Someone asked me the other day about how to use constraints in facilitation and I thought I’d jot some quick thoughts down here.
Let’s start using terms from Cynefin. Group work falls on a scale between ordered tasks and unordered tasks (or complicated and complex). The first question I ask myself in designing a container for facilitation is, “how much emergence is desired in this field?” In most of my work, I’m working in highly emergent situations, but for folks working around issues like safety or legal issues, there may be a prescribed outcome that the group needs to work towards. And of course, there is a mix along the way, and a lot of work happens in the liminal spaces between these two kinds of work.
If the purpose of the gathering is emergence, then you use enabling constraints to create the conditions for emergent outcomes. If the purpose of the gathering is a fixed goal or target, then you use governing constraints to discourage emergence.
All group work is constrained. In other words it is not possible for “anything” to happen in a group, and every choice we make with the power we have has hosts/facilitatiors or leaders in a situation constrains the work. It behooves us to make ethical decisions about the constraints we use to structure group work. NOT thinking about these constraints, or not thinking enough about them, can result in a fatal lack of awareness. We can end up over-or under-structuring a meeting such that unintended consequences become quickly catastrophic to the purpose of the gathering.
What do constraints look like? Here’s a short set of lists of the thing facilitators typically make choices about when they are setting the conditions for a container.
Connections
- Who are the people in the room and how do we connect them together? How do we break or lessen connections? How can we diversify connections?
- What information, resources or artifacts are important to connect to people and the purpose of the work? What do folks need to know to participate well?
- How much should folks in the gathering be connected to the outside world? How deeply do they need to be connected inside the gathering?
Exchanges
- What are the ways in which we will share information in the gathering? Stories, data, opinions, interests, facts, dreams, experiences?
- How does power work in this space? Who has it and who does not? What do we need to do to work with it well?
- What is the nature of exchanges in the system? Collaborative, learning, debate, confrontation and conflict, appreciative, critical, supportive, dismissive?
- Which media will enable exchanges in the space? Writing, drawing, body movement, song, play, reflection…
Attractors
- What purpose is at the centre of the work?
- What questions will we use to guide conversations? How open or close are those questions?
- Do we need a single focus for the meeting or the conversation, or is this a space for multiple foci? How will we enable those conversations to happen?
- What hidden attractors are in the room that may cause the group to self-organize in unhelpful ways? These are things like status, privilege, history and so on that form powerful centres around which people will make choices about their participation. Left unspoken, these attractors are powerful dark constraints in the system that can produce surprising results.
Boundaries
- What are the time and space requirements that limit our work, for the meeting as a whole and for specific parts of it?
- Who is in and who is out, and how do we make that determination?
- What are the barriers to participation, and how are they helpful or hindering?
- What topics are allowed or not allowed to be raised?
- What personal and social boundaries need to be created or maintained or dissolved?
- What safety needs have to be met for physical, emotional and psychological safety? How do we create the conditions for resilience in the container if people are required to stretch themselves away from their comfort zone or into a space that starts to feel challenging to them?
Where there are degrees of complexity or emergence in the container in which you are working (which is a lot of the time for most of us), your initial design choices will inevitably adopt and evolve over the course of the meeting. Each of these constraints is emergent and while we can start with choices, changes to those choices come fast and think. Sometimes you need to tighten a constraint by, for example, shortening the amount of time needed for an activity. Other times you need to break up groups that are falling into premature convergence together and perhaps getting “too cliquey” for the work at hand. In other cases, what looks like a “clique” is actually a group taking responsibility for its own safety, and in fact, you shouldn’t break it up.
There is so much more to say on all of this, but by way of tying the notion of my four kinds of constraints to facilitation, does that provide some clarity?
About HOW to do that? Consult my post on some of the basic competencies one needs to develop to work with complex facilitation. It ain’t easy.
Most mornings, when I’m at home, I stroll down to a local rocky beach, coffee in hand, to begin my day in meditation. The beach is a pleasant 15-minute walk from my house. When I reach the water, I step from the asphalt onto a gravel path that meanders through trees, past thickets of blackberry bushes, and ends in a secluded cove facing east, towards the rising sun that crests over the 1200 meter ridges of the Brittania Range, the mountains that make up the eastern edge of the inlet in which I live.
I began visiting this spot regularly the day after my father died. This beach, in all its varying weather and seasons, became my sanctuary for healing and introspection. Whether on a sunny summer morning or during a dark, rainy winter day, it offers a place to simply be. It’s a space where I am held in the vastness of the east wall of Atl’kat7tsem/Howe Sound, where I sit still, observing the ever-changing dance of the waves, wind, sky, and sea. This spot is undeniably a container, but it is one that’s vast and overwhelming, akin to entering a cathedral. It’s a space so grand that my presence doesn’t alter it, inviting me instead to enter and surrender.
There are containers in our lives that we create with intent and control. There are emergent containers, birthed from many small collaborative actions. Then, there are containers like this one, pre-existing, ancient even, that hold us and are accessed by deliberately crossing a threshold that ushers us into a different state of being, thinking, and feeling.
Having a space like this in one’s life is beneficial, as many of the containers in which we work, live, shape, and co-create are embedded within much larger ones, over which we have little control or influence. The practice of surrendering to a larger context helps us fully immerse ourselves in a place and moment, to quiet our minds, rest, observe, and experience. In doing so, we also discover our inner reactions to our surroundings.
Maybe you have a place like this, or you can find a place like this. It might not be the mountains of a fijord, but it could be a forest, a park, a lake, a field, or the heart of a bustling city. Go there, observe, listen, and notice how little your presence in that space changes it, but how much you are influenced by it. Consider the audacity of imagining how you could affect or change it. Familiarize yourself with your humility and insignificance.
Our work in the world requires us to dance between the spaces we make and the spaces we inhabit. We can dance between these spaces and we can witness the dance of these spaces with each other. And all the while, we inhabit our own little containers of thoughts and feelings and intentions and motivations, every so subtly shaping and being shaped by dancing space.
I’m reading, writing and thinking a lot about containers these days. It has been a pervasive theme in my life, as I have constantly been obsessed with the concept, the ideas and the practices of building and holding containers for as long as I can remember. The spiritual practices I have cultivated in my life have always been related to containers. From the beginning of my facilitation career, the ideas that have most grabbed me are the ideas of hosting and holding space.
I remember a couple of significant events in my thinking as I realized how important containers are to facilitation and leadership. The first was my first exposure to Open Space Technology in 1995. That first experience, hosted by Anne Stadler, Angeles Arrian and Chris Carter, began with a kind of ritual invocation as we moved from what had been a traditional conference of 400 people to a day of self-organized conversations. In that instance, a candle was lit, and something more spiritual than transactional took place as we were welcomed into Open Space.
After that meeting, I devoted myself to Open Space Technology and to the practice of what I later came to know as “hosting:” holding space for self-organization and emergence. As I began to study dialogic practice, facilitation, self-organization and complexity, the idea of “the container” loomed large in my awareness.
If you have read my blog over the years, you will see this. There are more than two dozen blog posts that explore my thinking on this, and my only serious academic publishing has been on this topic. It is a subject that grabs me because it represents a concept that has appeared in every part of my life, from facilitation to music making, to playing and watching sports, to spiritual practice and so on. It is the one idea that seems to define what my life has been all about hosting and holding containers for self-organization and the emergence of good things.
And yet, it is almost a completely intangible idea. Of course, containers are quite visible when we make them out of walls and windows, or the sides of boats, or an island surrounded by water. But most of the rest of the containers we live in are ephemeral, diaphanous, hardly there at all, and yet they determine so much of our behaviour. Containers enact ways of thinking and cognitive patterns for good or ill. They can evoke emotional responses that arise from our subconscious. They define or challenge our sense of identity or belonging and they can focus our attention or cause it to become diffuse.
Ten years ago as I was starting out on my research for the chapter I ended up writing in the Dialogic Organizational Development book on containers, I had a chance to sit down with Crane Stookey, who is a tall ship captain and a consultant and who has written extensively and generously on containers. He was my first interviewee on this topic because he has such a clear experience of understanding and working with containers, as do all captains that command ships built for the roiling sea. Our conversation at the time was fantastic, and the only note I recorded said this: “The container builds the conditions for internal transformation. In Dialogic OD, needs this to be the primary site of change.”
What I meant by that is that any change that comes to an organization (or team, or group or community…) comes because the conditions for how that group self-organizations have changed. Containers are so important for this because the constraints at work in containers are the things that determine the behaviours and possibilities in a complex system. We know this is true – take the tables out of your board room and see what happens – and yet so much work in the world towards changes focuses on the idea that if we could just work harder to control on the interactions between people and the outcomes of those interactions, we will get the world we want. It is a perspective I find cruel and at odds with human community and life itself. It is one that is colonial at its heart.
So there are stakes to working on this and trying to bring this idea and set of concepts to some clarity, and I think this is something I am going to be devoting my time and attention to over the next little while to see if I can come up with some really good ways to describe the properties of containers, especially the ineffable ones, and the practices we use as humans for crossing over thresholds and entering into the bounded spaces of our lives that bring us into different ways of thinking and being. Maybe – and I realize I’ve made this promise before but…- maybe it becomes a book.
I’d really appreciate your thoughts on this topic, your questions, your enthusiasms and stories of your experience. What do you think? Is this something worthwhile? What would it mean to you to have a set of thoughts, practices and ways of working with containers that help you to see this locus of change work?
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