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.
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.