How well can collective self-reflexivity scale?

An important post, observation and question from George Por: How well can collective self-reflexivity scale?

For conversations that matter to grow into communities of practice and social systems at increasing scale, they have to be able to absorb the increased complexity involved with those systems. What does it depend on whether a community or a network of communities is capable to do that? One of the factors seems to be the trust and appreciation that flow among the participants in the conversation, besides their capacity for double loop learning in real-time, on the spot”

Part of the challenge of working with shift in systems is finding the time to create the containers in which this trust and appreciation can flow. It takes time, and it’s not always time that is seen as productive time. Most people that are paying me to facilitate a meeting for them have definite outcomes that they want to see. Often they want more than can be acheived in the short period of time they assign (how many conferences are scheduled for three days but everyone leaves at lunch on day three?) Building trust and appreciation is real work and it requires a real committment of time.

The cost of this came clear in work with a recent client. We are working on something which could result in a major public policy shift in a contentious field with many diverse and irreconcilable stakeholders. What they are discovering is the closer they get to implementing the policy changes they are working on, the more people retreat into old and unhelpful patterns. What is absolutely needed in this context is a retreat of all of the major stakeholders to create a container to build trust and appreciation. Without a collaborative process, the initiative they have designed will fail.

And yet, such a retreat is so far from their usual practice that it seems like they can’t see it at all. For me, I see clearly what needs to happen, but there is only so much I can SAY, only so much I can TELL them. In my work with them we tried to create some conversational process but I felt we fell short in creating any kind of relationship that can hold the complexity of what they are trying to do.

So this is the scope of my challenge. I’m now wondering if I should even take on these kinds of facilitation gigs. I’m not sure that the reification of old patterns in cases like this actually helps, and in fact it may well hinder efforts to move to the shift everyone wants.