Strategic Facilitation
Designing and facilitating conversations around complex questions.
Facilitator of Complex Conversations
Ivan Vedenin
Designing spaces where people can think together.
I help people, teams, and organizations navigate complexity through dialogue, systems thinking, and collaborative design.
Warsaw · in person and online
What I do
Creating conditions for shared understanding.
I create environments where independent people can align perspectives, explore difficult questions, and develop new understanding.
Co-Creation Design
Creating frameworks for collective thinking and collaborative problem solving.
Innovation Programs
Designing hackathons, innovation labs, and incubation journeys.
Executive Dialogues
Curating meaningful conversations among leaders and decision-makers.
How I work
Most challenges cannot be solved by expertise alone.
They require better conversations. My work focuses on creating conditions where insight, alignment, and new possibilities can emerge.
- Dialogue before solutions
- Systems before symptoms
- Understanding before action
Practice in action
This is what working together looks like: a hackathon for the NGO SINGO, Warsaw, 2026.
Hackathon facilitation
Discussion setup
Checkpoint: teams sync on course
Team debrief
Pitch session
Field notes
About Ivan
One practice since 1998: environments where people think and act together.
My practice started in 1998 with a desire to play computer games. Dial-up internet was useless for gaming, so I began running cable between apartments. That grew into one of the first neighborhood networks in Minsk: a few neighbors at first, fifteen hundred users over time. And along with the network, unexpectedly, a community grew: self-governance, membership fees, conflicts, all of it real. That was when I first saw what later became my life's work: the network created a community, and the community formed around the network.
Since then I have built such environments out of different materials. Out of skills: in 2006 I started a training school and taught adults communication and self-presentation. Years later this would be called soft skills. Or, more precisely: I was building not trainings but a system for passing the ability on. More than a dozen assistants and two staff trainers grew out of its graduates to back me up.
Out of platforms: in 2012 I became co-author of the idea and creative director of Talaka.by, a platform where Belarusians did projects for Belarus together. Over five years more than a thousand initiatives passed through it. We taught project skills on real projects, launched the first crowdfunding in Belarus, with no bank involved, built on public pledges, and ran the #RazamMinsk city projects contest with Onliner and velcom, where prizes went only to what actually got built.
Out of thinking: since 2011, the Flying University and methodological seminars where live thinking was practiced. Since 2012 I have been a game technician in organizational activity games. Ten of them by now, and one, in 2017, was mine: designed and led end-to-end. In 2016 I took part in the first "Values. Responsibility. Future" seminar in Belarus, run on the Aspen method, and in 2024 and 2025 I moderated four such seminars and trained new moderators.
I have been inside business too: co-founder of Synpatic, a startup that recognized emotions in the human voice; at TDI I designed a market-simulation business game for 113 people, then tracked startups in their accelerator and facilitated the founders; two years as a project manager in a 20-year-old IT company, where I saw what happens to an organization when dialogue dies.
In 2019, together with a co-host, I launched ITSTARTS, a podcast about the Belarusian IT scene. The idea: a screen on which the industry talks to itself. The podcast lived for two seasons, then 2020 arrived.
Today I live in Warsaw, run games and Aspen-method seminars, and explore how artificial intelligence amplifies thinking, personal and collective.
For me, all of this is a way of being myself: doing what I am good at, sharing it, and living in the practice of live thinking.
Selected work
- 2026 Hackathon for the NGO SINGO: format design and full-cycle facilitation, Warsaw.
- 2024–2025 "Values. Responsibility. Future" seminars on the Aspen method: moderated four seminars, trained new moderators. Took part in the first one in Belarus in 2016.
- 2012–2026 Organizational activity games: game technician in ten games, from the Flying University to international strategy sessions. My own game in 2017.
- 2020 Team-building trainings at the Hi-Tech Park training center.
- 2017 Business game for the TDI advertising group: a market simulator for 113 participants.
- 2012–2017 Talaka.by: co-author of the idea and creative director. The first crowdfunding in Belarus, the #RazamMinsk city projects contest with Onliner and velcom.
Formats
Possible ways to work together.
Problem-Focused Sessions
For teams stuck where old approaches no longer work — reaching a shared, honest answer to “what is the real problem?” before jumping to solutions.
Innovation Programs
Multi-session formats for ecosystems, communities, and institutions — from problem definition to prototype.
Hackathons
End-to-end design and facilitation, from challenge framing to expert mentorship and pitch.
Executive Dialogues
Curated conversations among leaders in the Aspen seminar tradition — dialogue before conclusions.
Organizational Simulations
Interactive game environments for collective learning, role exploration, and strategic reflection.
Selected questions
How can teams think better under uncertainty?
How do independent organizations work together without losing autonomy?
A coffee and a conversation
Bring a question you keep circling. An hour of thinking together over coffee — in Warsaw or online.
Think it through
The coffee's on you — a small sign the conversation matters. After the coffee, message me on Telegram and we'll find a time.