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 don’t shy away from the fact that diversity is essential to creating processes that are inclusive and give us as much situational awareness and access to distributed intelligence as possible. The current attacks on diversity from ideological perspectives are direct attacks on making groups of people smarter. If you narrow the opportunity and the resources to look at and understand situations you limit the scope of possible action, and you make yourself a lot less intelligent and responsive that the context or your competition.
If your organization used a DEI policy as the only addressed the need for diversity of lived experience in your work, you were probably not doing it right. Performative diversity doesn’t help. Mandating a certain amount of diversity is still a technical solution to a complex problem. The problem is “how do we best understand the current context in which we are operating in order to find the best ways to act.” If the context is a complex one, increasing the degrees of diversity in the process gives one more access to the distributed intelligence of the field in which you are operating.
One of the places that this shows up in participatory work is in the way we invite people to the work. How do you find people you don’t know and generate enough comfort, trust and ease that they can show up and contribute?
Trust is an emergent property of relationships so one trick here is to work with the constraints of connection and exchange. The challenge is how to find people that have proximity to the issue at hand and that are unknown to those who find themselves in the centre of the problem. And it is compounded by a need to overcome trust issues stemming from factors such as status, knowledge, power, power and resources.
We once addressed this problem using this constraints strategy when working with a local foundation who was conducting some community engagement sessions for a new program design. The issue for them had always been the “usual suspects” problem: the same people kept showing up in the same way. Part of the problems was structural: meetings were held during the day and there was no child care for example. Part of the problem was the power and status gradient between the foundation – who was a powerful presence in the community – and the community itself. Many of the people who would show up to engagement sessions were those hoping to secure grants or those who were already funded but the foundation. This would skew participation in unhelpful ways as people tried to balance competing agendas around their own participation.
Yet the tension was real. We needed familiars to extend the reach of invitation to those who had knowledge to contribute to the problem and who would have enough trust to share it.
We began by making a list of invitees and we contacted them to ask them to personally invite one person in their network who was different from them and had never been to a foundation event. We didn’t specific how they had to be different, but we did ask that the invited person be new to foundation events. This simple action extended the invitation beyond the group that was known to the foundation staff and used existing networks of trust and relationship to cultivate difference and diversity. The resulting gathering was positively received and the program staff and participants said the quality of learning was noticeably different. Many of the new people who came felt pleased to be directly invited and so the level of engagement and participation at the meeting was higher than usual as well.
This idea and this approach was enabled by our understanding of how constraints work in shaping complex environments. Working with constraints to shape interactions between people is the work of the host in complex environments. We don’t know what the outcome will be, but when we want to change things, we settle on a direction towards “better” and work with the constraints available to us to see what will happen. In this case simply removing barriers – by providing food and child care for example – was not enough on its own to increase diversity. We needed to work with the exchanges between people to piggy back on existing trust networks to see if we could generate more trust and a different profile of participants.
It worked. What emerged at the event was a broader perspective on the issues at hand and ideas for crafting the new program. It alos brought new people to the work of the foundation, some of whom carried on to be involved with the new program.
Increasing diversity didn’t require a policy or a program. It was rooted in the real need in a complex context, which will always require diversity to scan, plan and design with the community in a context-appropriate way.
Over the past several weeks, Dave Snowden has been writing a very extensive series of long blog posts that serve as a watershed declaration of the state of his work thus far in the field of anthro-complexity. The posts both define what the field is and make sharp distinctions about what it isn’t, especially in relation to practices, ontologies, and theories that sit adjacent or close to it. I believe this represents a moment where Snowden is making a strong declaration about what anthro-complexity is, and being very deliberate about pulling it back from interpretations that seek to fit it into pre-existing understandings of complexity. Anthro-complexity is a new approach to complexity in human systems, and these posts are a strong statement of what that is.
In the course of these posts, Dave has focused in part on the Art of Hosting, among other approaches to working in complexity, and has named me explicitly as someone who has been trying to work within the field of the Art of Hosting to bring my own practice more in line with what I have been learning about anthro-complexity over the past 15 years or so, since I was introduced to Cynefin.
The entire series is very important to understand the context, and it is very long and dense stuff, but it’s important to understand some of the context. You can start the most recent series on the channel and the estuary here. For these posts I am going to write, I encourage you to read the two most direct posts about the Art of Hosting:
These posts have helped me to reach an important moment in my own thinking, and I promised to respond to them personally and messily, so I’ll do my best here, probably in a series of posts. I am just heading out on a three-and-a-half-week walking holiday, so I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to get to, but long walks do offer a chance to ruminate.
So here is the first of what will likely be a number of posts on this topic.
First, thank you, Dave, for naming me, and for naming the Art of Hosting as a practice field, and for putting some deeply important questions to me and to us. These are questions that help guide and deepen our understanding of the field we work in. The Art of Hosting field is a broad one, spanning every continent, made up of people who arrive from many different traditions and levels of experience in the worlds of facilitation and change-making. Originally, the field was formed by folks moved by their experiences in social change, new metaphors of organizational leadership and systems change, and large-group facilitation methods. We are, and always have been, a community of practitioners first, and so the field has taken on the feel of a place where methods and tools are top of mind. I think the world sees the Art of Hosting as a collection of tools and practices for convening dialogue, and I don’t think that is incorrect. But it presents a problem that Snowden has identified, and it’s one we have to deal with.
The basic problem is this: while we use the language of emergence and complexity in the Art of Hosting, our use of methods and pre-designed processes, and our emphasis on “hosts,” means that we run the risk of not always being coherent with our own claims about emergence. Our approach to hosting conversations that matter certainly acknowledges emergence and can create conditions in which emergence happens, but it does that largely because humans operating in any constraint regime will create emergent outcomes. The question is whether that emergence is relevant to the field out of which these people come, or whether it is a distortion brought about by the container in which people are gathered and in which we convene conversation. A powerful conversation on its own is not helpful if its effects cannot survive contact with the system that it seeks to change.
The critique is important because it raises a question of epistemic justice, and I don’t think we answer that question very well: whose knowledge is being surfaced, and under what conditions? Are we enabling the distributed intelligence of the system to become visible, or are we shaping what can be said and heard through the design of our processes, invitations, and harvests?
If the conversations we convene are to truly matter, they must be coherent with the field in which they are situated. More than that, whatever emerges in those conversations must be able to travel back into that field and interact with it: shifting patterns, enabling action, and surviving beyond the temporary conditions of the container.
The issue, then, is not whether to convene, but how to do so in ways that remain accountable to the field. We need to be aware of the constraints we introduce, conscious of the power we hold as hosts, and attentive to whether what emerges is actually usable once people return to the systems they inhabit. And we need to be constantly critiquing our positionality.
Dave’s work lately has been to discuss systems as geological features. He locates the work of anthro-complexity firmly in the metaphor of the estuary, and yesterday his post very helpfully described the Art of Hosting (as a body of work) as a delta. These are two different kinds of systems, and the distinction is important. I want to quote from that post at length:
Art of Hosting is the delta of the leadership and organisational field. Over two decades and across dozens of cultural contexts, Toke Møller, Monica Nissen, and the community they built have produced real moments of collective intelligence, genuine emergence, and authentic contact. The practice carries real generosity and real craft, and this post takes that seriously.
But the delta has been building. The hosting aesthetic, the circle, the open space, the world café, the council, the harvest: these are now a recognisable repertoire, instantly legible to anyone who has spent time in that world. And a repertoire is a structure that precedes the encounter. The hosting team designs the invitation, shapes the container, holds the process, and harvests the outputs. The circle looks leaderless. The architecture is not.
Chris Corrigan, who has engaged generously with this argument in previous conversations and stated plainly that he is trying to change Art of Hosting from within, deserves acknowledgement here. That is the most intellectually honest position available to a practitioner committed to a tradition they have also diagnosed. It is exactly the move Griffin made with Stacey and the matrix: following the argument toward its conclusion, regardless of the professional cost. The question is whether the tradition as a whole is willing to follow that argument, or whether the delta will continue to accumulate.
The delta’s generativity is real. The flood plain moments, the occasions when Art of Hosting breaks through its own container and something genuinely distributed happens, are not accidental. They are what the tradition has been reaching for, and they occur. The problem is that the method cannot reliably produce them, cannot fully explain when they occur, and cannot sustain them when they do. The hosting team is still in the room. The design is still prior. The harvest is still shaped by hands that arrived before the conversation began.
In order to fairly deal with this critique we must honestly look at the ways in which it is true. And so to all my friends and colleagues in this field, I invite you and us to find the genuine questions in here that help us deepen our practice and rise to the challenge posed by serious questions of epistemic justice, legitimate change, and a deeper understanding of complexity and its dynamics.
My experience of reading Dave’s posts lately has been at times feeling a bit defensive but on the whole (and especially after yesterday’s) more akin to what a delta might feel during and after an autumn king tide, when it is overwhelmed and inundated by the sea and the rain. When the deluge stops and the tide ebbs, one finds that the landscape has been gently rearranged and new patterns of flow and precarious stability arise. I find myself in somewhat familiar location, but standing on new ground and needing to re-navigate and re-orient myself and my practice. I genuine experience of estuarine thinking. As I have been doing so over the past few days (during which I was also co-leading an Art of Hosting training) I found myself operating with heightened curiosity and inquiry.
I’ll write more about these questions, and especially as they relate specifically to how I understand the practice of the Art of Hosting, the usefulness of methods (including harvest), the importance of dialogic containers and how anthro-complexity helps us make better change. Stay tuned, and enjoy the view.
The landscape dictates what is possible and what is not.
This is the third 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.
Here’s the idea:
- Dialogic containers are the scale at which humans experience the greatest immediate agency, but they exist inside larger contexts that determine whether that agency can produce lasting change.
- The contexts have different scales with increasing stability and increasing time scales over which change happens, and that has implications for what we can do within any given facilitated dialogue.
- Understanding these contexts helps us to design and host containers and processes that bring us the best possible chance of catalyzing bigger changes.
Introduction: Driving down the mountain with Adam Kahane
Back in November 2006 I attended an Art of Hosting gathering in the mountains above Boulder, Colorado which was unique in the hundreds of Art of Hosting events I’ve attended or led before or since. There were some important Art of Hosting stewards there alongside folks from the Authentic Leadership in Action Institute. There were a group of consultants from a new company called “Generon” which later became Reos. One of my fond memories of that event is singing “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” with me on guitar and Adam Kahane giving his all on the choruses!
It was an important event because it brought together people who had many differences about what we felt the role of dialogue is in system change. Adam was working on the Power and Love polarity, and was very interested in the what happens if dialogue just becomes about love and good vibes while failing to address power in the room. Many of us in the Art of Hosting community were really doubling down on the relational and inner work we felt was necessary for change to happen. It was a swirling encounter of folks with a fierce commitment to practice, and a lot of experience, but a nascent understanding of what lay beyond our competencies.
It took my a while to unpack it, but Adam and I drove back to Denver airport together and we had a chance to talk about it with respect to some of the bigger work he was talking on with the Generon group. For Adam, I think everything was about how change can happen at meaningful scales where power keeps things in a certain way. Dialogic containers are lovely because we can create whatever we want inside of them, but Adam was challenging me not be naive about the reality that these experiences are embedded in a bigger context.
The question that haunts me
My work at the time was engaged with some big systemic issues including food systems, youth suicide and Indigenous child and family services, and I was working with people and organizations that had power and reach. The question that haunted me (and still does) was something like “Why can’t we get things to really change?” No one wants youth suicide, children being placed in unsafe care, food systems that poison people and planet. Of course the current set-up benefits people with power and money who are able to profit from it and keep it going. But still. Why was youth suicide not a thing we could change?
I landed on the idea of “community action systems” which was my way of trying to name the context that Adam was also speaking about. I wrote a long post about it. In that post, you can see my early orientation to good work in complexity: starting with what is, working to shift it and seeing what happens.
Twenty years after writing that post, I think the inquiry is still valid. But my study of complexity and my dedication to linking dialogue to change has given me some further insight. And so I offer this third post in a series about theory and facilitation on the ecology of dialogic containers.
Connecting facilitation practice to good theory
Good dialogue feels transformational. In a good and deep conversation, we learn something, we may have our opinions changed, or discover insights together that we have never seen before. We might have a part of identity slip away. We can find healing, beauty, joy, conflict, or coherence. Because the change happens right away, and often within and between, dialogue feels like it is the key to systemic change. “If this encounter can have such a profound affect on me right here,” the thinking goes, “imagine what would happen if we did this at scale?”
I like that thought. I clung to that thought for most of my professional life. I fervently believed that if we could just get the right people in the room and have the right conversations, the right things could happen. Some small victories validated this approach a bit, but like a stone dropped into still water, the ripples can be measured for a while – profoundly beautiful radiating waves of energy – but at some point, the lake absorbs the effort and the far shore never feels the effect.
A couple of decades of reflection and learning about complexity led me to Snowden’s work, where anthro-complexity is an attempt to build a coherent theory of the complexity of human life. Dave introduced me to Alicia Juarrero, whose most recent book, Context Changes Everything, is a critical text in creating a theory of stability, which I feel is critical to any theory of, or attempt to make, change. If you don’t understand how things remain stable and persistent over time, it’s very difficult to know where to affect change, let alone what to do once you are successful.
Through my love of football and my the work of Mark O Sullivan, I was introduced to ecological complexity, which is derived form the work of James Gibson and from which the idea of “affordances” comes. Ecological complexity says that actions are embedded in interconnected contexts and are enabled from the constraints and possibilities that define those contexts. All this is important to understand because if we want to understand why things are hard to change we need to look at the constraint regimes that keep them in place and find ways to discover the affordances for action. That points back to why Dave named one of his frameworks “cynefin”, one meaning of which is “habitat,” specifically a habitat that makes some things possible and not other things.
All of these folks work on this problem and their work is incredibly useful to dialogue practitioners and process designers. But in my world of facilitation I see hardly anyone connecting this body of work with facilitation and dialogue practice.
This matters because dialogic containers are places of the most active and intimate agency in groups of people. In dialogue we have maximum agency for change. We can create, occupy and exchange within dialogic containers at a very rapid place. A mind can change in a moment, a four-hour meeting can create new and powerful relationships through shared experiences. New ideas can be birthed. Creativity bubbles, possibility emerges.
Scales and tempos
No dialogic container is a neutral or a blank space. It is nested inside of and alongside of other contexts that influence it. These contexts exist at different scales and have different tempos. Change happens at a slower pace. There is much less creativity and possibility in a large bureaucratic system than there is in a small team. Communities trying to initiate a new way of delivering services, like harm reduction around drug use, must do so within a cultural framework that says “for example “drugs are bad.” Changing the cultural changes the possibilities for coherent ways of being, but changing a culture is hard.
In an ecological setting, a dialogical container is a lightly resourced structure that can create powerful change that acts upon its participants. This recent post on making beauty together talks about that. Constraints provide a downward causality, which is what Juarerro argues. So what are the contexts, scales and tempos that can influence dialogic containers? A useful list might be:
- Dialogic containers
- Situational settings
- Institutional fields
- Cultural fields
Let’s look at these in more detail.
Dialogic containers
Dialogic containers are the most agile and flexible scales. Spatially, people are directly encountering one another, whether face to face or online, and things happen in an instant. Conversations move along in minutes or hours, and decisions can be made, minds changed, conflicts inflamed or resolved in the blink of an eye. Think about the moment you said yes to a marriage proposal or a job offer or an invitation to something that changed your life. Dialogic containers are places where we practice our own agency, we have maximum freedom to act based on how we have made sense of things, and where change can occur immediately.
However, as the entire field of social psychology and cognitive science tells us, what I call dialogic containers themselves are constituted of context specific constraints which influence behaviour. Physical constraints are the most obvious, and all facilitators know that part of their job is creating space that is conducive to a meeting’s purpose. The nature of the space affects how people can organize, how well they are able to participate and how present they can be to the task at hand. Choices about room layout, light, size, temperature and colour all influence participants’ experiences.
Dialogic containers are also subject to internal constraints that enable the likelihood that some things will emerge and others will not. Facilitators and process designers have some influence in this space both in the moment and in the invitation process that helps bring people into the container. In my own practice of highly participatory work I find that it is very important to identify a shared necessity for participants that links with their intrinsic motivations to be present and contributing. The more we connect the meeting to urgent necessity of the moment, the more deeply participants invest in and participate in the process.
A plenary meeting is not the smallest way a group can of people can organize and engage. When groups break into sub-groups, multiple dialogic containers form, each subjected to the same kind of internal constraints that enable or limit participation. In dialogue facilitation, this technique is used deliberately to break up a field for many reasons. Sometimes we want to increase creativity or diversity for idea generation, or to disrupt unhelpful patterns like groupthink or a conversation that seems to be going around in circles.
Situational settings
Dialogic containers are set within a moment in time and a space that matters. Current events in the organization such as a recent conflict or structural change can influence the way a meeting goes. A strategic planning retreat is very different if the organization is riven with conflict than when everything is going well. Team culture can be influenced with a change in leadership, which is something we see all the time in sports. A group that has been together through struggles and celebrations will have a strong internal coherence that will be very different from a group coming together for the first time in unfamiliar territory. Situational awareness can still be rapidly changing contexts, on the scale of days or months, and they are the context that is most immediately influential to the group. Many times I have engaged in a long planning process that began when the situation was one way but by them time we met together “things had changed.” If one doesn’t adjust the nature of the dialogic container with situational awareness, “fit” become an issue. We will be doing the wrong thing for the wrong reason.
I once ran an Open Space meeting for a group of people who had been preparing to put to use a substantial pit of government funding organize a community health network. It took us a few months to craft the invitation and make sure everyone could come, and to prepare them to participate well in Open Space, including setting up ways that their work on the day could be put to use after the meeting. All was ready to go and people arrived and were excited to get to work on this opportunity. As I stood open to Open Space, the government representative whispered in my ear that the financial commitment had changed, but he didn’t want anyone to know about it. There was to be no money and he thought I should just invite the group to do the work anyway but not to mention that there would be no funding. I asked him to disclose that to the group and his response was “it’s not public yet.”
The fact was, it wasn’t a secret. Some of the participants knew this and others hadn’t and all were sworn to secrecy, so no one felt comfortable raising the issue. As I called for topics to be posted there was silence. Finally one of the group members stood up and said “I think we all need to talk about this and we like to ask our facilitator and government rep to leave the room while we do so.” I was relived and grateful. While my client and I waited outside the meeting room for a few hours we talked about the ethics of what had just happened and how the situation very much had a role to play in why this meeting was not going to go the way he wanted it to.
Dialogic containers do not arise in a vacuum. they are the product of an immediate situation that can change quickly and influence what will emerge in the container.
Institutional fields
Institutional fields represent a broader context in which dialogic containers function. Here we see that behaviours and possibilities are contained by things like policies, laws, decision making authority, incentives, resources and even persistence behavioural patterns like workload and job function. All of these constraints are helpful because they provide stability to institutions. This stability usually takes years to change, especially in established institutional settings like government, education systems, and large corporations. The stability is helpful because it protects the resources and, where applicable, the duty of care that institutions hold. Institutional fields make it very difficult for change to occur and become a deep source of frustration for facilitators who craft dialogic containers for innovation and change, only to see good ideas mire in the stability of the institutional field.
Oftentimes I will hear from leaders that they want highly participatory events that generate good leads but that we have to “manage expectations” in terms of what is possible. I get it because a good dialogic container can generate feelings of excitement and possibility and experiences of change but institutions may have something to say about how much and how fast things can go. This is why my process design conversations include an important check-in about the “architecture of implementation.” In other words, I want everyone to be clear on what we know about how the results of a meeting will be used. The worst leaders are the ones who want the group to feel fully empowered (“oh I want everyone to think freely and come up with great ideas they can champion”) but have no intention of opening up affordance within the organizations to make novel ideas take root.
This interface between dialogic containers in which change is generated, and institutional setting in which stability is maintained is a critical space for understanding change. The bigger results of work done in dialogic containers are subject to the affordances that are in place between that container and the instiututional field, and that often makes it hard for emergent strategy produced in a container to find an easy way into and institutional field. Change is almost always unanticipated and oblique to the established institutional fields.
In a recent Open Space I did with a tribal government, over two days a group of employees began to talk about instituting a four-day work week for the tribal government employees. This issue emerged during the meeting and the tribal CEO watched it happen. When they asked her is this was possible she answered honestly: “I don’t know.” But she alos committed to doing her best o make it happen which meant that she needed to take a well thought out proposal to the tribal council. In order to make it more likely to succeed, she told they group they would need to back their proposal with data and with examples from other tribal governments and anticipate the questions that different tribal council members would have.
Because there was no established affordance for the change, making the change was going to be a high effort endeavour. The institutional field needed to be shaped to make it easier to say yes if the proposal was to succeed. This is familiar to everyone who studies and practices politics and change, but understanding the relationship between the active change landscape of a dialogic containers and the active stability landscape of an institutional field using ecological concepts helps make this work clearer. How can we carve a deep channel that makes it easy for these two contexts to be linked? That what affordances are. If we can find some that are pre-established affordances, that’s helpful. If we need to create some, then it’s unlikely that our change work will be effective until we do, and that should influence the way we initiate work ion teh dialogic container by influencing who we invite, and what we talk about.
Cultural field
Institutional fields may be the most visible contexts in which dialogic containers exist, especially in discreet and well defined organizational settings, but cultural field are alos at play. In organizations “they way we’ve always done things” can be as important a constraint as a law or a policy. So too can professional cultures, social norms, cultural status and personal relationships. These can affect what is considered “knowledge” or “authority” in a cultural setting. A person that shows up to a public local government meeting with a slide show of charts and spreadsheets is trying to establish authority within a managerial culture that values these kinds of artifacts, regardless of of how accurate the knowledge is. A person at the same meeting with a true and personal story might be dismissed as merely anecdotal, even though the story may reveal more about the situation that data that has visualized in a socially acceptable way.
Organizational cultures evolve over years. They are not changed quickly and they are not changed predictably. Even longer are the societal cultures and norms that shape behaviours. Wittgenstein coined the term “form of life” to describe the collected shared background of a human community’s practices, activities and ways of doing things that are long established and context specific for a society or culture. Forms of life have a powerful effect on the way institutions are shaped (and the regulatory environment inside which they are shaped) and they provide an incredibly robust and persistent field that limits what affordances are possible.
In the world of global sport, we can see how forms of life affect how global association football is organized and trained differently in North America and Europe. North American professional sports are organized around closed leagues where there is no incentive NOT to finish last. This is becasue the teams are “franchises” of the league rather than individual organizations who have agreed to play each other in a league. In North American professional soccer, promotion and relegation is extremely are and only recently has emerged in the United Soccer League, a competing professional league to Major League Soccer. MLS will likely never have promotion and relegation because team owners buy their franchises as members of the top tier of soccer and protect their investments by always staying in a league that generates shared revenues across all the clubs.
The biggest scale of these contexts are the civilizational scales that take multiple generations to change. These contexts are the stable and unchanging seas in which all work takes place. A culture that is rooted in liberal economics, featuring capitalist and market-based structures of productivity and distribution will always treat shared ownership and reciprocal gifting as counter cultural, even at the smallest scale.
Implications of contexts for making change
There is a helpful polarity of change work I use, which I initially got from Snowden. A Robust system survives by resisting change and a resilient system survives by being changed. As we look at the different scales of contexts inside of which dialogic work occurs, we can see increasing robustness the wider the context is. The reason why cultural contexts are so enduring is that they a deeply embedded in values that produce structures that guide behaviours and thinking in a particular way. Proponents of the idea that humans have no free will point to these larger constraint regimes to point out that, essentially, no matter how strong you are as a swimmer or how much progress you are able to make against the current, the river will always carry you back downstream.
Importantly, the degree to which a context is robust tells you a lot about how it changes. Robust systems are incredibly resistant to change, but when they do change, it is often catastrophic to the existing order. That means whole scale breakdown of a robust system will often collapse into chaos. If a group of people inside these contexts do not have the resources to manage the chaos (including expertise, connection and resourcefulness) things can become perilous. On the other hand, resilient systems are generally composed of flexible and loosely content structures that change all the time in small ways. Watching a forest change into a marsh through beaver activity is amazing. At no time does the ecosystem suffer a catastrophic loss of life or diversity (as it would if was instantly flooded by a dam break). Instead the system gradually changes over time, with the life being supported largely by what happens at the edges, where different contexts meet. These are called “ecotones” in ecology and they provide fresh resources, refuges, places to incubate new life and diversity. In the natural world the ecotone is where new species and new adaptive capabilities are born. The same is true in human life where the ecotone introduces new ideas, new connections and requisite diversity to the system which can be carried back to the centre of the system to be explored and experimented with.
At the immediate level, making meaning together can help create the local conditions for improved lives and that is why we gather to figure out how to improve organizational life. Occasionally there exists an affordance in a system of contexts like this that allows for the larger contexts to change, sometimes quite rapidly. Thomas Kuhn famously analyzed this in his work on paradigm change in the natural sciences. Science is a special case as a context because it has an in-built mechanism for both preserving its stability and making wholesale change, even when that change can throw the entire careers of established scientists into the bin!
But in general, larger contexts dictate the kinds of things that are more likely to happen than not. These are affordances, and good strategy seeks to find and use these affordances, especially if the change we are trying to make is structural or systemic. Single meetings, or even extended gatherings of powerful dialogue will not succeed in making changes to the larger contexts unless affordances exist to do, or unless the group has the power to overwhelm the constraints of the bigger contexts.
What this means for facilitation
This theory has been important to my facilitation practice. For most of my career I have enlisted to host dialogues with the hope that bigger things might change. If a group does not have access to power and influence and the ability to make changes to the larger context, these gatherings can feel very buoyant and optimistic but the results very quickly hit “the real world.” that is not to say that dialogue has no power. Held with a knowledge of the contexts in mind, dialogic practice can live in the ecotone of a larger system, cultivating the possibility of change, creating new and surprising connections, or developing new collective knowledge that can have and influence and effect on a broader context.
Dialogic containers remain the places where we experience the most agency and the most authority over our actions and our futures. Done well, many participants leave good dialogues with a sense of possibility and connection. Harvested well, and realistically, dialogic work can become the crucible for new ideas and connections that can catalyst change. On its own, dialogue is rarely effective in influencing the broader contexts that keep problems in place. Working to discover affordances and blockages in the context, building an architecture that supports implementation, and developing a theory and strategy for preserving gains made suddenly makes the encounter in the dialogic container important, more high stakes and more effective.
As Juarrero says, context changes everything. Dialogic containers give us a place where agency is immediate and creativity is possible. But the wider contexts in which those containers sit determine whether the results of dialogue can travel beyond the room. The work of the facilitator is therefore not only to host good conversations, but to understand the landscapes of constraint in which those conversations take place.