I think I’m definitely feeling like my work is online for the foreseeable future. While I do have some face-to-face sessions lined up for the fall and winter, most of what I am going to continue to do is host meetings and learning online.
Even though I have been doing that since probably 2004 or so when I first started using Skype I continue to learn about how to make online environments more interesting and, most importantly, more accessible. From time to time I put out a call to help me learn about people’s needs and experiences. Back in June I asked folks with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) how to help them participate at their best and I got lots of useful answers. I trust that the people who answered self-identified as folks with ADHD.
Here’s what I learned:
Preparation
Right off the top folks said that it helps to have lots of advance notice of what is going to happen in the meeting. Now, this is a hard one for me, because I tend to improvise a lot and respond to the direction the group is going in. That’s fine for me because I’m the one with agency and I can control how much bandwidth I have and choose the stop the work for a break when it feels good to me. But for folks that regulate their participation and attention through structure and preparation that can be a tiring ride and quickly erodes their ability to absorb material, and participate in discussion. To that end, I’ll be trying these strategies:
- At the outset, let participants know how the day will unfold, what the break times are and what the discussion questions are likely to be. This helps people to think through material and to prepare and how to measure out their attention and participation.
- Help ground the meeting in a strong purpose. Let people know why this work is relevant to them. That helps folks stay engaged in the session. This is good invitation practice.
In-meeting participation
Working online is very hard on the attention span for most people. It asks a lot of us to stay in one place, watching a grid on a flat video screen, engaging in activities that seem repetitive. If something is going on too long, it’s easy for attention to wander and the brain to start focusing on other things. Good facilitation in general should be avoiding these situations, but for folks with ADHD, specifically these strategies were offered.
- In the session, provide a mix of activities to generate and support thinking. This could include a few minutes of silent reflection at the outset of a conversation so participants can think about the question before responding or engaging in dialogue and exploration.
- Present material in smaller chunks and allow for some time to absorb and for participants to ask themselves “what is new here?” Longer presentations start to lose the viewer especially if the material is dense or full of new terms and concepts. I’m massively guilty of this and so going forward I’m going to try to present material in short, ogical, connected chunks that allows for integration.
- For learning exercises, provide activities that invite people to explore a concept and even provide a little challenge that allows for a safe-to-fail probe and a little dopamine reward. This little post from Nadia is one that inspired “the creative challenge” as a part of my facilitation practice.
- Don’t allow a few people to go down rabbit holes at the expense of everyone else’s learning. This can often happen in a plenary session, so I try to have people go into small groups to process some of the things they are hearing and learning.
- Sticking to commitments is important. If there is a break at 10:30, break at 10:30. I know already from years of working with folks with diabetes that scheduled meal times are essential and can’t be missed. This is true of folks with ADHD as well.
- Provide visual maps for the content that is being discussed. How does this link to other stuff we have been doing? My partner Caitlin is really good at doing this, and contextualizing our current learning in a larger landscape of what we are doing. It’s like those recaps that come before TV episodes…”previously on Star Trek…”
- Use tools like polls to engage people’s thoughts in plenary and then open the floor for comments based on that. Using tools like Menti gives people a chance to reflect and offer some text and so you can hear from everyone and not just the one or two who manage to get their voices heard.
What to do afterwards
As my friend Christie Diamond reminded me years ago, “the conversations starts long before the meeting begins and it ends long after the meeting is over.” To that end, it’s helpful to have a few plans for how to continue to participate after the meeting is done. For many people, the brian keeps sparking and having somewhere to contribute insights that come later is helpful. To that end it’s useful to let participants know what they can do afterwards with their insights. If there is a way to contribute, provide an email address and let them know how long that channel is open for. In our courses we use Kajabi as a learning platform that allows for discussion to take place in a forum at a later date. For programs like Complexity From the Inside Out which runs over nine weeks, these spaces are useful for asynchronous contributions.
So those are good strategies to use. I myself have never been diagnosed with ADHD, but when I look at symptoms I recognize many of the ways my brain works in those lists. Certainly the suggestions that my twitter correspondants provided would make MY own participation work better. I will leave you with a good short list from the UK National Health Service that provides some useful strategies for living with ADHD, many of which are simply good design principles for well delivered and accessible participatory events in general.
Thanks to all who contributed. What OTHER strategies should we add?
Since 2004, the Art of Hosting has been offered every autumn on Bowen Island, British Columbia, where I live. I was a participant in the first one and since then have been on the hosting team every year. We love hosting people here, as the island itself is such an incredible place to be and to sink into relationship with one another as we learn and explore participatory leadership and facilitation. What I especially love about this offering is the people that we work withe on our teams and the questions we get to be in together.
In the past all of our retreats have been residential, and as we ease out of COVID restrictions we have decided that we want to offer an Art of Hosting in this region, but we’re not yet ready to make it residential. And so we are proud to announce that from September 26-28, 2022 to be held in Vancouver. You can register here.
Our team this year will consist of me, Caitlin Frost, Kelly Foxcroft-Poirier and Kris Archie. All four of us have stewarded the Art of Hosting in this region for many years working with Indigenous communities, non-profits, governments, philanthropy, and businesses in a huge variety of settings. We bring a deep set of experiences with the Art of Hosting,using the four fold practice in incredibly diverse contexts, working with participatory methods and leadership development with equity and decolonization lenses and putting the tools and practices to use in contexts ranging from personal work to system change around social services, mainstream philanthropy, and governance.
These three partners are some of my closest collaborators in this work and I think it is fair to say that we are all mutually inspired by each other. I am excited to see the growing list of people coming to join us for this event. The learning and creativity in the room will be amazing.
We would love to have you join us. Click the link to learn more about the program and please come and join us in Vancouver in the fall.
Alberta was a woman who changed my life. She was a residential school survivor and a member of the United Church of Canada and very respected We Wai Kai Elder from Cape Mudge on Quadra Island. In 1985 she told Bob Smith, then the Moderator of the United Church of Canada that the Church needed to apologize for the destruction of Indigenous culture and spirituality (watch this video). Bob took on the challenge and in 1986, at its biennial General Council in Sudbury, the Church brought forward the proposal to issue an apology. I was an 18 year old delegate to that meeting, representing Toronto Conference and I had one of the 600 or so votes in the room that day.
I remember impressions from that day: a room full of residential school survivors, residential school employees and adminstraors, and some church members who had never heard of these things at all, Indigenous Elders, ministers and congregation members like Tom LIttle and Murray Whetung and Art Solomon and Stan McKay were there. We wrestled over the wording, some wanting to spare the feelings of those who had preached the Gospel with “good intentions” and others who were so fired up by the crying need for justice and restitution that we lost patience with the decision wondering why it she be so hard to Apologize, when that simple act was all Alberta was asking us to do. In retrospect I remember it as one of the few meetings in Canadian history when a huge cross section of the people involved with the crimes of Residential Schools were in the room seeking a restorative pathway forward together. We were made up of victims, perpetrators, ignorant bystanders and everyone in between.
We came up with a short and meaningful Apology.
Long before my people journeyed to this land your people were here, and you received from your Elders an understanding of creation and of the Mystery that surrounds us all that was deep, and rich, and to be treasured.
We did not hear you when you shared your vision. In our zeal to tell you of the good news of Jesus Christ we were closed to the value of your spirituality.
We confused Western ways and culture with the depth and breadth and length and height of the gospel of Christ.
We imposed our civilization as a condition of accepting the gospel.
We tried to make you be like us and in so doing we helped to destroy the vision that made you what you were. As a result, you, and we, are poorer and the image of the Creator in us is twisted, blurred, and we are not what we are meant by God to be.
We ask you to forgive us and to walk together with us in the Spirit of Christ so that our peoples may be blessed and God’s creation healed.
And I remember that the Apology was not accepted and that was brilliant because it meant that we had to demonstrate action to make good on what we were seeking. If we wanted to be forgiven, we needed to work to undo the harm. For me this was a clear decision. I was about to enter my first year of university at Trent and I decided to major in Native Studies, as it was known then. It set my life path off in a way of trying to live up to the apology that I was a part of making, so that at some point in the future we might be personally and collectively worthy of forgiveness.
Now the United Church has done that in a number of way, but it has been 36 years and we have still not been forgiven and we may never be forgiven and to be honest that doesn’t bother me at all. An apology is not about seeking an outcome. It is about seeking a pathway forward together.
Years after that meeting in Sudbury, in 2007 Alberta Billy opened an Art of Hosting training we were doing on Quadra Island with folks from the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team (VIATT). There she welcomed me and Toke Moeller, David Stevenson, Kris Archie, Kyra Mason, Patricia Galaczy, Barb Walker, Carol Ann Hilton, and other Elders, child and family service workers and Indigenous leaders and families to her territory and her life’s work. And it was there that she learned about the four fold path of the Art of Hosting which she later used to plan some leadership work she was doing with Elders and leaders.
I never met Alberta Billy in Sudbury and I didn’t made the connection on Quadra Island that our lives had braided together in that way. But as I remember her today, I’m glad that something of the nourishment I harvested from the journey she sent me 21 years before on could find its way back to her that day.
My condolences to her family and all who loved and were touched by her life’s work.
Im just coming back from a meeting this weekend on Vancouver Island where Kelly Poirier and I were working with some specialized health care workers who were meeting with Indigenous families around creating a care model for their children. We had three families with us including six children, two of which were babies, a five month old and a seven month old.
It has been a long time since I facilitated meetings with babies taking an active role in the proceedings. The children were included in this meeting as participants and they had as much to offer both the content and the process while also demonstrating what it looks like when we build a system with children at the centre.
With the world increasingly full of people that are acting like babies, it’s a good time to pause and reflect on the lessons that actual babies bring to the game. Babies get a bad rap.
The clock doesn’t matter. Rhythm matters. When there are babies in the room, we learn to pay attention to natural rhythms. Babies that are constantly held and cared for are very quiet and happy. The two babies we had in the room with us loved being held by others and they were looked after by their older siblings and other participants in the meeting. This of course is common in Indigenous families and large families. The babies had a blanket in the middle of the room they could roll around on and their every need was looked after. If they needed holding, they were picked up. If they needed as nap they could cuddle up with someone. If they needed feeding, they were fed, if they started getting tired at the end of the day, we closed the meeting down. If they were late in the morning, then we started once everyone was present and settled. Babies do not obey a clock, but they do very well at reminding us of healthy rhythms. Watching Kelly facilitate an hour of reflective practice with a five month old baby curled up in her arms sound asleep was beautiful.
Put the children in the centre not around the edges. We had babies in the middle and we had smaller children who were offered many options for being present including going in and out of the room, being accompanied by different adults and contributing. But there was no child care offered for our meeting. The meeting was child care and the children had a place in it. We all took turns being with the children, and they were never out of sight or out of earshot.
Babies change the conversation. The meeting we were running was not full of conflict or high emotions but it was about tricky issues like cultural safety and non-Indigenous professionals meeting with Indigenous families and so there was some nervousness in the room as we were building the container and the relationships. But babies make excellent talking pieces and excellent centres for a dialogue circle and having them constantly in our space made the conversation about them all the time. Their presence helped ground and simplify the conversation and it ensured that we spent our time well so as not to tire them out.
Babies have something to offer. Find a way to include them. Babies offer lots of things to a meeting, including feedback and insight and a kind of checking of the ego. All of the children in te meeting were included in every conversation sometimes in small groups, sometimes in the larger group. They offered their own answers to the questions we were asking because the questions were simple enough that a five year old could contribute “What do you like about your worker?” is a question everyone can answer and the children will often find ways to add to an adult’s story or tell it in their own voice. Additionally the two smaller children we had in our meeting were both excellent singers and when offered the chance to do so, they shared songs with us to end our meetings or bless the food, which is a common practice in Indigenous meetings on the west coast with adults usually offering songs before eating. There is nothing better than a child who loves singing being invited to share their gift with others in services of a genuine need rather than a cute performance.
Babies will tell you what’s happening in the room. Babies are very sensitive to the energy of a group. I learned this years ago, that they will sometimes express the emotions that are in a room in more subtle ways before the audults become aware. If things get tense they will get squirmy or begin crying from worry. It’s a signal to take it easy and take a little break. The baby is the first one to become unregulated in a setting and usually the first one to become regulated again. Babies don’t carry a lot of stories about what is happening in the room, so I pay close attention to their sounds and movements and it gives me information especially in setting like this one where the primary purpose was building a relational field and sharing and making sense of stories.
The baby reveals the truth of the system. If you are developing a model of care centered on children, watch what is actually happening with the children in the room. They way they are included and respected and lifted up so they contribute tells you a lot about how ready the people are to bring a truly child centered approach to their work. I have seen systems where the babies and the children gave us warning signs in the room that much more work had to be done. This weekend though was very special.
Over on LInkedIn, Bryan Stallings pointed to a 2017 post at the International Association of Facilitators site that contains a set of definitions of facilitation. I don’t remember contributing to that article, but I quite like what I said at the time:
“While facilitation traditionally means ‘to make things easy’ I think we need a new definition that means ‘to host the struggle together.’ Good facilitators help create a container for people to work with difference and diversity to make good things happen.”
That’s pretty good, I think. It describes what I do and it describes a shift in my practice over the years. Like many, when I started out as a facilitator I was really trying hard to deliver outcomes and to lead a group through a process to get to a preconceived set of ideas. It’s not that I wasn’t alos hosting some creative work, but my early forays in the field were probably brutal to sit through as I steered people through a process and, being a naturally conflict averse person, quelled differences. There would be brainstorming, but I was very much the kind of guy that seized on ideas I liked and inquired more into them, even if the group had other thoughts. Ick.
Now it’s all about the right tools for the right job, and sometimes that’s just the right tool. But not often. And definitely not in the unconscious way that I applied facilitation.
Once I trundled into the world of Open Space Technology, the Art of Hosting, Dialogic Organizational Development and the complexity world, my practice radically changed. It really did become about building containers for dialogue, creating spaces and contexts in which interesting things might happen. It took to locus of responsibility for the content off of me and put it on the participants. I became responsible for managing the constraints that would help a group do that.
If you look on my site for posts on complex facilitation, you’ll find a bit more thinking on that practice, but one things that stands out in the IAF article from 5 years ago is the commitment to difference and diversity. I recently took a Deep Democracy workshop with Camille Dumond and Sera Thompson as a part of my reluctant commitment to overcome my aversion to conflict, and I walked away with the idea that we need to get good at the practice of “conflict preservation” instead of “conflict resolution.” By that I mean that we need to be able to host conversations in which conflicts are present and remain present as a source of creativity and life, and not quash them because we are afraid of their energy. That means creating a container in which conflict is productive, in which people feel free to share different opinions, different perspectives, and contribute different gifts. And, of course, being conflict averse, this terrifies me. What if someone gets hurt? What if the space isn’t safe enough? What if something really offensive gets said?
Yup. Those are the questions we have to wrestle with. Because facilitation is needed in this time to ensure that people with vastly different experience and gifts have the chance to use them. Communities and societies contain many different kinds of people, including people whose opinions and ideas I don’t like.
Feel all those questions coming up? All those fears and “what if’s?” Yup. me too. Let’s talk about it below.