I’ve been facilitating groups for as long as I can remember, going back probably 20 years to high school when I ran both informal and organized youth groups with my peers. It has probably been about twelve or thirteen years ago that I started to actually pay attention to what I was doing. But only in the last five or six years, as I have been facilitating full time, have I noticed a deepening in my practice.
Work as practice. And by practice I mean something akin to a spiritual practice, whereby one undertakes a life of value and meaning through living in a particular way. When I feel my facilitation practice deepening, I notice that what I do is becoming more and more aligned with who I am.
I am starting to see just how important that is in the work I do with groups. When I was first starting out, I used to collect “tools” for working with groups. I had what amounted to a cookbook of ideas for working through different processes. I got some success in simply following the instructions and helping the group get to where they wanted to go. For most groups, and perhaps even a lot of facilitators, this is enough. It certainly served my work for a number of years.
The thing that changed that, and caused me to deepen my practice, was noticing what happened when things went wrong. Occasionally groups strayed far from the expectation I had for them and when the movie departs from the script, the facilitator’s REAL work begins. In these situations What I noticed was my own anxiety and panic about being in the unfolding chaos. I had very little idea what to do, and on a couple of occasions, things just went very wrong.
In reflecting on these experiences I realized what I was lacking was chaordic confidence, a term I appropriated from my friend Myriam Laberge. Chaordic confidence describes the ability to stay in chaos and trust that order will emerge. It’s a subtle art, but it is essential to working with groups who are themselves confronting chaos. If you can stay in the belief that order will emerge from what Sam Kaner calls “The Groan Zone” then the group has something to hitch its horse to, so to speak. But if you are married to your tools, and things go off the rails, you feel like a fish out of water, and you flop around unable to deal with the uncertainty around you. I’ve seen it happen – we probably all have – and it’s not pretty.
Developing chaordic confidence is more than acquiring more tools. It is about integrating an approach to life and work that is anchored in a a set of principles and values that serves our clients. For me these values include believing in the wisdom of the group, trusting that chaos produces higher levels of order and seeing conflict as passion that can be harnessed in the service of progress.
I began looking at some of the tools and processes and approaches I was using and started to realize that the things that worked for me and that brought a better experience to my clients, were processes rooted in the same values that I try to live. This weblog,tagged as “living in open space” is largely about that journey to live and work with the principles of Open space Technology – principles that amount to creating a practice of invitation. Living a life of invitation is a blast.
And there is more. My repetoire of approaches is expanding into a full range of what Toke Paludan Moeller calls “hosting practices.” And as I adopt and work with things like the world cafe and appreciative inquiry, I realize that the values and principles underlying those processes feel authentic to me. When I use those approaches to working with groups, my clients are getting ME, and not just a set of tools. I try to bring my whole self to this work now, with a large dose of chaordic confidence rooted in principles and values that link what I do with who I am. Doing and Being meet in the board room or the retreat centre.
We facilitators don’t talk much about this stuff, but I think it actually preoccupies a lot of our time and thinking. My own preparation for group involves many hours of design and reflection on process and principles so that I can go to work offering the highest level of service to the people with whom I am working. And for me, this means reflecting on what is core to my life and work.
So this is a long winded way of offering some insight into facilitation practice, perhaps mostly for those who are new to this path and who are realizing, as I am, that there is a life time of learning about oneself involved in this work. So as a service to those who might be interested in developing this deeper connection between life lived and tools used, I offer a set of links to principles underlying the processes I work with (and some I don’t work with!) in groups and communities. I offer these up both as a guide to group work and as a compendium of principles and teachings about living. See what you think…
Principles of process and life
- Open Space Technology
- Appreciative Inquiry
- Dialogue
- Circle
- World Cafe
- Dynamic Facilitation
- Chaordic principles
- Four fold way
My recipe book is changing. It’s no longer about tools for group work, but is instead a collection of teachings about living a true and good life of service to heart and community.
Today Dave Pollard reprints a recent speech by Bill Moyers in which he implores the world to use its heart to see what is unfolding around us. Moyers ends the speech thusly:
On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: ‘How do you see the world?” And Gloucester, who is blind, answers: “I see it feelingly.'”I see it feelingly.The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as a journalist, I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free – not only to feel but to fight for the future we want. And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk. What we need to match the science of human health is what the ancient Israelites called ‘hocma’ – the science of the heart…the capacity to see, to feel, and then to act as if the future depended on you.
This capacity to see from the heart lies at the core of what it means to sense the emerging future. And seeing from the heart means sensing the patterns of our emergent future in the grains of sand that are our present, right now, right here.
Johnnie Moore put it nicely yesterday when he asked “is your future in your present?”
In talking with Sonny Diabo last week, I learned that recovering this capacity to see may well be the one emerging Aboriginal leadership capacity that distinguishes 21st century leaders from those who have gone before. The utter domination of scientific materialism (along with the empirical measurement craze of the last couple of centuries) has relegated this ancient skill to the bargain basement bin of divination and idealism. The result has been a civilization where we shut off our human responses to the world and trust our senses only if they are confirmed by some mediated third party
Seeing the future in the present consists of two parts I think. It first means “seeing feelingly” or apprehending the truth of the world as it appears in front of us. All of the forces and the obstacles and the obfuscations that stand between our eyes and what is really happening. Seeing with the heart is the only way through this mess, to truly sense what is upon us.
Second, the capacity for seeing involves what Sonny describes as “getting my foot in the door.” In other words, there is a subtle ability to discern opportunity in all of the mess of the world. Sonny’s work these days consists of being and Elder to several processes across Canada that are purporting to make a difference for First Nations people. Among his two pet projects are Aboriginal Head Start, and long term care. He decided to throw his commitment into these projects because being born and dying are our deepest connections with the spirit world and the experiences of the first and last years of life are the most important for defining what it means to be Aboriginal. He sees this clearly, and sees the processes he is working on like doors that are opened a crack. He sees those cracks as potential, which he can help realize by supporting them as an Elder. And for him, once he has sensed this “”rightness” he sticks his foot in the door and does not let it go. For to simply witness these opportunities coming and going is not his game. He is there to extract the most he can for Aboriginal people. There is no decision to be made – he simply stays in the knowledge and belief that holding space and keeping it open allows the potential he sees to become manifest for everyone.
At the Art of Hosting workshop last week, my dear friend Toke Paludan Moller had a realization that he shared with us. It is that at every moment we are together as humans, collaborating, creating and enjoying ourselves, we are embodying something of the future we want to see. In our very act of being with one another, we are saying “this is how it should be.” Toke asked the question “what if the way we are together is the future?”
Questions like that force the eyes and heart open to seeing the world feelingly, in a way that allows us to see where we are and to seize the future contained in the Now, to seed it and grow it.
The other day Michael Herman and were talking about compassion and mutuality. The idea is that mutuality is making someone appear as real to you as you appear to yourself.
Naturally this means understanding that the person sitting across the room from you at this moment is full of an inner life that is as rich as yours. Confidence, self-esteem, confusion, love, pain, grief, celebration – all of these things are known to them too.
It sounds so trite on one hand, but it is incredibly powerful the more I dig into this thought. So often we see others as “punching bags” able to absorb hurt that we project without any internal effect. And yet, we know damn well how it feels to be cursed at (or smiled at for that matter).
To say that someone appears as real to you as you appear to yourself is to understand that when we think of ourselves we rarely think about our bodies. As Douglas and Catherine Harding would say, we don�t even know we have a head. We don�t see our back…we only see a small percentage of the body that other’s see. What makes us real to ourselves in our inner lives of thoughts emotions and sensations. With practice it is possible to sense that every other person in the world also has this inner life, despite that fact that we usually only perceive them as bodies.
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In a related move, Euan Semple at The Obvious? points me to The Global Rich List, which tells me that in an average year I am about the 50,000,000th richest person in the world, which puts me in the top 0.836 percentile.
I have a lot of work to do to understand compassionate relations when 5,949,632,435 are poorer than me. Five billion is a number I can’t even conceive of, but it does put minor aches and pains in context.
A picture of earth from the edge of the solar system, by Voyager 1
Carl Sagan: Relfections on a Mote of Dust
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there � on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
The picture at the top of this entry is a close up of the Voyager image of which Sagan is speaking. It was one of the last photos taken by Voyager 1 as it left the solar system in February 1990 to embark on its journey into interstellar space. The earth, a pale blue dot, appears suspended in a sunbeam which is basically solar glare on the camera lens. For a larger picture, with a lot more black nothingness surrounding our tiny, tiny home, click here. It sometimes brings tears to my eyes.
Grasslands National Park in southern Saskatchewan is an amazing place. It is natural shortgrass prairie and home to all kinds of interesting plants and animals. Over the course of three days there in 1994, we saw badgers, mule deer, pronghorn antelope, burrowing owls, ferringous hawks, black tailed prairie dogs, rattlesnakes, and red foxes. We saw teepee rings on the top of bald buttes, unused for maybe 100 years, but each stone cast off the bottom of a skin teepee and gently placed in a ring for another time. We saw buffalo stones; huge erratic boulders rubbed smooth by centuries of buffalo who scratched themselves against the cool stone.
But initially, it wasn’t easy to see all this. Grasslands is wide open and one can travel anywhere on foot. We decided that we would visit every tree that we could see in the park (4 in all). During the first evening of looking around we saw none of the wildlife we expected. The next morning we spotted a coyote trail and decided to follow it.
Suddenly the world revealed itself to us, The trail took us past deer beds and badger dens, prairie dog colonies and owl burrows. Past a bleached skeleton of an antelope and down to the muddy Frenchman River, the northern most reach of the Mississippi River Basin.
And the trail wound on, almost aimlessly, yet connecting each of these living places like a songline. I got to wondering how long that trail had been there…200 years? 1000 years? How long had the coyotes been patrolling the valley, checking on every possible chance for a meal?
I soon became convinced that these trails had no beginning and no end. To follow them you simply hop aboard, like a depression era drifter riding freights, and see where they carry you. Other trails join, and sometimes the path splits in two. But there is no beginning and no end. In theory, the continent is laced with these paths, the original story of the land etched gingerly into the natural surface of the earth. In most places these paths have been covered over, but I am sure that the acquired energy of thousands of years of animals walking has left an imprint. If one was sensitive enough, one might even be able to feel the trail humming beneath concrete or blacktop, honouring only the topography and natural contour of the land.
We can find these stories again. We have to dig beneath the layers that have grown over the trails like grime. But the story is there. It reveals itself the same way a dirt path emerges across a grassy urban park, in complete defiance of the paved plan . There are natural ways to navigate within space. By honouring them, the real story emerges, and the living places reveal themselves to us.