A braided river delta in Alaska, image courtesy of NOAA
Not as the be-all and end-all of their organizations and teams, but a good leader will hold a container in the workplace in which disagreement is productive, generative and honouring of different perspectives. The best leaders will also hold coherence.
I’ve often said that organizations need to be a bit like rivers, in that there is a coherent direction of flow but many back eddies. If you think about the way a large river travels through an estuary, it creates side channels and cuts of corners and bends while still channeling across the land. Life lives in these eddies and its even possible to productively travel in the opposite direction from the river flow efficiently using these back eddies. Organizationally speaking, sometimes you need to retreat from a well established course of action, and having disagreement and dissent within the organization can sometimes show you the path back to another way of doing things.
Peter Levine and Dayna L. Cunningham have a link-rich piece in the Stanford Social Innovation Review today that discusses this, and its implications for civil society beyond just organizational or movement-based settings. The final paragraphs are good:
Leaders must attend to two related responsibilities. Internally, they must protect and encourage voice by clarifying decision rules, distinguishing disagreement from disloyalty, and building routines that prevent conflict from hardening into factionalism. Externally, they must establish clear guardrails for responding to dissenting public voices, including those from activists, shareholders, elected officials, and the media. When organizations become the object of public disagreement, the question is not whether pressure will arise, but whether their principles are strong enough to guide their response.
Clear commitments, embedded in durable practices and governance structures, help prevent reactive shifts driven by momentary outrage or market fluctuation. They allow organizations to absorb criticism, weigh competing claims, and respond without abandoning core values. In doing so, institutions do more than manage disagreement; they demonstrate how pluralistic societies can remain steady amid strain.
Organizations that invest in the structures and norms that make disagreement constructive—both internally and in response to external scrutiny—help sustain the civic habits on which democratic life depends. In an era of polarized public discourse, institutions that learn to govern both expression and response become quiet stabilizers of the democratic order.
If we cannot practice disagreement in places where we also have an incentive to collaborate together, we will be hard pressed to do it in the looser fields of community and broader society. And that enables those who would like us divided to use disagreement to generate separation.
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
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?
The above is a photo of a great campfire that happened on Saturday night in the forest by a lake in Eastern Ontario. You had to be there. But if you want to do an interesting exercise, take a moment before reading on and make a list of things that you should do to create a great campfire experience.
I’m working away writing a book on dialogic containers and reflecting on the remarkable phenomenon of stability in the midst of change. I remember years ago Dave Snowden sharing a pithy description of the the difference between robust and resilient structures. Using the examples of a sea wall and a salt marsh, he says, essentially, that a robust system is one that survives by not being changed and a resilient system is one that survives by being changed. That description has always stuck with me and as I look at the nature of dialogic containers, ephemeral spaces which produce meaning between people, it’s interesting to me to think about what contributes to their relative stability in the face of change.
This was brought home to me again today while listening to a talk by Gil Fronsdel on the Buddhist practice of “Right View,” (he calls is “Wholesome View”) the first discipline of the Noble Eightfold Path. Fronsdel uses the example of standing in a rive to discuss what mental and spiritual stability looks like, even as a current flow all around you, carry the river over a waterfall. The way to address your fear of floating over a waterfall is to stand up and take a stable stance:
I’ve been in somewhat shallow rivers, maybe that the river was up to my mid?thigh, and I could lay down flat on the surface of the river, and it had a nice current that carried me beautifully down the river.And it was kind of fun and nice to be floating along. It feels really nice until you realize that the river is going right over a waterfall, a big waterfall. So then it’s not so nice anymore.
And so… you turn around, try to swim upstream, but…the river is pulling you down the stream faster than you can swim up. The waterfall is coming, you can hear the roar. And so all you have to do, though, is stand up in the river. Because it’s shallow… it’s just courage, it’s only up to your mid?thigh. And if you stand there, then the current of the river continues. It flows right by you. But you’re still.
You’re not separated from the current, but now you’re free of the current because you have the stability, the strength of standing there, and you’re far from any danger of going over the waterfall. It’s relatively easy now to walk to the shore or walk up river. And so we get swept away sometimes by our thoughts, swept away by our emotions, swept away by the world and concerns that are going on. And we don’t realize how much we’re being carried along, swept away by the current of this momentum of thoughts, momentum of desires, momentum of aversion. We don’t even see the waterfalls that’s going to take us over sometimes. But what mindfulness teaches us is that we could always have the ability to stand up in the current and kind of wake up and kind of be stable and strong.
In dialogue, containers offer a kind of stability to hold emotions and thoughts. Human beings thrive when there is a container in which we can fully participate, be fully human, and be. And they require us to have that overview of process and context, to see that we are in something that is meaningful, or not, and to notice what is contributing to that state of affairs. From there, we might even be able to catch ourselves and offering a slight shift, a slight move, a slight contribution that might catalyze more or less stability. It is a subtle art.
The way a conversation unfolds around a table and deepens and becomes sticky – you don;t want to leave it – is a kind of stability. When it breaks it’s hard to get it back again, and nif you weren’t a part of it “you had to be there” to understand what it is like. Other forms of stability for dialogue are held through rigid physical or protocol constraints so that deliberative chambers like court rooms and legislatures are designed for rational, non-emotional discourse. When feelings erupt in those chambers, the integrity of container fails, and chaos ensues, because those who are responsible for this spaces have no way to cope with the events of the moment but to shut it all down (don’t perform a haka in the New Zealand Parliament!). That can be a form of liberation, but in the end some form of stable container needs to arise in order for human relationships and conversations to unfold. Places like Parliaments and court rooms are structured to assert a particular kind of power relationship, so the physical and procedural stability of those containers is designed to re-establish that state of affairs “once every one has calmed down” and the dour business at hand can be considered again in the desired modality of the system, in these cases, predicated on notions of reason and civility.
But even in highly structured and constrained places, dialogic containers are emergent. You cannot force meaningful dialogue. You can only set some initial conditions and monitor what unfolds. Even though a room may have robust physical restrictions, adjustments to the constraints of the container can still offer a chance at something meaningful happening. I bristle from the idea that a dialogue facilitator’s role is “to create and hold the container.” I prefer instead to think of that role as one of using constraints to increase the probability that a a dialogic container will emerge. The way I have learned to practice facilitation is to be a witness to the capacity of a group to self-organize and manage itself with minimal intervention from a “facilitator.” Instead we work hard to design initial conditions, and pay attention to threshold practices like beginnings and endings to invite human beings into a place in which meaningful work gets done.
For my whole career I’ve been consumed with the mystery of the emergence and stability of dialogic containers, how something so ephemeral can create deeply meaningful experiences, and how we might find the ways to work with containers – through constraints of connection, exchange, attractors and boundaries – to increase the chances for powerful dialogue and meaning making. Everywhere I look, there are examples and lessons to be learned about this.
So, back to that campfire that is pictured above. If you took the time to make the list, think about whether that list will guarantee a great campfire every single time, from the get go. If not, what do you think you will have to do to make that more likely to happen? The answer to that question might be a good way to think about your approach to facilitation.
If nothing else, the deep divisions and culture wars in the US, and here in Canada too, are providing us with an opportunity to engage in deep practices of listening across difference. It’s harder now that it has ever been Dan Oestrich, who knows a thing or two about this, explains why.
Process artistry also has its place. Arts and well-hosted conversation are at work in Alberta where a group of researchers have initiated the Common Ground project to address stereotypes in the province. It is providing some useful lessons.
Depolarizing conversations is an initiative of my friends and colleagues at the Alaska Humanities Forum. It arose in 2021 during COVID when social media had divided families and small towns and disagreements had devolved into violence, assaults and the tearing of the social fabric. They have published some really helpful tools and resources on hosting these kinds of conversations. Get them while you can (and support them in continuing their work).
Irreconcilable difference is inevitable in a complex society but not every issue is an irreconcilable difference. Some are just conflicting perspectives. As long as we conflate conflict with war, we will maintain a tendency to want to avoid conflict instead of courting and supporting difference. Conflict transformation has long been the approach used to create a resilient container for what I call conflict preservation. We need this more than ever. And so do the orcas and the salmon.
One of the tools I use for working with polarities where there is a strong both/and situation is polarity mapping. I’ve written about it before but I love the way Kai Cheng Thom weaves it into her Loving Justice framework.
For more tools and training I can recommend Lewis Deep Democracy as one deeper approach to this work. It’s based in Arnold and Amy Mindel’s processwork. In Canada, I can recommend Camille Dumond and her colleagues at the Waterline Co-op. You’ll see my testimonial on their website. It’s accessible and practical training, even for experienced practitioners, and it will take your own practice deeper.