Rosa Zubizarreta-Ada

Rosa’s calling is to help develop our societal capacity for transforming friction and conflict into creative energy and systemic insights. Trained as an organization development consultant, one of Rosa’s practices is Dynamic Facilitation. Author of the manual From Conflict to Creative Collaboration, she teaches this collaborative sense-making process internationally.

Many of Rosa’s writings on relational facilitation and democratic innovations are available on her Diapraxis website. In spring of 2023, she completed a Ph.D. at Fielding Graduate University with a dissertation on the facilitation of collaborative meaning-making in the Austrian Bürgerräte or Citizens’ Councils. This democratic innovation began in Vorarlberg in 2006, and continues to evolve and spread. For the academic year 2023-2024, Rosa was a Democracy Visiting Fellow at the Ash Center of the Harvard Kennedy School. In September of 2024, she began a fellowship at the Research Institute for Sustainability in Potsdam, Germany.

Rosa has been actively collaborating with Tom Atlee since the late 1990’s. In 2000, Tom persuaded her to attend her first Dynamic Facilitation workshop with Jim Rough, its founder. A few years later, Rosa helped midwife Tom’s first book The Tao of Democracy while completing a master’s degree in the Organization Development program at Sonoma State, led by Professor Saul Eisen. This book collaboration with Tom was the beginning of Rosa’s interest in bringing her OD skills and mindset to the growing deliberative democracy movement.

Rosa’s academic and professional background is multi-disciplinary, with masters’ degrees in social work and education in addition to OD. At various times, she has worked as a translator, teacher, curriculum materials developer, and clinical social worker. All of this deeply informs her practice as an organizational consultant and facilitator of catalytic conversations: the “red thread” throughout is the power of heart-centered listening and the power of narrative.

With a life-long passion for social change, Rosa has explored the intersection of group facilitation and social transformation in her occasional blog The Listening Arts. Her most recent writings are accessible through her link tree.