This is the first 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.
My whole career has been a conversation between my facilitation practice and what I am learning about self-organization and complex adaptive systems. Like many people I started in facilitation because I like the way that techniques for group work could help people be better together. Good dialogue enables learning, understanding, innovation, problem-solving and community building. Doing it in a way that also builds relationships ensures that we “leave more community than we’ve found.” Understanding complexity theory helps me to situate my practice in what is possible and understand why things work or don’t work. If you have read my professional reflections on this blog over the past 22 years, you will have been with me on my journey as I’ve tried to understand all that.
My facilitation journey began with tools, probably nominal group technique. This is such a standard part of brainstorming and idea generation, that I doubt many facilitators even know the name for this technique. I can’t remember where I learned about brainstorming – it was probably word of mouth, because my facilitation craft has been honed in a traditional artisanal way, through knowledge transfer from mentors and masters and through many iterations of practice. NGT is a good tool, in the same way that a screwdriver is a good tool. It does a good job in situations for which it was designed. It doesn’t take long as a facilitator to realize that not every processes is fit for every challenge. The idea that “context matters” was something that I learned very early on in my career, and was probably something I was exposed to even in my academic training in Indigenous Studies, organizational studies, community development and cultural anthropology.
Every facilitator at some point collects tools in a tool box. In the pre-world wide web world, we acquired these tools through conversations with others, through the occasional book that was passed around and on facilitation courses where we were introduced to ways that groups worked. If you were serious about the work you might have come across materials from the National Training Labs or other places in the arcane world of organizational development. Every facilitator I knew back then had a binder full of tools and processes to use with groups. I still have a page of these resources which I use to inspire my own practice.
From a practitioners standpoint, most of us learned our craft through these tools. We found out what worked and what didn’t. We got a sense of who we were in facilitation work. We learned the hard lessons that no one in a group is “neutral” – even the facilitator – and we learned that reflection on practice is helpful. Reflection means asking the question “Why?” Why did that work? Why did that fail? Why did I make that choice? Why did the group dynamic shift this way or that?
Those early reflections led me to understand group work as complex, and from there it was about diving into the arcane world of complexity theory, group dynamics, organizational psychology and everything else. I found the theory world interesting but it rarely descended to the level of practical choice creating fro groups. It rarely connected to action. That became my work, and it was always validating to find someone like Kurt Lewin in Problems of Research in Social Psychology saying things like “there is nothing so practical as a good theory.” For me this continually learning about theory was informed by the philosophical approaches I was introduced to in my post-secondary education, informed by several years of practice in the field within organizations and social change work.
The first most important learning for facilitators is that your tools don’t work the same with every group. The second most important learning I think is the idea that the facilitator matters to group work far more than we are led to believe. The role and position and choices of the facilitator has immense effects on what happens in a group of people. That realization set me off on a journey of trying to understand the nature of different contexts. What makes one group different than another? Why can we never standardize performance or assure quality outcomes and results from facilitation practice? This seems so clear and obvious, but the state of the facilitation world continues to treat tools and methods as context-free silver bullets for every problem. We speak frequently of our tool boxes, and the language of group work is filled with the mechanistic metaphors of technical language: fixing problems, smooth meetings, efficiency, productive dialogue, outputs and outcomes. Agenda designs follow linear logics; start here, do this, progress to this stage, get a good outcome, and do it all in six hours. And in all the 1\”10 must listicles that promise life changing methods for group work, we rarely see informed discussion about the positionally of the facilitator.
I use this kind of language all the time. Even the term “facilitator” implies a mechanistic solution to a problem space. “To make things easier” is the etymology of the word. Actual facilitation practice doesn’t do this, in my experience. It makes something easier, and some things harder. Facilitators need to be clear about what is made easier and what is made more difficult and we MUST, ethically and morally, be clear and transparent about what we are doing to ensure that meetings end on time, or that they meet pre-determined goals. We have to be honest with ourselves about how much emergence we allow in the containers in which we work, and how we influence action in those containers.
We also have to be honest about what process can accomplish and what conditions need to be in place in order for things to “work.” And what “working” even means. There is a strong cultural tendency to believe that if we can just get the right people in the room, if we can just get all the issues out on the table, then we can make progress. Such a belief tends to ignore power and it tends to treat the dialogic container as the most important place for action, ignoring the bigger contexts that determine what is possible and what is not. If there is any doubt that this approach is wrong headed, the failures of the CoP conferences to adequately address climate change are exhibit A.
Context for action matters. Many times as a facilitator I have found myself at a loss about why a group process has gone in a surprising direction. There is so much hidden in the social field, and often times an intervention can open things up, bring surprising issues to the fore, or trigger dynamics that folks were unaware of. Facilitated dialogue oftentimes helps solve some problems but also opens up others.
As skilled dialogic practitioners we know that we need to pay attention to the dynamics of the context as we are designing a meeting. I don;t think our clients usually give us enough credit for taking the time to do that. I will always insist that something like two thirds or three quarters, or more of my work for a session goes into understanding the context so that what we do is useful to a specific group of people, in a specific place and in a specific moment in time. It is tempting to believe that a facilitator or consultant can come into any situation and work some miracle in a short amount of time. The truth is that we are the LEAST well equipped to work with your team. Even when I do take a long time to work with a team and craft good questions and a design of activities that will help address realistic process goals, many times participants will see me on the day and say “all he does is ask questions and then the people do all the work. What are we paying him for?” It’s the classic conundrum of knowing where to tap.
Because this work is largely invisible to the process it seems like a dark art. But there is good theory that supports the work of consultants and facilitators who work primarily with the context so that they can take an educated guess about the kinds of process tools that might help a group in any given situation. In this series of blog posts I want to address this aspect of facilitation practice, why it matters, and how complexity theory helps us to understand both the nature of dialogic containers and the importance of the contexts in which they are embedded.
I think facilitators need to develop these skills and practices becasue the “magic” that happens in good dialogue is not random and it is not down to just using the right tool in the right context. Doing so helps us to
The other day I wrote a post looking at religion as an emergent container of meaning making that is both difficult to define and important in civic life. I’m writing this as a person who is religious to the extent that I practice within and belong to a 100 year old mainline Christian tradition with a mixed history in civic affairs, the United Church of Canada. It was involved in the establishment of both residential schools and public health care. It has championed and supported global solidarity and peace work and no doubt has left people feeling hurt by actions of its leadership. It was the first church in Canada to ordain gay and lesbian ministers and an early adopter of same-sex marriage. In many ways my life has been shaped by this tradition, even the two decades or when I wasn’t an active practitioner in a congregation.
As I have worked with many churches and faith communities of all kinds, I am acutely aware of the influence that religion can have on civic life. I am acutely aware that that is often “not a good thing” especially in this day and age. In the post I wrote the other day I was trying to explore how religion functions as an emergent product of a set of constraints. My basic idea is that religion itself is difficult to define and therefore difficult to either adopt or throw out in terms of its influence on civic affairs. Those of us that belong to religions have very different conversations about the role of religion in civic life than those who do not. Very few of my friends are religious, but with those that are, critical conversations about the role of religion in society are very different with them than with those who simply reject religion at all or say it should be a private matter.
Today I awoke to a beautiful Christmas present (yes this is the liturgical season of Christmas). My friend AKMA, an Anglican priest, Biblical scholar, and critical thinker, read and reflected on my post and offered some beautiful responses offered with grounded and gentle assertions from the perspective of one who inhabits a religion. He shared some sources which inform his thinking (knowing that I will chase these down for further reading!). Most importantly, he shared from a place of deep lived truth, with his characteristic humility and respect:
” I should own up that I take my faith and the sorts of congruent Christian discourse as true and real in a more than merely notional way. That applies even in a way that excludes other ‘religious’ claims. That’s just part of what I take believing to mean, and I’m keenly aware of the risks and presumption baked into that. At the same time, I know and recognise that other profound, admirable, illuminating people do nothold to what I believe, and some believe things that my faith contradicts. Since I have no specific reason to think I’m cleverer or more pious or more receptive to divine revelation than these among my neighbours, I must hold to my faith with a humility that obliges me to treat people’s divergent faiths with the respect that I’d wish them to show mine. I have more to learn than one lifetime…so I can’t by any means rule out the possibility that my Muslim neighbour has arrived at the true, real way of faith and I am wrong about many particulars.
All of which is to say that where Christian nationalists take their faith as a warrant to oppress others because they can’t imagine that they’re wrong, I take my faith as an obligation to honour others’ faith up to the point where our claims conflict, and there to handle that conflict as gently and respectfully as circumstances permit.”
His whole post is worth multiple reads, because what I think he is saying in response to what I am writing is that he isn’t necessarily interested in my framing and exploration of religion-as-container, but instead in sharing the way in which his participation in his religion guides his participation in civic life. And he does so in such a nuanced and expansive manner that it validates the point I was trying to clumsily make in my original post.
Viz:
The tricky task set before us entails finding a modus vivendi by which we who hold to particular exclusive claims about human flourishing can honour and respect people who take a different view, but who still want to live in a civic community with us, and how we can work together to minimise the damage done by fascist-nihilists who will contentedly imprison, torture, kill anybody who gets in the way of their implementing their will.
This is what I mean by religion as a powerful dialogic container. It is a bounded space of shared identity and meaning-making. Inside it, you see these conversations with contemporaries and with ancestors who have carried a deep questions about how we live together. AKMA’s distillation of such is an example for me about the role that religion plays in both personal and civic life. It feels brave to say it aloud. Thanks AKMA.
A mural at St. Andrews-Wesley United Church in Vancouver showing the ending of the Noah’s Ark story as if it happened on a BC Ferry.
The word “religion” does a a lot of heavy lifting. But actually finding a way to define it in a way that is useful turns out to be surprisingly tricky.
The scholar and minister Wilfred Cantwell Smith, whose book The Meaning and End of Religion (1962) had meticulously detailed the belated emergence of the ‘religion’ concept in Europe, long maintained that talk of ‘religion’ conflated too many things not to cause mischief, and urged that we give up such talk altogether; we should, instead, speak of faith and ‘cumulative tradition’. The anthropologist and historian Daniel Dubuisson, who anathematised ‘religion’ as a 19th-century Western imposition on non-Western worlds, urged that it be replaced with ‘cosmographic formation’. These evasive manoeuvres, in turn, have met with scepticism. As the social theorist Martin Riesebrodt drily observed, neologisms like Dubuisson’s could doubtless be shown to ‘have also been “constructed” through historically specific discourses’ and revealed as ‘instruments in the linguistic battle between classes or cultures.’ Besides, he pointed out, those who would eliminate the term ‘religion’ seldom manage long without it.
So how has ‘religion’, as a concept and category, endured in the absence of a stable definition? To answer that question, it may help to think about how referring expressions do their referring. Some terms keep their grip on the world even as our understanding of what they denote changes radically; others, once central to serious thought, fall away when their supposed referents are deemed illusions. What distinguishes the survivors from the casualties?
The interesting question here is seeing it as a space of meaning making, and therefore as a kind of container. From that perspective we might look at the constraints that give rise to the idea…the attractors, boundaries, connections and exchanges that create the unique identity that defines the emergent phenomenon of a religion.
If ‘religion’ endures, it’s because the word still does work, practical and theoretical. It orders law and policy, directs research, and shapes the inner lives of those who use it. Sociologists can enquire into its relation to charity or suicide; psychologists can study its connection to prejudice or wellbeing. In the United States, legislators and judges must have a sufficient grasp of the category that they can balance the [American] Constitutional dos and don’ts of ‘accommodation’ and ‘non-establishment’. For the religionist, meanwhile, it continues to name a space where meaning is made, defended or denied. Whatever else it may be, ‘religion’ remains a category with too many stakeholders to be fired by fiat. When it comes to what the word means, no one gets to say, and everyone gets a say.
This is such an interesting article, because I think emergent containers are very important in human experience and, as noted above, those we call “religions” play a more important role than others such as, like allegiances to a sports team, professional associations or, in some cases, citizenship. Like all dialogic containers. I think religions are emergent phenomena, which is why “no one gets to say, and everyone gets a say.” They are evolving spaces of meaning-making, and they are dynamic. The kinds of exchange for example, the rituals and liturgies of practice, are always changing. What happens in my little rural church on Bowen Island is very different to what happened in the volcanic tuft caves in Cappadocia, but there is a line of continuity between the two. Complex systems have path dependency, that is, they evolve and develop based on what has come before, which limits the ways in which they will likely change in the future.
Understanding containers of meaning through the constraints that give them rise helps us to understand how they change and why. Religions change, both in the object of their focus and in the ways in which they practice. Simply saying things like “religion is the problem” actually doesn’t bring useful tools to the conversation about the role of religion in civic life. Religions that are deeply exclusionary in practice, and place rigid boundaries about what is right and what is wrong, may nevertheless internally be places of deep community practice. Indeed, public social services, health care and education systems emerged out of religious institutions and in secular societies, the state took over these roles partly as a program of secularization.
I think there is a place for the containers that we call religions in our world. I think they can be places inside of which people polish their goodness and practice the full range of capacities that are needed to build a world of peace. And I think they can also be harmful cults, which do untold damage through violence, abuse, coercion and exclusion. Like all containers. Religion is nothing special, except that it is accorded a special place in our civic life, even in self-described “secular” states.
If the problem is that civic life in a place is dominated by the separations promoted by some religions, the answer may involve looking elsewhere within the container for the kinds of practices that help to build a civil society. A society that is evolving, growing and changing is doing so in complex ways. Those of us that are helping to make change (and helping to stabilize continuity) need to be careful not to take entire containers of human experience and throw them out. That is a form of colonization and erases and negates some of the ways in which human beings draw sustenance.
We can instead talk about what it means to create and build a society based on principles and practices of human dignity and peace and care and seek multiple sources of inspiration and expertise in designing these while at the same time collectively addressing places where people are dehumanized, killed, hated and excluded. Thinking about the ways we make meaning together from a constraints-based perspective helps me to see that the resources for doing so can be everywhere.
For several years I have been teaching online about the constraints that give rise to containers. I have a bunch of exercises that I do with people to give them a felt and embodied sense of “container” while we are online.
Today Matt Webb shares an interesting experience related to that:
A few weeks ago I was on a zoom call where someone had a standing mirror in their room in the background. I’ve never seen that before. It kept me weirdly on edge throughout like it violated some previously unstated video call feng shui or something.
(I had another call in which the person’s screen was reflected in a shiny window behind them and so I could see my own face over their shoulder. But that seemed fine. This was not the same.)
My disquiet came because the mirror was angled such that it showed an off-screen part of the room. I could see beyond the bounds; it broke the container.
The very best way to learn about dialogic containers is to notice dialogic containers. Where are the spaces inside of which you make meaning and how are they enabled? Carry that question with you.
We are deep in the rainy season here on the west coast of North America. I’ve been reflecting on my year of work and noticing a few patterns that are coming to mind as I think about the kinds of questions that our clients have been confronting this year. I don’t know that these observations are especially novel, but they do represent patterns that I have seen this year. they also represent places where I think our work can be helpful.
Something of the bigger context.
As it always has been. But that bigger context is currently full of austerity, fear and polarization. Much of our work is within the non-profit and public sector, and our clients have all been facing declines in funding, uncertainty about the future, skyrocketing need from their own clients and a deep questions about using their leadership to confront polarity and division in their organizations and communities.
It used to be that we were confronting a “scarcity mindset” where we feel to recognize the wealth of ideas and leadership that we actually have. This leaves leaders and organizations retreating into their own shells as they try hard to shoulder the responsibility of the work. Often in our organizational development work, we could do things that lift our eyes up a bit and help activate the leadership throughout the organization.
These days, on top of that dynamic, I think we’re facing an “austerity mindset” whereby that wealth of talent, attention and money is still present but it is actually locked away and not available to us. It has been concentrated elsewhere and everyone seems to be preparing to simply do without it.
I’m certainly not 100% sure of this shift, but it feels like the issues leaders are confronting are shifting in ways that we continue to explore with them and their teams, and my colleagues as well. What helps at this time is continued connection and sophisticated situational awareness to see and name what is happening and to be honest about what is available to work with. Maybe, dear readers, you are seeing it too. All work happens in a context and being able to name this context is important, without getting lost in it. I wrote about this back in September.
Five year strategic planning is dead.
The Covid-19 experience seemed to finally put to rest the typical five year strategic planning process. Everyone now has practical and tangible experience of how the best laid plans can be knocked sideways. And in the last year or two, as organizations have been recovering from Covid, they have no been hit with massive uncertainty in the world, including cuts to their funding. And it very much seems irrational, arbitrary and determined by bigger dynamics that are outside of the control of the organizations we get to work with.
In response, the kind of planning I have been asked to do more and more this year is about scenario planning and arriving at a set of practice principles that can help organizations lead towards a variety of futures. I do love this kind of work. It has relational benefits of visioning and dreaming together, but is rooted in deep and practical need for on the ground responses. I’m not an expert at operational planning – and there is always a need for that kind of work – but bringing people together to think about futures and develop some shared resourcefulness about responding to what might happen is useful.
Connection is needed but trust is shaky at the centre.
I have had a blog posts sitting in my drafts for a little while that talks about how we can move from centralized planning and control towards a more networked form of leadership. Ever since I ran across Open Space Technology in 1995 I have seen the need for this, because as Harrison Owen (who we lost in 2025) observed, Open Space activates an organizational structure of shared leadership and responsibility that is latent in any group of people. He called it “The High Performance Organization” and it checks a lot of boxes for what leaders want: engaged staff, ideas and responsibility sprouting up all over, connected and self-organizing teams that are working in a common direction, but meeting challenges where they are at.
The problem is that such networks really depend on the ability and willingness of organizational leaders to open up space for that to happen. We spend a lot of time in our longer engagements working with senior leaders to help them sustain their ability to truly trust the folks in their groups to do the work. It is sometimes a hard thing to bootstrap, but once it gets going, these types of networks can be quite powerful. Central leaders and organizations become conveners rather than resource sinks, and work becomes meaningful. It requires leaders to do the work they are uniquely positioned to do but to release to the community work that can be better done at the edges.
In the little supporter-owned soccer club I am a part of we do this but having our core leadership care for the fiduciary and technical responsibilities or the club and the rest of us live by the principles of “Assume your talents are needed, and proceed until apprehended.” In this way we activate community and true ownership over what we are doing.
And speaking of polarities…
This kind of things means that polarities abound: centralized control and distributed responsibility; continuity of tradition and new responses to emerging conditions; maintaining fiduciary obligations while stretching beyond; focus on the core external offering and building interior connections and development. Every planning process I have been involved in this year seems to hang on one or more of these polarities. Often the conversations about need and purpose start with an acknowledgement that both sides of the polarity are needed and the challenge is to lean into the skills and talent we have to do both. As contextual uncertainty has increased, our clients seem more willing to wrestle with these polarities rather than simply seeing their current conditions as a problem to be solved.
As always, we need to be thoughtful about how we think about change.
We are living in a world which seems to be revelling in ignorance about complexity. Every problem now seems to have a simple answer, with predictable and brutal results. We are fed this line in our civic conversations too, organizational realities and personal lives too. Social media algorithms have shaped our ideas about what is happening in the world and what we should do about it. I think complexity literacy is more important than ever. Just being able to think about the different kinds of change out there TOGETHER helps us to make sense of things in a more useful way and in a way that builds more relationships and therefore more resilience. Some of my go to frameworks for helping folks understand how change happens, the Cynefin framework and the Two Loops framework, continue to be extremely useful for helping people describe the spaces they are in, and chaordic planning has stood the test of time for collaboratively designing responses to these kinds of conditions.
AI is helping us delude ourselves into believing that we don’t need craft, or the ability to confront uncertainty with relationality.
It used to be fairly common that a client would discover that I was a facilitator and hand me an agenda and ask me to facilitate it. Its the reason I wrote the chaordic stepping stones guide in the first places, so that we could explore the possibility space together and design something that was fit to needs instead of simply rolling out a best practice. This year was the first time I received agendas generated by ChatGPT and asked to facilitate those. It took me a moment to figure this out, but I think that many people are probably asking their favourite large language model to give them an agenda for a two day strategic planning process. We are witnessing a massive cultural crises stemming from the destruction of craft across all the arts including music, writing, visual arts and process arts. Designing and facilitating participatory work is a craft. the two go hand in hand. One would never give an accomplished artist a paint-by-numbers set and ask them to use their technique to fill it out the way one wanted. Or hand a musician a piece of music to play that has notes in it, but no sense of development, harmony or rhythm.
Artificial intelligence is excellent at giving one the impression that the uncertainty they are confronting is easily solved. The tools that we currently have access to are extremely powerful aids to help with facilitation work, but they simply cannot replace the craft of relationship building and the time it takes to do work that generates meaningful contribution and ownership and sustainability. Facilitators and participatory leaders need to continue to develop the skills to work with groups of people in increasing complexity, within decreased time frames and a climate of austerity, polarization and uncertainty. Our chatbots are incapable of understanding what we know when we enter a space like that, but those of us that fear the ambiguity of these spaces can find ourselves retreating into the comforting certainty of a set of answers that come from what appears to be a divine and omniscient source. We just have to be careful not to lose the ability to sit together and figure something out. Keep watching sports like soccer and hockey. Keep making music with each other. Exercise the feeling and abilities that we have to make and undo things together without knowing where we are going or what might happen next. Move together, slightly slower than you think you should be, and seeking surprise along the way.
Stories and shared work are helpful.
I had a lovely call the other day with Cynthia Kurtz and Ashley Cooper are some folks Ashley is working with around using Participatory Narrative Inquiry to work with stories in communities and organizations. I continue to use that collection of methods for dealing with difficult and complex situations, including future scenario planning, because my experience has been that making sense of grounded stories together is the best way to engage with the uncertainty and opinionated conversation that passes for civic dialogue. I’m interested in methods and processes of civic deliberation and address conflict with process design. How can we bring difference into governance without confusing it with conflict? How can we work with conflict without confusing it with violence? This is not an area I have ever been comfortable in, but I have found that stories and circle are the best way to have a group of people dive in together on shared work that helps differences become resources and helps conflict become co-discovery. In watching the current kinds of conversations we are having in Canada around things like Aboriginal title, it’s clear that folks with opinions not rooted in actual experience have a hard time even beginning to understand issues, let alone seeing ways in which reconciling differences can be the work of a mature politics, and a potentially defining characteristic of the Canadian project.
So these are some of the things I have seen this year and I expect that these are threads that will continue to grow and bloom in the coming year too. I’m really interested what YOU have noticed?