Defining facilitation in relation to difference
Art of Hosting, Conversation, Democracy, Facilitation, Featured
Over on LInkedIn, Bryan Stallings pointed to a 2017 post at the International Association of Facilitators site that contains a set of definitions of facilitation. I don’t remember contributing to that article, but I quite like what I said at the time:
“While facilitation traditionally means ‘to make things easy’ I think we need a new definition that means ‘to host the struggle together.’ Good facilitators help create a container for people to work with difference and diversity to make good things happen.”
That’s pretty good, I think. It describes what I do and it describes a shift in my practice over the years. Like many, when I started out as a facilitator I was really trying hard to deliver outcomes and to lead a group through a process to get to a preconceived set of ideas. It’s not that I wasn’t alos hosting some creative work, but my early forays in the field were probably brutal to sit through as I steered people through a process and, being a naturally conflict averse person, quelled differences. There would be brainstorming, but I was very much the kind of guy that seized on ideas I liked and inquired more into them, even if the group had other thoughts. Ick.
Now it’s all about the right tools for the right job, and sometimes that’s just the right tool. But not often. And definitely not in the unconscious way that I applied facilitation.
Once I trundled into the world of Open Space Technology, the Art of Hosting, Dialogic Organizational Development and the complexity world, my practice radically changed. It really did become about building containers for dialogue, creating spaces and contexts in which interesting things might happen. It took to locus of responsibility for the content off of me and put it on the participants. I became responsible for managing the constraints that would help a group do that.
If you look on my site for posts on complex facilitation, you’ll find a bit more thinking on that practice, but one things that stands out in the IAF article from 5 years ago is the commitment to difference and diversity. I recently took a Deep Democracy workshop with Camille Dumond and Sera Thompson as a part of my reluctant commitment to overcome my aversion to conflict, and I walked away with the idea that we need to get good at the practice of “conflict preservation” instead of “conflict resolution.” By that I mean that we need to be able to host conversations in which conflicts are present and remain present as a source of creativity and life, and not quash them because we are afraid of their energy. That means creating a container in which conflict is productive, in which people feel free to share different opinions, different perspectives, and contribute different gifts. And, of course, being conflict averse, this terrifies me. What if someone gets hurt? What if the space isn’t safe enough? What if something really offensive gets said?
Yup. Those are the questions we have to wrestle with. Because facilitation is needed in this time to ensure that people with vastly different experience and gifts have the chance to use them. Communities and societies contain many different kinds of people, including people whose opinions and ideas I don’t like.
Feel all those questions coming up? All those fears and “what if’s?” Yup. me too. Let’s talk about it below.
I appreciate the overall thrust of what you are saying here, sounds like you are on a learning journey.
As a facilitator working in a wide range of settings, how i host conflicts is driven primarily by the purpose of the gathering. If the group needs to reach decisions and outcomes, then after allowing space for divergence and respectfully hearing viewpoints, at some point i am likely to ask convergence-oriented questions, such as “The current proposal is X, can you live with it?” If they say No, we explore why and that becomes fodder for improving the proposal.
If the purpose of the convening is transpartisan dialogue or work on other polarized social issues, then the primary “outcome” sought is to build relationship across differences. The questions and techniques for that are different. The best training and resources for the latter i have encountered come from Essential Partners (https://whatisessential.org/), who have decades of experience hosting conversations on sharply divisive issues (such as abortion, which is how their early reputation was built).
Love this Kanava!
Essential Partners has been one of my go-to places for years. They are truly expert at building relationship across differences and the training I did with them radically altered my understanding of how to deal with conflict. Not that it’s ever easy – conflict is difficult no matter what, and it’s so much easier to dismiss, walk away from, or lash out at people whose views I find offensive. But I’ve learned painfully that none of those approaches helps, and the techniques I learned from Essential Partners and The Compassionate Listening Project (https://www.compassionatelistening.org) actually do, difficult as they are to put into practice.
Hi Chris,
I deeply appreciate your sharing here about the need to “preserve conflict” – a term I think is an important one as we explore how to reach out of our safety zones into difficult conversations. I have shared this post with some fellow leaders I know 🙂
I fear conflict – afraid that having conversations that include difference will lead to broken relationships. Conflict is really wrapped up in power differential for me – I fret that the most inarticulate, the introverted and the marginalized will be dominated and wounded. I think I am most frightened that I will do the dominating and wounding.
If we are going to have spaces that are open for division and difference, the process needs to be even more structured for me to feel safe. This goes beyond “opening agreements” and extends into the tools we use for the conversation itself. I know that in some contexts, this can make conversations feel “overmanaged” by participants. I do not know how to resolve these complaints. On reflection, I think maybe the participants need more freedom from the tool/process and sometimes I think the guests are used to having freedom that makes others unsafe and rebel against having that constrained? Participants are free to share but seem to struggle with the limits of not being able to control who else, when and for how long others are permitted to share (and limits to their own dominance or dominant world views about how things “should” be done correctly and efficiently).
So many questions and big concepts here… including freedom, constraint, creativity and discipline.
Lots of richness here.
Click through on those Deep Democracy links, Rosa.
I love the idea of seeing conflict as a source of creativity and life and working to use that conflict productively. Sadly, it feels to me like we’re getting collectively worse at dealing with conflict instead of better: tiptoeing fearfully around delicate issues for fear of offending, walking away from conversations any time we get offended or triggered, and excommunicating those whose views are repugnant to us instead of dealing with them head on, respectfully and constructively.
I had a sad interchange recently with a fellow I know. We’ve had a lot of conversations over the years on hot-button topics, both of us being rather political and on different sides of many issues. I hadn’t seen him in awhile and we reminisced and laughed about the many lively disagreements we’ve had over time, recalling, however, that our conversations were always respectful and no topic was off limits. He said he can’t do that anymore: when some folks have learned about his views on certain issues, they simply stopped speaking to him and wrote him out of their lives.
I don’t think shutting down discourse is any kind of solution to any kind of problem. So as a facilitator, I want to learn all I can about how to dive into conflict and help others do so in ways that are as constructive and creative as possible. What does it look like to create spaces where people are safe enough to be BRAVE?
The answer to your last question might be imaginatively worded as “It takes bravery to create space that is safe enough for folks to be brave…”
So we must all be brave! 🙂