What really piques Martin de los Rios' interests is social planning, especially governance and conflict resolution. In 2009, he met Myrna Lewis and was introduced to the three levels of Lewis Deep Democracy. This led him to spend the next 18 months training to be a Deep Democracy instructor. The training culminated with him flying to Johannesburg in 2010, to attend a "Train the Trainer" summit that involved breaking though trainer/participant/process issues and delivering Deep Democracy training amongst other Deep Democracy experts, he was awarded the title of Deep Democracy Instructor. Nowadays, Martin has integrated Lewis Deep Democracy practise into his daily life and with the other tools that he uses in his consulting business. He used to work at the City of Melbourne when he was becoming an instructor. He used deep democracy for community engagement processes and internally through organizational development programmes. One such example of the latter was facilitating better team dynamics through Deep Democracy as a coach. At the time, there was an important Technology Innovation Initiative put forth by his organization, however, team dynamics were getting in the way: the team was struggling with the manager, conversations were unproductive, expectations and goals were not being met, and a general sense of annoyance was festering amongst team members. Given a looming organizational mandated deadline and a short amount of time to remedy the situation, Martin used a variety of Deep Democracy tools such as the Soft Shoe Shuffle and Amplification to help the team have the conversation that they had been avoiding. The team was polarised, the manager on one side and her team on the other. He introduced The Argument process to create clarity and help people say what they need to say. The end result was transformative for everyone. "It was a break-through, they moved beyond the excuses they were giving each other, there was growth through the team's awareness of the situation, there was better interaction, and in the end they were able to hold the event they were tasked with doing on schedule. " Martin refers to these outcomes: "as the ones that create a real group hug." He chose Deep Democracy over the other engagement methods because he believes the majority of other methods pursue and focus only the outcomes. This artificial outcome may result in quicker buy-ins from participants but these successes Martin says, "are often times short-lived, artificial, and ultimately: the issue(s) still remain(s), shoved under the carpet, growing." Martin believes Deep Democracy is better in this regard; "Deep Democracy enables participants to not only explore their own positions but to explore the positions of others, which results in an unexpected learning and realization. Built into this process is a promise of growth at the personal and group level that results in long-term agreement and more profound outcomes: group transformation." Martin believes there are two steps for preparing himself to facilitate a difficult session. Firstly, he clears his head to be in a good space: [...]
