For those of us who facilitate for a living the question of online vs virtual dogs is constantly. The surge of good online technologies has enabled participation across massive distances at very little financial and environmental cost. A good online facilitator (and they are NOT common) can create a warm and effective dialogic container using virtual tools. Online tools are useful and online spaces are a brilliant option for accessibility. They help in all kinds of ways. Since well before the pandemic I have offered courses and workshops online but I have to admit that I still prefer face to face especially if I know what we are doing requires building a strong and enduring relational field.
Yesterday a prospective client told me for the first time that they no longer do zoom trainings for their staff. It is not a good use of their training budget because staff don’t like it, it’s is not effective and by now most folks have figured out how to be online with as little participation and attention as possible. As a teacher I too find this state of affairs to be pervasive and I expressed my admiration for this policy.
This person is pointing to the biggest problem I have with online: it doesn’t seem to build the enduring relational field that face to face meetings do. For transactional outcomes I suspect online is fine but if you spend all of your time relating to people mediated through technology, I suspect that it has an enduring negative effect on relationality, and therefore long term sustainability of a team’s culture and intangible outcomes.
I’d welcome research on this. Today I came across an article in my feed that reports on a court case from Ontario that ruled on the question of whether online was the appropriate forum for a settlement conference. The judge ruled it was and the article summarizes his findings this way:
Spiegelman does not state that mandatory mediations should presumptively be virtual, nor does it elevate technology over judgment. Justice MacLeod was careful not to replace one rigid default with another. None of this will surprise experienced mediators or counsel. But the decision carefully probes the lingering assumption that physical attendance is inherently superior and reframes face-to-face presence as a question of process design, evidence, and proportionality.
For mediators and counsel this confirms the reality and post-COVID experience that virtual and hybrid processes are no longer provisional. They are part of how mediation in civil justice now operates and they will be evaluated by courts by considerations of function, not nostalgia.
This case provides a clear message. Courts will have little patience for procedural skirmishing over mediation logistics unless a genuine process concern is identified as the issue. What drives settlement is not the room, but the readiness of the participants, the authority at the table, and the quality of the process design.
Spiegelman is a reminder that, in every mediation, form should follow function and disputes about form should not be allowed to derail the goal of resolution.
The article points out that there is little evidence to suggest that there are differences in outcomes between online vs in person settlement conferences. My observation is that this is probably true depending on what you consider the outcome to be. If the outcome is simply “a settlement” then perhaps this is the case. But alternative dispute resolution, practicesd more broadly, can also be about conflict transformation, relationship repair, and enduring accountability.
To that end I looked for some research that discussed this further. To my surprise there was very little. I would have thought over the past five years that justice system researchers might be interested in this question. but perhaps they were simply not asking the RIGHT question. Also, it should be said that I didn’t scour the entire internet for answers!
But I did find this paper from Paul Kyrgis and Brock Flynn at the University of Montana: The Efficacy of Mandatory Mediation in Courts of Limited Jurisdiction: A Case Study from the Missoula Justice Court.
The authors examined a number of landlords-tenant disputes to see if virtual conferences were effective in not just settling a case but creating an enduring settlement. To do that they simply looked at whether cases returned to court.
Finally, remote mediation appears to have mixed results. Remote mediation has undeniable benefits in facilitating participation and program scalability. But those benefits come at a cost. The ultimate settlement rate for remote mediations was a full ten percentage points lower than the aggregate ultimate settlement rate. That lower ultimate settlement rate suggests that remote mediation may not foster the same level of accountability or engagement as in-person sessions.
Their full paper is worth reading for the literature review and their methods. They alos spend a lot of time discussing all the various factors that may or may not contribute to enduring settlements and the cases that make up their sample. And I am definitely extrapolating from their conclusions a bit when I say that something happens face to face that builds relational accountability.
But still, this is one useful way to look at what else happens in face to face meetings vs online because in dispute resolution I surmise that some forms of relationship repair helps to make the settlement enduring.
Those of us responsible for designing and hosting meetings of all know in our bones that something different happens when we are all in the room together. We know that relationships come into play much differently. we know that strong fields are built and these are essential for building enduring results.
Six years after our pandemic started do we finally have data to be able to look at this question? If you know of good research in this field drop it in the comments.
In this first instalment of this series I moved the focus of facilitation practice from tools to context. In this instalment I want to explore what it means to “hold space” and why this is only part of the work in the dialogic container.
Dialogic facilitation is concerned with meaning making events in a discrete space and time. This space and time is both physical and social, and it is what I call a “dialogic container.” These are places in which people come together to engage in meaning making and action. The dialogic container is context for the work that happens and the container gives rise to meaning between participants in the dialogue. Within the container, participants engage and interact and make meaning together. The dialogic container is the scale at which participants can take immediate action. It is intimate and vibrant. Meetings and gatherings host agency, and for this reason I think we often think of them as important for making larger changes.
Many people have talked about the role of the facilitator as “holding space” and I even wrote a book on that practice. “Holding space” is a vague term that has many definitions. It doesn’t even really convey the practice well. Nothing is actually “held” and “space” can mean a bunch of different things. The term describes a practice that is ineffable and intangible and yet important to good dialogue.
Despite its importance, I don’t want to talk about “holding space” as a practice. You can go and read my “Tao of Holding Space” for more reflections on the practice. Instead I want to point to the space that is being held: the dialogic container.
This is the first and closest level of context inside of which dialogue happens. In large group meetings, other containers form in small groups. In the large group facilitation work I do, it isn’t possible for one person to hold the variety of spaces that appear and emerge in complex dialogue facilitation. Instead the role of the facilitator is to shape the constraints of that space to enable maximum agency and self-organization of the participants and to encourage the emergence of desired insights, outcomes and actions.
Good facilitators make choices about how constraints are used to shape interactions between people. Once these constraints are put in place the role of the facilitator is to be, in Harrison Owen’s words, “totally present and completely invisible” until such a time as the group process needs to change. Facilitators have a great deal of power in these contexts. We can cut off a conversation, make a subtle adjustment in a space to separate people or encourage or prevent different things from happening. Conscious facilitation requires us to be hyper aware of our impact in dialogic spaces and to be clear and honest with our influence on the proceedings.
Take a moment to reflect on the meetings and conversations you are a part of. Think about how the setting influences what happens, how the physical space constrains or invites different possibilities. Think about how choices that are made in that meeting influence the conversations that are being had and what happens.
On reflection it should be very clear that this context is extremely influential in the process of dialogue. No two conversations are ever alike. No two conversations will render the same outcomes. No two people will experience the conversation in the same way.
In World Cafe conversations we see this happen all the time. Because that process is structured around small groups which change every 20-30 minutes, participants quickly get the sense that just changing two or three people in a conversation or taking up another spot in the room can significantly change the nature and quality of the conversation. That can be frustrating if a conversation is going really well, because a “sticky container” can form, one which is difficult to break. In other cases, having the conversation end can be a relief as people look to get out of an unpleasant discussion or an uncomfortable dynamic.
Dialogic containers form around constraints, including attractors that draw people’s attention together. A powerful and necessary question is an attractor. A shared purpose can be a strong attractor. Attractors bring coherence. In a conversation about the future of a social services agency, it doesn’t make sense to talk about manufacturing cars because the topic is incoherent in the context of the conversation.
Power is another form of attractor. When powerful people are in the room it changes the nature of the conversation. We say of circle for example, that the shape does not equalize power relationships. It simply gives people equal access to the centre of the room, and figuratively it symbolizes that participants are offered equal access to the dialogue topic. But power still exists, and it is endlessly fascinating in a highly democratic process to watch a group organize itself around the twin attractors of shared purpose and powerful people.
At some point in a dialogue session the facilitator is the most powerful person in the room. To the extent that there is trust between the group and the facilitator, participants will consent to the proposed process of dialogue. In situations of extremely low trust, it is possible that a meeting will simply fail to get off the ground. Sometimes the facilitator becomes the common enemy, and the group rebels against any shaping of its time together.
But in situations of high trust, a group may consent to a process because they are clear that it helps them to address as persistent need amongst them. As a facilitator I spend massive amounts of time with my clients in design and co-creation of processes – especially novel processes – so that we don’t show up on the day and need to overcome suspicion and anxiety before getting started. If I am to occupy to most important space in the room, even for a short time, I must be able to have trust to be there.
In this respect there are no neutral facilitators. The role is far from neutral; rather it is influential. One may be agnostic or even ignorant about the content of the gathering (and I’ve run meetings in languages I don’t speak, like Irish, Turkish, Estonian, French, and multilingual meetings too, which shows that connection to content is not essential) but you are not neutral in terms of influencing the group’s process. The choices that the facilitator makes, especially in a container in which one has a lot of trust, will shape the process significantly and influence the nature of relationships between people going forward.
So the dialogic container is important, because in any process, it is the space of immediate encounter and immediate agency. People will make meaning and act together. They will bring story and expectations and history into the room with them and they will form relationships (or break them) which will influence outcomes as much or moreso than the decisions made in the meeting.
While meetings are important, my experience is that the most significant results of most meetings is the relational field that is built by being together. Many clients expect high stakes meetings to produce miracles – fundamental transformations in insight or decision making that changes everything. In my experience, a single meeting is inadequate for this. However, dialogic containers can be powerful places where people learn new things, change views, form new relationships, or discover new insights. That is their promise.
Still, it is common to hear from participants in a container “this is all good, but how will it be when we return to the ‘real world’.” This is a valid question and it has to do with the next post in this series, on the contexts in which dialogic work is embedded. Dialogic containers are necessary for meaningful action, but rarely sufficient for sustained change. They are embedded in larger contexts that shape what happens once the meeting ends.
For now though the point of this post is to establish the importance of container and context in which dialogic works happens. The nature of the container, in all of its complexity, plays a significant role in the tangible and intangible outcomes of dialogue work. Once we see that, we can begin to see that the work of dialogue facilitation is both about “what happens in the room” as well as what happens in the context in which that room is situated.
I am using Patti Digh’s title for this post. She posted today on Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert, in which he had to perform on a piano that was far from ideal. But he accepted the constraint and played one of the most enduring and transformative jazz concerts of all time.
It reminded me of the time that Geoff Brown and I played with two Turkish musicians at the Applied Improv Network conference in Portland. The image above shows us in full flow.
I had just met Geoff, and we were beginning a friendship that has lasted nearly two decades despite having been together only three times – in Portland, working on a sustainability conference in Melbourne, and doing one on Indigenous Housing here in Vancouver.
The show in question was the gala improv show, held I believe at the Portland Schweitzer Concert Hall, which is a big venue. The four of us were invited to be the band for part of the show. Geoff had his guitar with him and the Turkish musicians had their instruments, but I had nothing. The show organizer said “my son has a really nice guitar. I’ll bring it for you.”
We showed up on the evening ready to go (this was an improv show remember, no rehearsals!) and the organizer handed me the guitar case. I opened it up and instead of “a really nice guitar” he handed me a battered beginner classical guitar that was missing the A string. “Oh shit,” he said.
His son had evidently swapped guitars at some point and dad just grabbed the case without checking and left.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
I took one look at the guitar and, after three days of accepting every offer that came my way, I said “it’s good. I’ll play it.”
And that’s how I found myself playing onstage in a soft seat theatre in Portland in front of hundreds of people on a battered old five string guitar with an Australian blues man and two Turkish musicians. You can tell from the photo above that we had a ball.
I was recently reflecting on Vaclav Havel‘s essay “The Power of the Powerless.” Acts of living in truth are critical for recovering power from those that have stolen it and are using it for oppressive purposes. Havel’s work has long inspired me and underpins the basis of how I see good dialogic work and participatory leadership. Small democratic acts of participation,collaboration, co-creation, inclusion and relationship are critical. There is no scale at which these are not critical if one values a world in which we participate together in building a future that serves all.
I was quite startled to hear Mark Carney quote Havel yesterday in his speech in Davos. Carney told some truths for which he is rightly being lauded. But as a Prime Minister he has a lot of work to do to build a society here at home where the most vulnerable don’t get steamrolled for the expediency of his large scale power moves.
I believe a lot of things can and must happen simultaneously to act within a world which has had much uncertainty and unpredictability introduced to it so quickly.
I am not prepared to give up a hope for a world of participatory and relational power alliances, especially here in Canada and especially with First Nations (seek out Christi Belcourt’s writing on this on Facebook, if you dare) I understand the need for speed but I also caution us all not to set aside things like justice, sustainability, and inclusion of the otherwise marginalized at the table lest we build the new system based on emergency measures and forget to be a society that stays committed to human rights, justice and environmental care, even if we don’t always get that right. I don’t believe one negates the other.
Doubling down on AI, defense, and fossil fuel energy production takes us towards a future where the wealth will be generated for the few who currently have the power with resources that are non renewable. Communities and ecosystems will be devastated as the costs are externalized for more generations. What assurances are there that these moves will build better and more resilient societies? Who will be asked to sacrifice for this future? Will we both defend ourselves from larger powers so that we can build a long term and effective education and health care system? Where we support and build up our natural ecosystems.
I don’t have answers. But I ask, what other ways can we align middle power nations that is built on the strength of relationship and long term care for people and planet? If the global system of power and economics needs to be realigned, what is the range of choices we have? How might we expand that range?
Carney has achieved what the entrepreneurs coveted “first mover’s advantage.” As a Canadian, based on the policy decisions he has made domestically, I am unsure how he will use it. In his speech his lauds his domestic accomplishments:
Since my government took office, we have cut taxes on incomes, on capital gains and business investment. We have removed all federal barriers to interprovincial trade. We are fast-tracking a trillion dollars of investment in energy, AI, critical minerals, new trade corridors and beyond
And yet. Every provincial health care system in Canada is currently in a crisis. Affordability continues to price an entire generation out of their start in the world. Our post-secondary education systems are failing because we underfunded them, forced them to rely on high paying international students, and then stopped that immigration program. Wealth inequality is the biggest threat to our survival as a democracy. And yet we still cut taxes.
I can envisage a dystopian world where AI, oil and weapons are the currency that just gets spent in a hyperscaled and hegemonic battle for supremacy among the few. What can the rest of us expect from this?
Yesterday Carney said “You cannot “live within the lie” of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.” That is true. And yet does he not see to see how his latest moves to fast track projects like an oil pipeline to the west coast reflect exactly this approach via a vis First Nations?
Carney also said “if you are not at the table you are on the menu.” That is a chilling statement to me because, despite the outpouring of pride and excitement about how he named the current global order, what he is proposing puts most of us on the menu. Carney’s commitment to a doubling down of neoliberal principles as the basis of his invitation to fight does nothing to address the pressing challenges faced by most of the victims of the global experiment of the last 45 years. I hope he changes that stance but I don’t think he will.
It is no surprise to most of us in Canada that Carney has become a fairly traditional “progressive conservative.” Most of us voted for him because he was preferable to the current conservative party’s populism which was based on outrage baiting and very little cogent policy. Things have become so bad in the world that we missed Brian Mulroney.
As for Havel, his wisdom is perennial. Carney’s speech is good but I encourage you all to read Havel. Just because the Prime Minister quoted him does not mean that the rest of us don’t need his strategy and tactics. We – most of us – are on the menu, remember. And Carney is not the green grocer.
We have a big job ahead of us. If we are to defend ourselves against threats of the global superpowers we need to do a much better job of talking about what makes us different. If our sovereignty matters, we need to say a lot more about why. And if someone whatever Carney is proposing “wins,” then what are building with the peace that follows?
This is the first of a series on facilitation, dialogic containers and context. In it I want to develop a theory of context for facilitators on that explains not only how dialogic work succeeds, but why it sometimes cannot.
My whole career has been a conversation between my facilitation practice and what I am learning about self-organization and complex adaptive systems. Like many people I started in facilitation because I like the way that techniques for group work could help people be better together. Good dialogue enables learning, understanding, innovation, problem-solving and community building. Doing it in a way that also builds relationships ensures that we “leave more community than we’ve found.” Understanding complexity theory helps me to situate my practice in what is possible and understand why things work or don’t work. If you have read my professional reflections on this blog over the past 22 years, you will have been with me on my journey as I’ve tried to understand all that.
My facilitation journey began with tools, probably nominal group technique. This is such a standard part of brainstorming and idea generation, that I doubt many facilitators even know the name for this technique. I can’t remember where I learned about brainstorming – it was probably word of mouth, because my facilitation craft has been honed in a traditional artisanal way, through knowledge transfer from mentors and masters and through many iterations of practice. NGT is a good tool, in the same way that a screwdriver is a good tool. It does a good job in situations for which it was designed. It doesn’t take long as a facilitator to realize that not every processes is fit for every challenge. The idea that “context matters” was something that I learned very early on in my career, and was probably something I was exposed to even in my academic training in Indigenous Studies, organizational studies, community development and cultural anthropology.
Every facilitator at some point collects tools in a tool box. In the pre-world wide web world, we acquired these tools through conversations with others, through the occasional book that was passed around and on facilitation courses where we were introduced to ways that groups worked. If you were serious about the work you might have come across materials from the National Training Labs or other places in the arcane world of organizational development. Every facilitator I knew back then had a binder full of tools and processes to use with groups. I still have a page of these resources which I use to inspire my own practice.
From a practitioners standpoint, most of us learned our craft through these tools. We found out what worked and what didn’t. We got a sense of who we were in facilitation work. We learned the hard lessons that no one in a group is “neutral” – even the facilitator – and we learned that reflection on practice is helpful. Reflection means asking the question “Why?” Why did that work? Why did that fail? Why did I make that choice? Why did the group dynamic shift this way or that?
Those early reflections led me to understand group work as complex, and from there it was about diving into the arcane world of complexity theory, group dynamics, organizational psychology and everything else. I found the theory world interesting but it rarely descended to the level of practical choice creating fro groups. It rarely connected to action. That became my work, and it was always validating to find someone like Kurt Lewin in Problems of Research in Social Psychology saying things like “there is nothing so practical as a good theory.” For me this continually learning about theory was informed by the philosophical approaches I was introduced to in my post-secondary education, informed by several years of practice in the field within organizations and social change work.
The first most important learning for facilitators is that your tools don’t work the same with every group. The second most important learning I think is the idea that the facilitator matters to group work far more than we are led to believe. The role and position and choices of the facilitator has immense effects on what happens in a group of people. That realization set me off on a journey of trying to understand the nature of different contexts. What makes one group different than another? Why can we never standardize performance or assure quality outcomes and results from facilitation practice? This seems so clear and obvious, but the state of the facilitation world continues to treat tools and methods as context-free silver bullets for every problem. We speak frequently of our tool boxes, and the language of group work is filled with the mechanistic metaphors of technical language: fixing problems, smooth meetings, efficiency, productive dialogue, outputs and outcomes. Agenda designs follow linear logics; start here, do this, progress to this stage, get a good outcome, and do it all in six hours. And in all the 1\”10 must listicles that promise life changing methods for group work, we rarely see informed discussion about the positionally of the facilitator.
I use this kind of language all the time. Even the term “facilitator” implies a mechanistic solution to a problem space. “To make things easier” is the etymology of the word. Actual facilitation practice doesn’t do this, in my experience. It makes something easier, and some things harder. Facilitators need to be clear about what is made easier and what is made more difficult and we MUST, ethically and morally, be clear and transparent about what we are doing to ensure that meetings end on time, or that they meet pre-determined goals. We have to be honest with ourselves about how much emergence we allow in the containers in which we work, and how we influence action in those containers.
We also have to be honest about what process can accomplish and what conditions need to be in place in order for things to “work.” And what “working” even means. There is a strong cultural tendency to believe that if we can just get the right people in the room, if we can just get all the issues out on the table, then we can make progress. Such a belief tends to ignore power and it tends to treat the dialogic container as the most important place for action, ignoring the bigger contexts that determine what is possible and what is not. If there is any doubt that this approach is wrong headed, the failures of the CoP conferences to adequately address climate change are exhibit A.
Context for action matters. Many times as a facilitator I have found myself at a loss about why a group process has gone in a surprising direction. There is so much hidden in the social field, and often times an intervention can open things up, bring surprising issues to the fore, or trigger dynamics that folks were unaware of. Facilitated dialogue oftentimes helps solve some problems but also opens up others.
As skilled dialogic practitioners we know that we need to pay attention to the dynamics of the context as we are designing a meeting. I don;t think our clients usually give us enough credit for taking the time to do that. I will always insist that something like two thirds or three quarters, or more of my work for a session goes into understanding the context so that what we do is useful to a specific group of people, in a specific place and in a specific moment in time. It is tempting to believe that a facilitator or consultant can come into any situation and work some miracle in a short amount of time. The truth is that we are the LEAST well equipped to work with your team. Even when I do take a long time to work with a team and craft good questions and a design of activities that will help address realistic process goals, many times participants will see me on the day and say “all he does is ask questions and then the people do all the work. What are we paying him for?” It’s the classic conundrum of knowing where to tap.
Because this work is largely invisible to the process it seems like a dark art. But there is good theory that supports the work of consultants and facilitators who work primarily with the context so that they can take an educated guess about the kinds of process tools that might help a group in any given situation. In this series of blog posts I want to address this aspect of facilitation practice, why it matters, and how complexity theory helps us to understand both the nature of dialogic containers and the importance of the contexts in which they are embedded.
I think facilitators need to develop these skills and practices becasue the “magic” that happens in good dialogue is not random and it is not down to just using the right tool in the right context. Doing so helps us to