You might have been following along as I have been playing with this triangle over the past few weeks. This is a version that I think I am happier with for now and it’s already helping me and others to understand a few things. First, what is the influence of a facilitator into the complex system of a group of people. Second, what is a dialogic container thought about in terms of anthro-complexity. And third, what is the role of a facilitator, and what are some of the capacities and moves one can play.
I’ll introduce this in stages, and use language that speaks to facilitators, hosts, participatory leaders. Folks who read this blog, who practice the Art of Hosting, Liberating Structures or other forms facilitation that treats groups as complex. I want this framework to help us inquire into some of things we take for granted such as the role of the host, the helpfulness of methods. the belief in the collective capacity of the group, and in the notion and idea of what a container is and how to work with it.
The title of this post is a nod to Mark Downham’s long treatise The Architecture of Held Space, which is a very generous discussion of these questions too and which deserves a full response on it’s own. But his work and Snowden’s work previously pointed at in this series ask the questions that I am trying to answer here. Here’s a post that links to those writings.
Starting with basics.
Let’s start here. Groups of people are constantly meeting, working, talking and living their lives without the role of a facilitator. Most of human history, historically and in the present day has unfolded without facilitators and consultant working with groups of people to optimize processes, introduce new ways of working together or saving people from the everyday chaos of their lives. I say this in a tongue-in-cheek way, but it’s a serious observation. We – the consulting industry, the hosting world, the facilitation community – are a lot less necessary than we believe.
So we start with the above polarity. There are interactions and there is structure. Pause for a moment and think about where you live. It could be a village, and island, a neighbourhood, a building or a city. Think of ways that people have problems solved together, introduced new ideas, created new things. How neighbours are helped when a new child is born. Or how conflicts arise in the public conversation and how they are resolved or how they cage over time. Novelty in societies and groups springs from interactions between people. They come out of who knows whom, who is connected or not, what gets talked about. Communities and groups are bubbling cauldrons of connections and exchanges. You can never fully understand them, you can never fully see what they are capable of. But beautiful things emerge.
Interactions between people do not happen randomly however. Thing of the place you live and think of the built environment. Think of how folks get around, where they meet and where they don’t meet. Think about the “way we always do things” the traditions, languages, and implicit ways of being that are unique to each place. Think of what it feels like to visit a new place and know that you don’t completely belong there. There are structural elements that shape humans experiences. These structures are physical, psychological, social, and cultural. They are patterns that persist over time that makes some things more likely to happen than other things. These structures can change, but the do so slowly.
The structures and the interactions are continually in relationship. The structure influences what’s easy for people to do wan what is hard for them to do. In complexity, we call these affordances. People who are skilled at working within their own environments often have a good understanding of some of these structures and affordances are are able to work with them in a way that makes things happen. Others might have great ideas, but they always seem to get nowhere. Structures can provide resistance – “that’s not how we do things around here” – or they can provide hard boundaries – “you can’t walk from Bowen Island to the mainland, no matter how much you want to.”
SO the question to ask when learning about a group of people, or when a group of people is learning about themselves is “How do enduring structures shape interactions and how to repeated interactions become structural?”
If you are coming into a community or organization to do work and you don’t start here you are treating each group as a blank canvas upon which your influence can be exerted. This applies especially to consultants but it alos applies to leaders who “drop in” to their teams or departments without any understanding of what is really happening. The field of pre-existing interactions, the ways that people respond to change or generate it, and the pre-existing structures – physical and cultural, immutable and changeable – provide the landscape inside of which any intervention takes place.
Take a breath while I tell you why three is better than two.
Pause here. I’m going to tell you why I’m going to make the next move.
A favoured tool of many consultants is working with polarities. I use them all the time to look at things. Structure and Interaction is a classic polarity. Both exist at the same time, both are helpful, positive states. In the Art of Hosting work we use Chaos and Order. I’ve also used others like Individual and Team, and Organization and Stakeholders. Often conflicts in organizations are about contested ends of a polarity. That’s helpful to see.
But the problem with polarities is that it places a situation on a scale and asks us to maybe balance the upsides of both or do things that will slide the problem more towards on end or the other.
The bigger PROBLEM with pairs like this is that it tends to introduce either/or thinking. Even if we are using a tool like polarity management (which promotes Both/And thinking) we are still highly entrained to see the ends as more important than the middle. That can have the effect of embedding the conflict even deeper and make it feel like maximizing the upsides of one is a compromise or a value tradeoff for people that prefer the other.
And so, what about three?
Snowden has written recently on this, but for decades he has used triads in sense-making in a way that helps us see that a complex situation exists in a space that is influenced by multiple sources of constraints that make some things more possible than others. Triads are a feature of his software, SenseMaker and although they are sometimes hard to understand, I find them helpful for getting beyond simple dichotomies.
And so the next section of this essay will be about the third part of this system, the one that turns a group of people into a facilitated group, a led group, a team, an organization. It is the acknowledgement of an intention, backed with privileged power, that provides an important source of constraints.
The designer
In a recent LinkedIn post responding to an earlier blog post in this series, Natalia Treninya offers a gentle disagreement with my offering of this third source of constraints. She writes: “I find it hard to accept that the design of a dialogue, or of any other creative process, stands as an equal third vertex of the trialectic. Stability and emergence describe the state of the field, whereas design acts upon the field, so to me it belongs to a different level.” (translation from Ukrainian provided by LinkedIn).
I get that, but I don’t agree. The whole point of introducing this third corner is to be honest about the work that intention does when it is coupled with a position of privileged power in a pre-existing field of interactions and structure. Snowden’s constant challenge to the Art of Hosting community, let alone the broader facilitation community as a whole, is to get the facilitator out of the centre of the work. But the facilitator is never removed from the work. That is exactly another problem: cloaking the role of power in good intentions, or a wonderful design, or a set of brilliant exercises.
Even in “complex facilitation“, which is the approach to methods used by the Cynefin community, the role of the facilitator has to be accounted for. Methods are used, each with an intention. Interactions are shaped. Strutures and patterns appear and the facilitator manages the process.
But how and why is the facilitator able to “manage the process?” Because the position comes with the power to do so. That power is accorded by the consent of the group (or not, in which case something else takes over). “Yes, we will do the Future Backwards exercise or the Word Cafe or the Circle or the Paired Walk or the 1-2-4-All” is what the group says to the facilitator, but never completely.. There is always someone in the room who thinks this is bullshit, or who has to suspend their scepticism to go along with the group. We all carry memories of being told what to do that elicit responses ranging from compliance and approval seeking to outright rebellion.
So the unique position of the facilitator influences both the structure of the moment and the interactions. In complex facilitation approaches, the facilitator/host does not get involved in the content of the work, but only manages the interactions between people in the space. That is an important and influential role and so it has to be accounted for.
Time for a break
Let’s watch a video together. Let’s see what happens when the person with the power to shape the process comes into a room ignoring the structures and interactions that are already present in the group and imposes a his own ideas about what should happen. This is a scene from West Side Story where Glad Hand, the community social worker, embodies the bumbling leadership role we have probably all occupied at one time or another. You can read my commentary on this scene here.
Poor Glad Hand. He was convicted that this new method of his would break the group up, introduce new relationships and solve the gang problem. My favourite part of the scene happens after the group rebels and becomes even more entrenched. The police officer makes a bee line for Glad Hand and desperately points out to him how bad he has just made the situation.
Answering the challenge
There are groups interacting in the present moment. There are pre-existing structures that embed and embody the residue and habits of historical practice. And there is the p[ractitioner, the consultant, the teacher, the facilitator, the leader. The one who holds the design that is accompanied by an intention that speaks to a preferred future.
So let’s explore this third point in the triangle in relation to the other two.
Now we are looking at a dynamic space bounded by three sides inside of which dialogic containers exist and move. The Design point can be occupied by a facilitator who brings a method, or a leader, or an authority, or anyone else who has the power and ability to enter the space with intention that can shape the space. The introduction of this third point introduces two new tensions and space in which we can map what emerges from these three tensions.
From a facilitation perspective, the left hand side asks the question of how the method or intention being brought relates to the existing patterns at play. Anyone who has set the chairs up in a circle, while working with an organization used to sitting around a table, will be familiar with this questions. There are ways of doing things. If you are going to be introducing a new intention that results in a new structure, something interesting will happen in contact with the pre-existing structures.
On the other side, the tension is between the intention of the facilitator and what the group is attending to. The group holds the capability for designing and choosing change and a design and intention introduced on top of them runs the risk of being patronizing, disempowering or colonizing in its effect. In complexity, It is not methods or good facilitation or leadership that creates novelty or good responses to the problem at hand but rather the distributed knowledge, capability and capacity of the group itself to address its conditions. This has important implications for what we choose to do. As a facilitator when I am too in love with my method, I impose it in a way that disables the group’s capacity, even while I speak praises to the group’s collective intelligence and capacity.
The space
So this diagram is finally a space represented by three distinct source of constraint that affect and influence the dialogic container. The facilitator’s role then is to constantly attend to the work of the container within this space. In an expert driven process, where for example an engineer is directing a team to install a building system, the interactions of the team members are highly controlled. The engineer might need a detail or two from the front line, but in general, the design and implementation of a knowable system will proceed very close to the left hand edge of the triangle.
On the other hand, a group that is trying to design a new organizational structure for itself might not need any facilitation or design at all beyond an agreement to meet in a pub and kick around answers to the question “how should we make decisions together?” It doesn’t need facilitation, and the intention and design can be entirely co-owned by the group itself. The pub provides a structure, especially if said pub is a part of the ritual space in which the group often decamps to consider the bigger questions in life.
On yet another hand, a consulting intervention for a strategic plan might start with an intention from the Board and quickly move to a narrative capture of the staff, clients and partners of the organization, followed by collective sense-making. This immediately works with the capability of the group to sense opportunities, to name the structural affordances and blockages for development of change and to change the interactions from “working together” to “planning together” which wakes up the latent capacity to a group to make collective decisions and choose pathways forward into the unknown. The consultant becomes responsible for hosting the methods to do that, paying attention all the time to the preferred direction of travel introduced and held by the Board as an intention (“we need a plan to help us move into the future and we need everyone to be involved”). The consultant’s role is to constantly work to attend to and shape the interactions, with consent, with transparency and with accountability.
Dialogic containers arise all the time. As each of the points in the triangle take on great or lesser effect on that container, the container’s life can be mapped in this space. The lifecycle of a container is not linear, it’s not universal and it is context free. Each one appears from the interactions of these constraints and is shifted and influenced over time until it dissolves again. While it exists, the facilitator continually attends to the changing relationship between Design, Structure and Interactions. When the work is done, to put it in Taoist terms, the facilitator disappears along with the container and the people see that they did it themselves.
So play with this a little. Tell me what it evokes in you. I am especially interested in how this challenges your practice, rather than how it validates it? What question for yourself does this open up?
This triad has turned out to be surprisingly helpful. I’ve been thinking about it ever since I posted it a few days ago, because it answers some questions that have been bothering me for a long time. So here’s an attempt to capture where the idea is leading. Think of this as watching it evolve in real time. Read on…
I continue to think through the ideas of containers in dialogic work. Thanks to some conversations with a couple of colleagues I had a thought today about the three-cornered nature of the container.
Inspired by the idea of a trialectic, we can describe containers as occupying a space between three points, depending on what they are, what work they are doing and the nature of the substrate in which they sit. The thee points are Designed, Built, and Emergent. Each of these three has a particular focus. The Designed container channels intention. The Built container provides retention and the Emergent container arises from, and demands, attention.
In facilitation practice, the language tends towards designed and built containers. We talk about holding space, we talk about the boundaries, the physical space, the beautiful question, the method. The role of the facilitator is often defined as a person that designs and holds containers.
Complexity however bids us to pay attention to what is happening. When humans meet, containers emerge, almost instantly. Our attention is directed and held, not with the help of a facilitator, but because the constraints of the situation shape what happens. Some constraints precede the encounter, like physical space, organizational history, culture, and power relations. Others emerge through interaction itself. Some are brought by the designer into the room. Together they constitute the container.
Every actual container is some combination of design, building and emergence. The space between these points is what matters, Asking where a container sits within the triangle tells us what work is being done by intention, what work has been stabilized in material, legal, or social structures, and what work must remain open to emergence.
Different types of containers need to do different work. A storage locker is a kind of built container whose work is only the retention of a space that can be filled. There is very little intention paid to the design of a storage locker, and once one is built, it doesn’t need to be designed again. Not much emerges within it. That’s a feature.
An emergent container is one that arises, for example, when two friends meet on the street. In the moment of encounter, a boundary begins to form and an attractor holds the attention of the interaction. When two friends are actively engaged in a conversation on the street there is stuff going on that an “outsider” would struggle to understand. What is at the centre of their shared attention might not be shared by others. You can feel how this little social space is carved out of the rest of the environment. A conversation between friends relies on attention to proceed, and both bring attention to the moment. No designer. No robust structure that must be held.
A designed container is something like a meeting method. When I am using Open Space for example, I am bringing a deliberate intention to the group. “We should meet this way. The conversations should flow like this. The outcomes can be harvested here.” This can be both helpful and extremely perilous.
When design makes contact with reality is the critical moment. Design is only the beginning. Once people begin interacting, the container inevitably shifts toward emergence. Good facilitation is less about preserving the design than noticing where the design is making contact with reality. If the design is held too tightly, the designer is privileged in the space and the group loses possibilities for true emergence. If the design proceeds from the use of constraints to shape interactions, that can be extremely helpful. If the work is complex, bringing attention to bear into the work is critical. The facilitator role shifts from being the process host to holding attention to what is emerging. Not to name it, or to synthesize, but to inform the next move of shifting constraints, including by enlisting the group in that work: “Should we take a break? Do we need more time? Is this the right question? What’s happening now?”
Design that contacts reality in a built container is one in which intention informs the retention. This is how architecture works. It’s about the deployment of pattern languages (in the Alexandrian sense) to the built environment. A living built environment begins with intention that translates into retention provided by stable structures in the built environment. It alos provides affordances for the attention of the users of space to learn and shape the space afterwards. Think of a community garden, or over longer scales, the built environments of towns and villages that shift and change over the years. Stuart Brand wrote about this in “How Buildings Learn.”
I’m exploring the idea that dialogic containers are spaces and moments (physical and non-physical) in which humans make meaning. Dialogic containers are not things facilitators create or hold. They are patterns of constraint within which meaning-making becomes possible. Good facilitation lies not in holding the container but in learning when to design with constraints, when to rely on built ones, and when to let emergent constraints lead.
The photo for this post was taken on Whyte Avenue in Edmonton last June when the Edmonton Oilers were in the Stanley Cup Finals. Everything in this photo can be mapped in the triangle above.
Back in April at the most recent Art of Hosting we convened, someone asked me “does the Art of Hosting make good faith assumptions about people?” I’ve been thinking about that question ever since, and not satisfied by my answer which, came from a more defensive posture.
I think the short answer is, yes…
Questions are the central preoccupation of my work. I ask them of clients, we ask them together, we ask questions about questions to be sure that we are asking good questions and when we aren’t we ask questions about what would be the better questions. In uncertain situations, the quality of our inquiry often matters far more than the quality of our answers.
So much of my work deals with supporting groups and organizations as they explore uncertainty, ambiguity, and unknowable futures, that answers are usually less helpful than good questions. The question often then becomes, what makes a question good?
For years in the Art of Hosting I have avoided teaching about good or powerful questions. My reticence to do so was based in the idea that knowing what a good question is is so context dependant that I couldn’t possibly tell you unless we had a context to work with. I think the role of hosts is not arrive bringing the powerful question but to arrive bringing the attention needed to notice the questions that are alive in a field of work.
There are however a few useful pieces of scaffolding that might hep a person get started in thinking about questions. At a recent Art of Hosting, my colleagues taught a short introduction to powerful questions using a kind of hierarchy of questions that is contained in Vogt, Brown and Isaacs’ “The Art of Powerful Questions.” It looks like this:
from Vogt, Brown and Isaacs’ “The Art of Powerful Questions.”
This hierarchy started me thinking about this post. In re-reading the Art of Powerful Questions, I could see that there were two distinct practices discussed there. One was the practice of designing questions. The other is the practice of discovering questions. As one source in the publication says:
“Discovering strategic questions is like panning for gold. You have to care about finding it, you have to be curious, and you have to create an anticipation of discovering gold, even though none of us may know ahead of time where we’ll find it. You head toward the general territory where you think the gold may be located, with your best tools, your experience, and your instincts. And then you begin a disciplined search for the gold.”
THAT is what interests me.
A question does not have power on its own
Let’s stick with the first practice for a moment: designing questions. Every facilitator at some point has kept a journal of good questions. When you do you start to notice that it is impossible to speak with certainty about what makes a question powerful. What this hierarchy does is to put various English interrogatives into a kind of sequence, not of powerfulness actually, but ostensibly of openness. Yes/no questions are clearly more limiting than Why or What questions. But I don’t know if they are more powerful. One of the most powerful questions I ever asked was “Do you want to get married?” It was by far the most consequential question of my life and it really came down to yes or no. Likewise, one of the most debilitating questions I was ever asked was from a teacher who was frustrated by what I later learned was a classic presentation of ADHD who asked twelve year old me “Why do you disappoint me?” If a yes/no question has two answers, that Why question had zero. And perhaps it was powerful, but it wasn’t generative. It was, unknowingly to the frustrated teacher, cruel.
The other thing to note about how questions are skewed by context is that the questions above were put in a relational context. “What do you think you’re doing?” is not really a question, and it carries the overtones of disapproval from a person in power. Questions like that are carried in a medium of relationship that render the hierarchy of powerfulness almost useless.
There are lots of different kinds of questions. There are closed questions and open questions. There are questions that we have answers to, questions that lead us in a certain direction, and questions that invite us to keep uncertainty and openness and exploration alive. There are questions about the past, the present and the future. Lineal, circular, strategic and reflexive questions. Directed and undirected questions, and so on. I spend a lot of time helping people to NOT ask yes/no questions like “Did you receive good support for this problem? If no, please explain.” It’s better to ask “What kind of support did you receive?” and have people share a story and tell you themselves if it was good service or not. This is the basis of work with Participatory Narrative Inquiry
The Art of Powerful Questions as a document really came out of a conversation between a number of people involved in the World Cafe community as they were thinking about questions, and I recommend it as a good starting point. The World Cafe community continues to explore this question about questions.
After working with questions for many years and especially increasingly working in complex and emergent contexts, I think my practice has led me away from designing good questions to trying to discover them. As a leader in places where I have led sometimes framing the right question is the right thing to do, but it is about adopting the stance of inquiry that is ultimately more important that having a perfect, powerful question.
Questions are proposals embedded in contexts
Questions are embedded in contexts. The combination of the question and the context creates a kind of proposal for action. What has intrinsic power in a complex system is the questioner. As a facilitator, if I ask a question of a group, it collapses the field of possibilities in the room because I have made an implicit proposal about what is important right now. Even if I have spent time to craft that question with a bunch of people from the organization or group I am working with, the act of me asking that question is where the power lies. So, while it is important to pay attention to assumptions embedded in questions, it is also important to be aware of the proposals embedded in questions.
A question like “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” is a beautiful question. But if I ask it in a group I am making as assumption that the people I am asking it about have similar thoughts about their lives as Mary Oliver does. I am also making a proposal, as Mary Oliver does, that I’m possibly not doing enough in my life to bring more attention or purpose or meaning. Or I may be assuming that folks, as she says
know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Not everybody has that kind of idleness at hand to be able to reflect on whether contemplating a grasshopper was a good use of time. Asking folks that question devoid of the context of their lives, the urgency of a situation, or the consent to be in that conversation is a hell of a proposal. Imagine asking a seasonal farm worker that question. Or the Dalai Lama.
Beautiful questions are not necessarily inviting questions
Mary Oliver’s question is beautiful. It stands on its own because it is a poetic statement. I’m not sure it actually wants an answer. It seems to invite a turning, a metanoia, a repentance. If it were offered in a therapeutic context, it might directly imply that I’m not doing the RIGHT thing with my one will and precious life. The question therefore intimidates me and subjugates me to the author’s intention. When that intention is hidden, I feel manipulated.
I do see this often in questions that come my way like “What would be possible if we trusted each other more?” That is a question that immediately drives me to thinking about its opposite. In my world, even as a person who tends to trust more than I should, there are definitely people I should be trusting less. The idea that MORE trust leads to more possibility contains an embedded assumption, an implicit proposal and a predetermined pathway of inquiry. It avoids the first principle of good complexity work and lets the framework determine the data and not the other way around. There is no new meaning to be made from a question like that, really. The conversation is likely to be abstract and opinionated at best. And might be a naive casting about in an unknown future at worst.
That’s not to say that we can’t learn from questions like that.
If we really wanted to examine trust I might start with having people tell stories about trust to each other. How trust operates in different contexts matters, and so if the exploration is not be useful, the stories have to be relevant to the context either because they are directly related to the context or they become connected to the context through reflection and collective sense-making. Nevertheless, it’s no good that assuming that MORE trust leads to MORE possibility if there is a chance that trusting some people less in order to opens up the possibilities for a field.
Good questions can be answered by everyone, and get the facilitator out of the centre.
Not all conversations are the same, but a lot of my work deals with looking at what’s happening and exploring change. This implies a trajectory to the questions, from the present state towards a direction of travel that we might discover together. My favourite questions for this, and still the ones I use as a basic template for work are Terry Borton’s reflective questions: “What? So what? Now what?” These are so simple, and yet they hold us, as facilitators, at a distance from the group’s work, which is a good thing. They ask of us to become hosts that works with the constraints of the system that shape actions, rather than the attractors that collapse what’s possible into a single, deep, valley of channeled conversation.
As basic source code these questions are helpful. Almost every change or planning process I work with starts with “What?” There is nothing better at getting directly to the urgency of a situation than by asking what the hell is going on and then shaping the constraints of the situation such that everyone can contribute to that conversation. There is not one answer. There is a survey of the field and the perspectives in the room that gives us enough information with which to act, because in complex situations that is what we need.
The “So What?” question invites the group to look at what they have said is the “What” and make sense of it. What does this mean for us? This is the area of exploration, negotiation, discussion, perspective sharing, learning. From this sense-making comes the turn to trying things out. “Now What?” is about the actions we might to take to address a problem, explore and option or move this into a new cycle of inquiry, Glenda Eoyang calls her version of this loop “Adaptive Action.”
There is a similar construction in the Technology of Participation body of work known as ORID, which helps people in inquiry look at Objective questions, Reflective questions, Interpretive questions and Decisional questions.
Again, these methods imply a directionality to an intervention, but as long as that intention is clear and transparent and lands a proposal for action, I think the direction is ethical. If the group refuses the proposal, then the question becomes “What do we do now?” I’ve had a few cases of these in my life and they are good lessons in humility and excellent examples of watching a group activate its collective capability to frame its own questions and inquiries.
The most consequential questions are often the ones the group recognize as their own
So this brings me around to the point. A question shapes the field of attention. In complexity terms it becomes a constraint and makes some things easier to notice and others easier to ignore. It channels attention and participation. If it is understood as a probe to that system, to see what else might emerge, it can be useful. If it is held tightly as The Thing We Are Here To Talk About then it becomes non-consensual and it suppresses the emergence that is needed for a group to discover and rely on its own capability and distributed knowledge. For complex and uncertain work, including planning, change, and culture, the questions are already in the field. They are the ones that everyone is asking in their minds. Not “What would be possible in five years if we became a more welcoming community?” but rather “What are we going to do about these damn tourists?” (That might be from a real situation. 😉 )
But what about my one wild and precious question?
So the most powerful question is not the one that the facilitator brings. In fact my advice would almost always be to start with “What’s happening?” and go from there. Bring attention, not intention. When a group develops enough shared attention sometimes the powerful question emerges there and it seems obvious. We need to not go looking for beautiful constructions, poetic and inspiring language, or even hierarchies of importance. We need to pay attention to the conversations that are already happening, the questions that people are asking themselves, the relational fields in which those questions are being asked and the larger context of need and purpose that forms the proposal for the intervention.
Practitioners intervene. That’s what we do. Letting go of the need to bring the powerful question helps us to do it better because it turns a predetermined intervention into a collectively help proposal for action, one that can be explored, contested, rejected, accepted, or changed. Start simple and be transparent. Start with a question that everyone can answer, one like “Can you share an experience of… What happened?” Take the answers to those questions and give them to people and ask them what they make of them. Then let the next question emerge from what the group has made visible together.