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Schedule for the next online cohort

The program has 8 plenary days spread out over one year, happening online.
One year after the last day, there is a cohort reunion day, which serves as the official closure of the program.

September 20th 2024
October 11th 2024
November 7th 2024
December 18th 2024
Jan 21st 2025
Feb 17th 2025
March 14th 2025
April 25th 2025

Cohort meetup day - December 18th 2025

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Registration and billing

We like to work on a pay-what-you-think-is-fair basis. For this reason, registration comes in two steps.

First, buy a basic admission ticket (€ 1,300) for the entire program (nine days in total).
Then, adjust the facilitator's fee up or down, accommodating your choice and/or circumstances.
Upon receipt, we issue invoices for all payments.
Thank you for leaving us your invoicing details (name, address, VAT number if any).