One of the earliest maps I ever discovered in my facilitation career was Sam Kaner et al.’s Diamond of Participation. It has been a stalwart companion for more than 20 years in my work. It forms a key part of the way the Art of Hosting community talks about process architecture, usually referred to as “the breath of design,” owing to its pulsation between divergence and convergence.
I realize I don’t have much on the blog about this map. So I thought I’d share my summary of Kaner et al.’s seminal work, The Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision Making. If you don’t yet own this book, buy it now. It is an essential resource for all facilitators.
The Diamond of Participation
The Diamond of Participation is a map of the group process created by Sam Kaner and colleagues that identifies several phases a group goes through to create participatory decisions.
As groups engage with complex decisions, a very common journey goes through emotional and creative phases. Our ability to stay open to this journey enables us to discover new ideas, enter into the unknown, engage with difficult dynamics and make sustainable decisions. As a map, the diamond of participation helps us navigate the terrain of participatory decision-making and can help a group identify common traps, pitfalls and opportunities. Alongside personal leadership capacities to host and participate with presence and openness, this map, with tools and practices to help move through each stage, can support engaging, creative, participatory decision-making.
The diamond is divided into five zones or phases that groups go through. In each of these zones, leaders can help groups make good decisions by paying attention to the emotional terrain and using good tools at the right time.
Zone 1: “Business as usual”
Most decisions and conversations go quickly. You might need a few ideas and a couple of options, but the pathway is clear, and there is little or no controversy about what to do. Because we are conditioned to make decisions this way, it is common for groups to close a conversation down early, and for complex conversations this can have the effect of both avoiding conflict and limiting choices and possibilities.
When important decisions are on the table and there is no easy or obvious solution, groups enter the diamond of participation. Good leaders, with an awareness of the underlying patterns the diamond illustrates, can help guide a group through these stages toward more effective participatory decisions.
Business as usual involves:
- Quick decisions
- Debate over dialogue
- No focus on relationships
Zone 2: The Divergence Zone
Once it is clear that there is no obvious or clear decision, groups enter the Divergence zone. Familiar opinions get bandied back and forth and diverse perspectives on the problem begin to surface. This can be an enlivening time as a group searches for options and brainstorms possible paths forward. In the early stages of the divergence zone leaders can invite teams to explore different points of view and perspectives and introduce three key types of thinking: Surveying the territory, searching for alternatives and raising difficult issues.
Surveying the territory is done with methods that collect stories, perspectives and data and share them between the group members to build a shared picture of the diversity that the group is working with.
As a group searches for alternatives, holding intentional dialogue interviews, undertaking learning journeys or gathering stakeholders together can provide valuable information and insight.
But in truly complex processes, the answers are still not evident, and emotions can turn negative, with frustration and impatience beginning to appear. At this time, leaders need to be able to host the difficult conversations that come up so that diversity and difference don’t turn into unproductive conflict. In these moments, working with limiting beliefs and taking the time to sit in processes like circles and hear feelings and emotions becomes an important part of the work.
From this point, the group enters the Groan Zone, a sometimes painful part of the journey that can lead to fresh thinking and innovative decisions if it is well-hosted.
Zone 3: The Groan Zone
As a group enters the groan zone, people begin to struggle in the service of integration and in releasing their attachment to their own perspectives. Creating something new requires mixing, combining, and letting go. This can be a fraught experience rife with confusion, irritation, discouragement, anxiety, exasperation, pain, anger, and blame. It is no surprise that we want to avoid the groan zone, but for a group to discover new things, leaders can help people through the groan zone by engaging two types of thinking: creating shared context and strengthening relationships.
Creating shared context helps to re-ground a group in their work. This can take the form of paired interviews or group conversations where people explore different perspectives with a deliberate intention to listen for differences and where each other is coming from. Focusing on need and purpose can be valuable here as it gets a group “out of the weeds” and into remembering the deeper intention and the bigger picture.
Strengthening relationships is important in the groan zone, because frayed relationships will undermine the sustainability of a decision. Practices as simple as sharing stories, or going for a walk together can alleviate acute conflict and give people a chance to shift out of positions and reconnect to each other.
Work in the groan zone is heavily influenced by emotions and it is a lifelong practice for leaders to work on their own comfort and resourcefulness around conflict and strong emotions if they are to hold a group through this work.
Personal leadership practices are key to developing the ability to stay present and host process effectively in the groan zone. Developing deep self-awareness and presence, and using self-inquiry practices to shift reactive patterns can be helpful.
Zone 4: The Convergence Zone
When a group has worked through the groan zone, it comes time for convergence. This is where new ideas, fresh thinking and innovation can rise to the fore. The convergence zone precedes decision making as options are weighed, paths forward are discerned and, in larger processes, prototypes are designed for the purpose of testing new ideas.
When working towards a decision, three types of thinking are helpful: applying inclusive principles, creative reframing and strengthening good ideas.
Moving through the transition from groan zone to convergence requires a change in the container and the work. Inclusive solutions require a commitment to an inclusive decision making process, so it can be good practice to have the group design and adopt a set of inclusive principles to guide their work. These can be used later in the decision making phase as well.
Creative reframing invites the group to look at the work with new eyes. Having come through the groan zone together, all of the ideas that were gathered and discussed in the divergence zone take on new life. Looking at solutions with creative processes like scenario planning and TRIZ helps to introduce new ideas and perspectives to strengthen proposals.
And strengthening good ideas is the way towards making a sustainable agreement. Once ideas are contested, experimented with and considered it comes time to strengthen them through prototyping and piloting. The idea is to move the new ideas towards a decision by working with them through various scenarios first. Whatever can be done to strengthen an idea helps.
Zone 5: The Closure Zone
In participatory decision making processes closure usually involves making a decision together. This could be through a vote, or a consensus process, or it could even mean that the leader takes the decision alone with the consent of the group. Regardless of how closure comes about it is useful to agree together on the rules of decision making and then facilitate a decision.
Starting with agreeing on the rules and process gives you a chance to have a dry run through decision making with your group and this is especially useful if the decision you are making is contentious. Start by agreeing what would constitute a good decision and what a good, robust process is for making that decision. There are different versions of what consensus decision making can mean. You can research and try different approaches that best suit your context. For example, you may want to test consensus and have a rule that if someone is opposed to a proposal that they must bring an alternative to consider. You also might want to make some rules about timeliness of the decision or the maximum amount of resources available. When the group owns the process, it goes a long way to having them own the outcome.
Facilitating a decision can take various forms but typically goes through four stages: First, prepare a proposal that is simple and clear and that ensures that everyone knows what they are voting on. In some cases you might prepare two or three proposals in order to poll the group of options. Regardless, a proposal for a decision should be something taht is easily understood and easy to compare against other options.
Second, test the group for consensus. See who agrees with the proposal and who has questions or other things they would like to add. This process allows for a final set of conversations to strengthen the proposal. If you experience blocks and vetos at this stage of the process, this can give you good information about changes that need to be made or ongoing relationships that will need to be tended after the decision is made.
Third, iterate the proposal and review it again. Focusing on the major issues and questions means that the iteration process can be focused and aimed at creating a stronger proposal. Finally, make a final decision. That may be a vote or a consensus decision depending on what is required of the process.
Once the decision is made, the process is closed and the work continues. It can be important to give some thought to how the decision is communicated and implemented as part of your next steps.
My friend Marcus Jenal published his latest weekly newsletter in which he muses over a few questions related to complexity, strategy and taking a stance. He doesn’t have a comments section enabled on his blog (hint! hint!) so I’m going to respond a bit to what he wrote here and we can have a conversation in this space.
Too often, I fall into the trap of questioning every new insight I have and asking myself if that insight goes deep enough. Every insight is still biased through my cultural coding, my upbringing, my context, etc. Yet by the very nature of being human we will never reach a place of ‘pure’ unbiased understanding. So we need to strike a balance between self-critical reflection and believing that we found some ground that is solid enough to step on and move forward.
It’s like the metaphor of crossing a river on foot. We make a careful step to check if the next stone is stable enough to step on or not. If it is, we make the step and then check which direction we can go from there. If we get stuck, we move a few steps back. But if we never trust the stability of the next stone, we will not move at all. And yes, sometimes we might fall into the water but that’s ok. We can pick ourselves up and start again.
This is one of the biggest blocks I see with folks who are new to complexity work. There is a tension – a polarity even – between needing to move and needing to know. I think that tension is generated by standard problems solving practices that begin with the Cynefin framework’s Ordered Systems formula of “SENSE – ANALYSE – RESPOND.” You start by gathering information you can about the system, have an expert analyse the data and tell you what to do, chart out a path forward and then execute. That is what most problem solving in business and organizational life looks like and it permeates design thinking and action practice.
When I’m teaching people to work in complexity, it’s good to use tools and metaphors that draw on their own experiences in the rest of their life. I am firmly of the belief that human beings are innate complexity workers but our organizational life squishes those capacities out of us, or relegates them to the sidelines of our non-work lives, to hobbies, games, parenting, gardening, cooking, art, and other activities of daily life. In places where we are safe to fail, we can try all kinds of things at our own pace and comfort. We are not paralysed by the fear that someone will yell at us for getting it wrong, or worse, we will be fired, demoted, or thought less of. So many organizations and leaders I work with are paralysed by fear. Ofet they figure out how to download that fear on to their teams and always have someone else to blame if things go wrong. That’s a lot of the work we do when trying to open up leadership practice.
“Why are we stuck?” ask many leaders. “How do you reward failure?” I ask in return. And thus begins the conversation.
These days I just point people to this EXCELLENT Liz and Mollie cartoon to illustrate this:
So yes. We need to act without information. We take up some, have a sense of where we want to go, and then move and the cycle begins.
That leads to the second part of Marcus’s post:
I am re-watching the two conversations between Nora Bateson and Dave Snowden on ‘When meaning looses its meaning’ (Session 1, Session 2) together with a group of friends who are both interested in Nora’s and Dave’s work. We are having fabulous discussions after watching bits of the conversations. While Nora and Dave try hard to agree with each other, of course they have their differences. And these differences are somehow reflected in my own thinking about how to be and act in the world, which I’m expressing in my weekly emails – particularly the dilemma of if/when/how to act. In very strongly simplified terms, Nora advocates for broad, open, purposeless spaces to make connections and relationships that will then sprout into change in whatever way, while Dave sees the possibility of catalysing certain attractors and shifting certain constraints in a more intentional / purposeful way so that new, more desirable things emerge (he calls this ‘nudging’ the system). While it is more obvious with Dave, both have an idea of how a more desirable world would look like: more people would accept that ecological and complexity thinking are better ways to engage with the world than industrial linear thinking. Both, Nora and Dave, take a stance, which allows them to become thought leaders.
It has been lovely watching Nora and Dave dance together and as Marcus rightly identifies, the differences, held in a generative tension, are the interesting bits. I think the tension about direction of travel that Marcus has seized on here is an important polarity to navigate in complexity work.
Direction of travel matters. Call it a moral compass, call it a shared purpose, a shared vision, or a sense of what is right and good, but INTENTION, as Alicia Juarerro will tell you, matters. It serves as an attractor for action and so if you are planning to move, you better be aware of your intention, especially if you think you are just hanging out in a purposeless space. In complexity, there is no space that is free from context. If I am just hanging around with a soft gaze waiting to explore something, that is not an empty space of thinking. My eyes and ears and heart are conditioned and constrained by my history. And that is why Nora’s ideas of “warm data,” as I understand them, are helpful. It helps to populate the purposeless space with enough diversity and possibility that it can be intentionally purposeless.
I learned that a long time ago when I was thinking about Bohmian dialogue in the context of alos developing my practices of invitation. Bohmian dialogue is intentionally open, and, as Harrison Owen once said, “Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened.” That is true and it is alos true that there is always intention in the invitation, and whoever comes has arrived there by virtue of the history of connections that led them to discovering and responding the the invitation. Spaces can be open, but they are never unbounded. Awareness of the boundary conditions is helpful for understanding what is possible and why what happened was “the only thing that could have.” Complex systems have history and that history matters.
So I think this difference that Marcus has found presents us with a nice space to manage within when we are working in complex systems. A range of openness of direction of travel from broad to narrow. At a certain point if you treat the direction of travel like a target you have drifted into the complicated domain in Cynefin, which is fine, if that is truly what you are doing. But targets are not the same as vectors and they inspire very different patterns of behaviour.
Oh and on Marcus’ last question…
PS: I’m not 100% sure what the difference is between ‘taking a stance’ and ‘taking a stand’. Even English native speakers could not really explain it to me consistently.
…I answered him by email saying essentially that a “taking a stance” is a position that you take to prepare for action, and you optimize your ability to engage well to whatever is coming. It’s preparing to move. “Taking a stand” is getting ready not to be moved, to dig in and resist whatever is coming. One could even say it’s another way of thinking about the resilient vs. robust form of dealing with change.
Over on LInkedIn, Bryan Stallings pointed to a 2017 post at the International Association of Facilitators site that contains a set of definitions of facilitation. I don’t remember contributing to that article, but I quite like what I said at the time:
“While facilitation traditionally means ‘to make things easy’ I think we need a new definition that means ‘to host the struggle together.’ Good facilitators help create a container for people to work with difference and diversity to make good things happen.”
That’s pretty good, I think. It describes what I do and it describes a shift in my practice over the years. Like many, when I started out as a facilitator I was really trying hard to deliver outcomes and to lead a group through a process to get to a preconceived set of ideas. It’s not that I wasn’t alos hosting some creative work, but my early forays in the field were probably brutal to sit through as I steered people through a process and, being a naturally conflict averse person, quelled differences. There would be brainstorming, but I was very much the kind of guy that seized on ideas I liked and inquired more into them, even if the group had other thoughts. Ick.
Now it’s all about the right tools for the right job, and sometimes that’s just the right tool. But not often. And definitely not in the unconscious way that I applied facilitation.
Once I trundled into the world of Open Space Technology, the Art of Hosting, Dialogic Organizational Development and the complexity world, my practice radically changed. It really did become about building containers for dialogue, creating spaces and contexts in which interesting things might happen. It took to locus of responsibility for the content off of me and put it on the participants. I became responsible for managing the constraints that would help a group do that.
If you look on my site for posts on complex facilitation, you’ll find a bit more thinking on that practice, but one things that stands out in the IAF article from 5 years ago is the commitment to difference and diversity. I recently took a Deep Democracy workshop with Camille Dumond and Sera Thompson as a part of my reluctant commitment to overcome my aversion to conflict, and I walked away with the idea that we need to get good at the practice of “conflict preservation” instead of “conflict resolution.” By that I mean that we need to be able to host conversations in which conflicts are present and remain present as a source of creativity and life, and not quash them because we are afraid of their energy. That means creating a container in which conflict is productive, in which people feel free to share different opinions, different perspectives, and contribute different gifts. And, of course, being conflict averse, this terrifies me. What if someone gets hurt? What if the space isn’t safe enough? What if something really offensive gets said?
Yup. Those are the questions we have to wrestle with. Because facilitation is needed in this time to ensure that people with vastly different experience and gifts have the chance to use them. Communities and societies contain many different kinds of people, including people whose opinions and ideas I don’t like.
Feel all those questions coming up? All those fears and “what if’s?” Yup. me too. Let’s talk about it below.
Euan Semple was the first person I ever linked to on my blog. Today he posts a little reflection on his blogging practice:
…I’ve always said, my blog posts are mostly memos to self. They are for me to react to the world around me and to see those reactions placed before me for inspection. Yes inspection by others but mostly by me. Being concerned about whether or not people like what I have written affects how I write.
I guess this process mirrors our struggles to identify our true selves in the rest of our lives. The draw of relationship becomes pressure to conform.
Can we know ourselves without relationship? Can we truly be ourselves if it becomes too important?
In Jonathan Haidt’s latest essay in The Atlantic entitled “Why the past ten years of American Life have been Uniquely Stupid” he writes about how the “like” and “share/retweet” functions came into social media. It changed everything, mostly by gaming the algorithm with likes and speeding up the uncritical consumption of information.
Before 2009, Facebook had given users a simple timeline––a never-ending stream of content generated by their friends and connections, with the newest posts at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom. This was often overwhelming in its volume, but it was an accurate reflection of what others were posting. That began to change in 2009, when Facebook offered users a way to publicly “like” posts with the click of a button. That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful: the “Retweet” button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all of their followers. Facebook soon copied that innovation with its own “Share” button, which became available to smartphone users in 2012. “Like” and “Share” buttons quickly became standard features of most other platforms.
By 2013, social media had become a new game, with dynamics unlike those in 2008. If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would “go viral” and make you “internet famous” for a few days. If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. Your posts rode to fame or ignominy based on the clicks of thousands of strangers, and you in turn contributed thousands of clicks to the game.
This new game encouraged dishonestyand mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the “Retweet” button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.”
As a social psychologist who studies emotion, morality, and politics, I saw this happening too. The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. The volume of outrage was shocking.
These two functions definitely changed the way I write when I moved most of my writing to social media from the blog. Likes and shares are both powerful attractors but the most powerful of all is the comment. Because that one fosters reflective community and relationship.
I’m in trouble. In the best way. So get ready for a long and rambling post about geeky dialogic philosophy and complexity practice.
I’m a little bit known in some communities as a person that is writing and working with the notion of “container” in dialogic organization development. The word and concept itself comes from a lineage of thinking about the spaces inside which dialogue takes place, and there is certainly lots written about that. I think I first learned the term from the work of William Isaacs whose classic work, “Dialogue,” is a seminal reference in this field. He describes a dialogic container as the “sum of assumpitions, shared intentions, and beliefs of a group.”
While that was the first place I learned of the concept of container in dialogue, my learning about it was also informed by reading about complexity science, and especially learning about dissipative structures and autopoiesis, two key concepts in self-organization in living systems. Furthermore, I learned of the notion of sacred space in both Christianity and indigenous ceremonies, especially the Midewiwin, to which I was exposed in my University years. Finally, my thinking about container with respect to complexity has been heavily influenced by both Dave Snowden and Glenda Eoyang‘s work, as they have explored how these concepts and dynamics from the natural sciences show up in human systems. In this context, Dave’s work on enabling and governing constraints is incredibly useful and Glenda’s broad palette of tools helps us to illuminate and work with containers.
So that is a brief survey of where my understanding has come from. I find the concept incredibly helpful in understanding the dynamics of self-organizing systems and it helps us to find places to intervene in a complex system with a rigorous approach to explore and change the patterns of self-organization and emergence.
So I use the word “container” with a very specific meaning, but it’s not a meaning that is shared by everyone and it definitely not a meaning shared by folks who have a history of being contained. Occasionally I get scolded for using the word, and I own that. We must be VERY thoughtful about language in this work so this is a long post where I think about the implications of this troublesome word which is used to describe a useful concept badly.
The word and concept are useful in understanding and describing dialogic practice. But it has some SERIOUS baggage because in contexts of oppression and colonization the history of colonization, enclosure, and imprisonment is entirely the history of containing people; on reserves, in jails, in schools, in groups defined by race and marked by lines, in ghettoized neighbourhoods, in a million places in which people are contained, enclosed and deprived of their agency and freedom to create and maintain boundaries.
In these contexts, the word “container” is often heard as a reference to places that are created by people with the power to contain others, and very often they contain people who have a lesser amount of power to change or free themselves from that container.
It is true and important to note that any discussion about how to manage dialogic spaces – containers – is entirely dependant on the power one has to create and influence the boundaries, and manage the connections and exchanges. Creating a dialogic container is an act of privilege. Using the word “container” will almost always trigger a negative reaction in people that have been SUBJECTED to containment, against their wills, against the interests, and in the service of depriving them of power.
Liberation movements all over the world in all moments of history are about creating alternative spaces to the oppressive culture and conditions of the present. These are expressed in all kinds of ways. In land reform movements, for example, colonized lands are recovered and returned to their original owners. In movements to free people from enclosed and coercive spaces like exploitative labour, prisons, residential schools, oppressive child welfare practices, or human trafficking, alternative spaces are built for equality, justice, freedom, learning, self-actualization and growth. And the metaphor and reality extends to spaces where people change the language to talk about their conditions and create spaces where conversation, dialogue, and organizing can happen in a way that draws a line between the oppressive practices of the past and the liberating spaces of the future. Socially constructed narratives can provide alternative stories that begin to link, connect, and differentiate people in a way that helps them organize their conditions of freedom.
So one major problem with this troublesome word is how it works in English. The word “contain” can be brutal, because in English it is a transitive verb that is not continuous, meaning that it implies an action conducted upon a object and then arriving at a resting place, where the object is contained and the action is done. That is a troubling truth of the word “container” and partially explains why it rests so uncomfortably on a dialogic practice that is intended to create spaces of generatively, creativity and life. It objectifies the object of it’s action and it acts upon that object to bring about a final conclusion. There is a lot buried in the particular grammatical function of the word. There is no room in the English definition of the word for self-organization and emergence.
Truthfully, the space required for dialogic practice needs a type of verb that doesn’t come so easily to English: a collectively transitive verb that is generative, continuous, and describes something that changes in its use. I suspect, having been a poor student of Anishinaabemowin and a bit of Skwxwu7mesh snichim, that there are maybe such verb forms in these languages. In my long study of the Tao te Ching, I’ve come to understand the concept of “yin” to be this: the form that life takes, in which creative energy is contained so it can do it’s work. It is created and changed in its interdependent relationship to what happens within it, like the way a river bed both holds the river and gives water its form of “river” instead of “lake” and is changed by the river being in it. It implies “receptivity” to creative energy. In Japanese where there is a sophisticated vocabulary for these kinds of spaces, “ma” (?) might be the word I’m looking for: a word that my friend Yurie Makihara defines this way: “Ma is the time concept expressing the time between something and other thing. We say how to create Ma is really important to encourage you to speak or “it’s kind of nice to have this kind of Ma.” For me Ma is the word to include some special sense to say, so we don’t use it just to express the time and the place.” Even though Yurie’s English is quite good, it’s clear that translating this into English is nearly impossible! But I think you get a sense that Ma is a collective sense about the shared time and space relationships that create a moment in which something is possible. Ma describes that moment, in a spatial way.
So. As is often the case, I’m left with the hidden poverty of English to give me a word that serves as both verb and noun and that is highly process-dependant. Over the years folks have suggested words like “nest” “hearth” and “field” to describe it. These are good, but in some ways they are also just softer rebranding of the word “container” to imply a more life-filled space. The terms still don’t ask the question of who gets to create, own and maintain the container nor do they fully capture the beauty and generativity of a complex adaptive structure in which meaning-making, relationship, healing, planning, dreaming both occur and act to transform the place in which they occur.
If we cast our eyes about the culture a bit wider, they quickly land on the word “space.” We use the word “space” a lot in social change circles, but it has its own troublesome incompleteness. The problem with “space” is that it often tends to turn attention towards what is between us and away from the boundary that separates us from others. This can be the way in which creating space for social change can fall victim to an unarticulated shadow: inclusion always implies a boundary between what is included and what is not included. Many social change initiatives falter on an unresourceful encounter with the exclusion that is implied by radical inclusion. A healthy social system can speak as clearly and lovingly about this boundary as it can about the relationship within the system. And for me this is the important part of talking about dialogic practice. So I can understand the helpful neutrality of the term “space” because it can be a result of a tight and impermeable boundary or it can simply be what we give our attention too as we come into relationship around attractors like identities, ideas, purposes, or needs. It can beautifully describe the nature of the “spaces in between.” But it still doesn’t do enough for me to describe the relationship between the spaces and the forces – or constraints – in the system that give rise to a space and enable self-organization and life. Still, it’s a pretty good word.
So perhaps what is needed is a true artistic view of the problem, to look away from the problem and towards the negative space that defines it. That is indeed what I have started doing in my work, by focusing more on the factors that influence self-organization and emergence and less on naming the structure that is created as a result of those factors. This is a critical skill in working with complexity as a strategist, facilitator, manager, and evaluator. These constraints include the interdependent work of the attractors and the boundaries which help us create a “space” for sensemaking and action, whether dialogic action or something else. There is a place where you are either in or out, and there can be a transition zone that is quite fluid and interesting. There is also an attractor at play, which can be a shared purpose, a goal, a shared identity, a shared rhythm or something interesting and strange and emergent that brings us into relationship. Anywhere you find yourself, in any social space, you can probably identify the attractors, the boundaries and perhaps even the nature of the liminal space between completely in and completely out.
This brings us back to the power conversation, rather more helpfully I think. If we let go of the “container” and focus instead on the factors that shape it, we can talk about power right upfront. Attractors and boundaries are VERY POWERFUL. They are created by power and maintained and enforced by power and the negotiation about their nature – more or less stable, more or less influential, more or less permeable and mutable – is by definition a negotiation about power. As a facilitator one carries a tremendous amount of power into the design of dialogic spaces. The most energetic resistance I have ever received in my work is always around the choices I made and the nature of the attractors and boundaries I am working with. I have been told I am too controlling, or not controlling enough. I have been told that we aren’t asking the right question (“who are you to say what we should be talking about?”). I have been removed from my role because what I was doing was far too disruptive to the group’s culture and norms of how they work, and in enforcing the disruption, I was actually depriving people of accessing the power they needed in the work.
(See the stories from Hawaii here and here and this story from Nunavik. Being an outsider with this power is perilous work.)
So yes, the terms we use to describe dialogic spaces matter. Finding a word to describe these spaces is important, and this is an important piece of critical pedagogy for anyone teaching dialogue and facilitation.
But don’t let your work rest on the definition of the space. Understand where these spaces come from. Actively work to invite more self-organization and emergence into these spaces that are in service of life, love and liberation. Become skillful at working with boundaries and attractors, limits and invitations, constraints that enable life rather than govern outcomes, and get good at knowing what kinds of relationships and constraints are the best fit for what is needed. That is what we need as we co-create spaces of radical participation and liberation and to transform the toxic use of power and control so we get more and more skillful at inviting us all into life-affirming moments and futures.
What do you think?