Are the people trustworthy? Is the facilitator? Is the process?

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, in my practice I make good faith assumptions about people. But let’s expand that.

I found a blog post of mine from twenty years ago that lays this down:

The essence of his argument is this: in Judeo-Christian societies, humans are said to be born with sin, and are therefore inherently untrustworthy; to be precise, humans are unable to rely on their own judgements to make good decisions and decisions for the good. And so the way to deal with a population of largely untrustworthy neer-do-wells is to create an eleborate system of controls in society to ensure that behaviour is managed and the chaos doesn’t get too overwhelming.

In contrast, Watts says, many societies, including traditional Chinese society and, I would argue, many First Nations societies see humans as essentially good and capable and trustworthy. If you can view humans like this, then you can see a room full of people as a room full of potential, and an organization of people is one essentially capable of doing good in the world. All you have to do is trust these inherent capacities.

The implications for this are that I am called to see people as fundamentally capable of participating in the ordering of their collective life.

The question I think I have been in for a long time, especially because I was initially trained in and by Indigenous teachers, has become how do we bring that assumption and square it with the role of a facilitator/host/practtioner/designer who comes to the situation and who, with very little authority, makes the intervention facilitator-centric? In situations where the dynamics of colonization are present, that stance and set of relationships takes on added importance, but I don’t think we’re ever free of that tensions. Because this is a pervasive problem in general management and organizational life, deeply informed by the way the Church married to Empire addressed the issue of organizational scale, we can take a deep view about this question. Using a theological perspective Snowden describes this as “the intent is Pelagian, the structure is Augustinian” and what that means is that we can say we can genuinely trust the group and still reproduce a structure in which the facilitator, and the process, occupies a privileged position.

This is a practice tension, not a question to be answered. I don’t think this tension can be resolved. Every intervention changes the landscape. Every invitation privileges some possibilities over others. Every method excludes as well as enables. The question isn’t whether I influence a situation. I always do. The question is: how do I influence it without making myself the source of its intelligence? It’s one I’m thinking a lot. My own practice informed by both Snowden’s work and Kurtz’s Participatory Narrative Inquiry is a way to disrupt this tension in favour of the good faith assumption. The way one navigates this tension depends very much on the kinds of situation in which one is working. “Complicated” situations – like building a bridge – require expert-driven processes with experts performing clear roles. Complex situations like require the kind of process that is emergent, including the role of the host.

What’s your relationship to this tension? Where do you find yourself locating the capability for collective action?