Over the years I’ve noticed a trend in consultative facilitations that goes something like this: a client calls wanting to consult with the community about something. Sometimes this takes the form of a leader wanting to engage employees. The request is usually to design an event where we can hear from people without them being dominated by more powerful voices. At some point the client says something like “we’d like to have our people there as observers or table hosts or mixed in as silent listeners.”
Often this looks like elected officials not wanting to dominate citizen meetings, government or agency staff not wanting to dominate community meetings, or executive teams not wanting to dominate the lower level employees.
My response to this over the years has been to push back hard against that idea, despite how noble it seems. Often it comes from a good place: that those with power want to create space for people without power to speak and have their ideas taken seriously. I get that, and I honour it, but truthfully the best way to do engagement is to, well, engage. It’s entirely possible to design engagement to maximize what you want and minimize what you don;t want all the while not create
Let’s get a few things out of the way
- Groups of people are never free of power and dominating behaviours. It doesn’t matter if you are using a well conducted circle process or a self-organizing process, or placing limits on who can speak and who cannot. It is impossible to build a group process that is free from these behaviours. So the challenge is to mitigate them.
- In truly participatory processes, observers are indeed influential. Have you ever been somewhere and there are people there not participating, just watching from the sides silently and taking notes? Does it feel like this kind of set up lessens power in any way or builds trust?
- If you are consulting because you don’t know the answer to a question, being absent from the conversations does not help you learn. The trickiest challenges we face aren’t solved by listening quietly to someone else in the hopes that they will provide you the answer you are looking for. They are addressed by diving in together and looking for ways to tackle problems in new ways.
If you are facing a truly sticky issue and you have no answers, getting as many people as possible fully engaged in exploring it is critical. So here are a few bits of advice I find myself giving out time after time, in no particular order.
Use a process like Open Space or World Cafe that allows participants to set their own agendas. These processes, and many others, place the onus of discovery, creativity and action on the participants. They operate from the assumptions that the ways forward are there to be discovered together, from the creative spaces between people. Furthermore they are founded on good dialogic principles, which you can point to and practice, such as, speak from your experience, listen to learn and be aware of your impact. Inviting a group into these practices helps them focus on each other as as potential experts.
Use small groups and break them up. I’ve never understood the aversion to small groups, but trust me when I say that you can do very little rapid creative work in groups larger than five. If you want to learn more about my approach to group sizes, here’s a post summing up what I know, and here’s a quick video my friend Nancy White made. Making and breaking up small groups is an important complex facilitation technique that allows for people to create without getting entrained and therefore sinking into domination patterns are or other kinds of bias.
Trust your people. There is an undercurrent to the base worry that clients share with me, and it’s worth addressing with them. I find that when we probe deeper, we discover that often the client has a deeper issue about either trusting their own people to behave well, or trusting a group of “lesser powered” folks to be resilient enough to speak. This is actually easily remedied by designing the session well, but it sometimes helps to have an offline conversation about the way the client feels about participants.
Have truly open questions. If you want your meeting to be truly participatory and engaging, you have to ask a group a questions you are stuck on. The questions need to be open and honest, and the group you assemble needs to be the people best suited to explore the question and create actions around it. Never bring a pre-determined answer to a participatory process, and give people the illusion that they are creating something new together. It’s unethical. Beyond that, truly open questions make it easy to encourage people to listen to one another and they de-centre expertise, meaning that the group itself can truly become the experts. If we can separate those in power from those with answers, we get a truly rich dialogue and learning experience.
Commit to supporting what you start. In my practice of chaordic design, I call this the Architecture of Implementation. You have to know what you are willing to commit to ensure that whatever happens at the meeting will have an effect. This doesn’t always mean money. It could also mean that time, space, power, connections, and many other resources can be put at the behest of the group to move to action. It could also be that you let people know that “nothing will come of this meeting beyond the learning that happens in the meeting itself. It doesn’t matter to me what the architecture is, but it does matter to the group. Being honest helps people to show up in a trusting way, and helps them to know how much time and energy to spend on your initiative.
Invite authentically. If you have designed with all of the above in mind, you can authentically invite the right people to your gathering with very little fear that there will be catastrophic domination. And authentic invitation brings people into the room ready to work on a problem that they are needed for. That is a powerful call.
I’m sure lots of experienced facilitators out there have other wisdom to add about how to address this concern. What have you got to add?
I’m on the road, currently in Columbus Ohio, working my way through a two week road trip that has taken me to Ontario to visit family and to New Brunswick where I was part of a remarkable hosting team for the Art of Hosting Working Across Divides. It was a timely gathering for 70 people from government, civil society, and social enterprise to come and learn how to work with differences.
In Canada’s only bilingual province, language is a massive difference between people, and New Brunswick has a multitude of language cultures. There are 34 local French accents alone in New Brunswick and probably just as many English ones too, having to do with class and ethnicity and proximity to the sea or the woods.
In the last provincial election there, the virus of populism had its day and took these existing differences and turned them into divides. Right wing populists have a well-trod strategy for doing this. Instead of pointing to differences between people, they tap the fear that people have of people who are different than them, without naming the other. This is called “dogwhistle politics.” Once they find a fear of the other that elicits an emotional response, they double down on the fear often, but not always, with lies and misrepresentation. When their political opponents offer up diversity and difference as an asset to a healthy society, the populists accuse them of “divisiveness.” They claim that only their approach will bring “unity” typically by eliminating any conversation that recognizes the value of differences. Often their “unity” platform is basically assimilitation: “if only you were like us, we’d have unity; if you want to be different, you’re creating division.” Sometimes they outright declare such an emphasis on difference to be “racist.” If you want to see this in action, visit Rebel Media, an organization I will simply refuse to link to. They are great at this.
The pithy insight on difference and divisiveness that struck me in this Art of Hosting is this: differences are real and useful, and division is one thing you can do with them. People are different, and offer different perspectives, lived experiences, and world views on things. These differences are essential to living and working in complexity, because a homogeneous view of a situation leaves you open to crises hitting you unawares. Cultivating difference is a good strategy for surviving and thriving in a complex situation. Seeking out differences of opinion is essential, finding people who are different than you and working with them makes you all smarter.
Divisions happen when people become so afraid of the other that they stop making the effort to bridge the gap. When this happens a kind of vacuum opens up between people and that gap is the thing that populists exploit. Political power can be won and held with a very thin margin these days in Canada. You only need about 20% of the voters to vote for your party. If you get your vote out, and the opposition is split or apathetic, you can form power. In New Brunswick the current government was formed on this exact number: about 31% of voters voted Conservative, and only 67% of the eligible voters cast a ballot. The populist People’s Alliance hold the balance of power. (In Ontario, Doug Ford came to power with 23.49% of eligible voters supporting his party.)
The way to defeat populism is to not allow people to play on your fears of other people who are different from you. It means convening incredibly diverse spaces and creating the conditions for people to show up with their unique perspectives, working WITH differences. That sometimes means doing things that make differences more stark, to explore different experiences, different ideas and different stories, so we can learn from each other. And it sometimes means making differences less pronounced so that we can find common purpose or shared perspective.
Divisiveness does not come from people working with differences. Divisiveness comes from people inserting fear into the gaps between people who are different.
Its that time of year when we are getting ready to invite people back to Bowen Island for our annual Art of Hosting. Since 2004, folks have travelled from all over the world to come to this gathering. Over four days and three nights, we will be diving in with each to explore powerful tools for participatory leadership, engagement and hosting conversations.
Our team this year consists of myself, Caitlin Frost, Amanda Fenton and Teresa Posakony, four long time Art of Hosting stewards who have extended their practice into other related fields. These are some of my closest colleagues in the work, and people with whom I have done some of most interesting, engaging and complex work in my career. We each bring a deep set of practices and experiences to our work and we all love teaching.
Caitlin is one of the world’s foremost practitioners of The Work of Byron Katie, a practice of self-inquiry that has been used by leaders and participants in our program to develop a strong personal leadership practice for inquiring into limiting beliefs. Being able to show up resrouceful in challenging work is a crucial aspect to participatory leadership, whether you are leading an organization, a community or a single meeting. The Art of Hosting is predicated on the ability of hosts to hold space when we are uncertain of outcomes and dealing with emergence. Caitlin will be leading a half day of work during the workshop to introduce participants to the practice and demonstrate ways of using similar practices collectively, so that groups can increase their capacity for working in complexity.
Amanda is a steward of The Circle Way, which is the core practice behind the Art of Hosting. Understanding how to lead and work in Circle gives hosts and leaders a powerful practice ground for participatory leadership. It is a place where hosts can learn how to practice standing in places of power and leadership and how to lend their attention to holding open the space that is needed for voices and leadership to emerge within a system . Circle practice is not simply about a dialogue method, but is instead a ground for developing the leadership skills needed for participatory work.
Over the past decade, Teresa’s work has combined skillful participatory practice with a curiosity about how to change systems, especially those systems that are responsible for health and education. Using a combination of learnings from research in neurology, epigenetics, adverse childhood experiences and resilience, Teresa has put together a body of work to bring trauma informed practice to leadership, participatory gatherings and systems change.
This year we are also being joined by a colleague from Japan, Yurie Makihara who uses dialogue and participatory leadership in her work with businesses and municipalities in Japan on sustainability issues.
As for me, I get to bring my deep interest in designing process for complex challenges, using hosting for planning, action and evaluation to address tricky strategic work into this work. What I love about teaching is how much more I learn about my own work as I share it with my colleagues and with participants who are bring real life challenges to the program.
It’s not all about us though. It’s also about you, the participants. each Art of Hosting is highly experiential and you are invited not only to bring your own work and curiosities to Bowen, but bring your courage to step up and host with us. We have participants coming from a variety of sectors including business, education, social services, churches, local and indigenous governments and philanthropy. The conversations and connections that are formed on Bowen often last year, between diverse folks from a variety pf places. We invite you to join us as well.
Helping a friend with a design challenge today. He is running a small group process at the end of a day of presentations about energy futures in a small community. He initially thought that it would be good to end the day – in which 120 people are gathered to hear about energy futures – with action steps, but these kinds of gatherings are not good places to come up with action planning. Instead I advised him to use a World Cafe for reflection process to produce the elements of a shared vision. IN a little over an hour, good work can get done without raising expectations to high or demanding too much commitment from folks who just came to hear some presentations.
Here is the design I sent him.
You have a short time. Here’s a design:
Get people into groups of four. If you can, get them around tables with some markers and paper in the middle. If not, just have them move into groups of four chairs.
Tell people not to get comfortable. They will be moving twice in the next hour.
Give them a simple question: “what have you heard today that excites you about our future here?”
Tell them they have 20 minutes to share in their groups and discuss that question.
After 20 minutes stop them all, have everyone stand up together and move to different groups.
Repeat
And repeat again.
Towards the end of the third round, say fifteen minutes in, give each group three post it notes and a pen. Ask them to reflect and agree on three things they heard commonly across all conversations.
To harvest, your ask anyone to read out one of their post it notes. Then you invite any group with a similar one to shout BINGO! And bring the notes to a wall in a nice neat cluster. I’m serious. The goal of the process is to get clusters.
Repeat until all the post it notes are on the wall. Have people come up to the wall and give the clusters names. Get the core team to look at the clusters and write a shared purpose statement from it. This is what you can present back the next day.
World Cafe is perfect for this. It works because it is based on a basic structure of small groups of four people, switching conversations to allow a whole group to deeply explore a question, and a harvesting strategy that makes visible what’s being collectively learned. And you can do it in a little over an hour.
Learn more about The World Cafe.
All facilitation work happens within containers and those containers are separated from the rest of the world by thresholds. When you enter a meeting, you are removing yourself from the world and entering into a space where specific work is being done. It’s no exaggeration to say that this is almost a ritual experience, especially if the work you are doing involves creating intangible outcomes such as team building, good relations, conflict resolution or community.
Good participatory meetings have the characteristics of the Four Fold Practice within them: people are present and hosted with good process. They participate and co-create. In order to do this, participants need to make a conscious step over a threshold into the container.
Thresholds are as old as humanity. The boundary between in and out is ancient. Being welcomed into a home, a family, a structure or a group comes with ritual behaviours to let you know that you have left one world behind and entered into another.
In meetings, these thresholds are multiple and nested. My friend Christie Diamond once said “the conversation begins long before the meeting starts, and continues long after the meeting is over.” That has rung true for the thousands of conversations I have hosted and participated in over my life. And on reflection, I can trace a series of threshold that are crossed as we enter into and leave a conversational space. At each step, my “yes” becomes more solid and my commitment to the work becomes more important and concrete. See if this scheme makes sense:
- Invitation is noticed
- Engage with the call, connect it to my own needs
- Making time and space to engage (committing my resources)
- Physically moving to the space
- Arriving in the field of work
- Entering the physical space
- BEGINNING THE WORK
- PARTICIPATING IN SUB-CONTAINERS WITHIN THE MEETING
- FINISHING THE WORK
- Leaving the space
- Exiting the field of work
- Returning home
- Reorganizing resources to support the change
- Re-engaging with the world
- Working from a changed stance
Each one of these crossings happens whether you are coming into someting as mundane as a staff meeting or something as important as attending your own wedding. Often time facilitators pay attention only to numbers 7-9 and many times 7 and 9 are given short shrift.
I’m curious to hear about your own experiences of crossing thresholds for important meetings.