Part three of a seven part series on the Seven little helpers for dialogue and action.
3. Use a talking piece
Think about any conversation you have ever had. If it ws a good conversation, there was a purpose or a question or a topic that was compelling and interesting to the people taking part. You may have found yourself “leaning in” and listening with curiosity, offering your own stories and perspectives, finding commonalities and exploring difference. In our natural setting as human beings, conversation sis easy and a wholly natural way of exploring ideas and making sense of the world. If so you have found yourself in a dialogic container, a social structure with a centre and a boundary and all kinds of things happening inside.
So much of organizational life though runs counter to our instincts, and even when there is an important need for a conversation we can find ourselves resistant to it. The timing doesn’t work naturally, or the conditions aren’t conducive to the natural flow and participation of a good conversation. There are many times when we need to stop what we are doing and enter into a space where we can pay attention to each other. Good dialogue practice helps us to do that by creating a container which encourages speaking, listening, sense making and decision. in times of conflict or stress, a thoughtful method that allows everyone to speak and be heard is essential.
A simple method for every facilitator is using a talking piece: some item that can be passed around a room and allow the person holding it to speak while others listen. The talking piece, and its rules and rituals, structures the process and creates the container. Every facilitation tool, agenda, or set of guidelines and principles functions to structure process. Every facilitator decision functions like a talking piece. When Toke added this one to his list of “little helpers” it was with the caveat that such a tool needed to be chosen and used with great care and consciousness about how it would affect the group. As a facilitator you wield a lot of power and it’s quite difficult to strike the right balance between too much freedom, which doesn’t provide creative constraints, and too much control, that throws people into apathy. Learning how to strike the balance is a practice, which means that you get better at it the more you do it and reflect on it. There is no answer for how to strike the right balance, but here are a few principles that might be helpful.
Host the process in a way that allows the group to do the work themselves. As much as possible, stick to creating the conditions for people to do their own work. Don’t tell people what to do or what they will feel. Try not to be the person interpreting the words of participants or the overall insights of a group. Instead create good process that allows people to make contributions, listen and learn and mitigate their personal impact on a collective conversation.
When things go awry, pause and go back to the simple question: “what’s happening?” Conflict is inevitable. Things go off the rails. People get angry and hurt. The facilitator makes mistakes. Remember that when these things happen, you are not alone. You are allowed to reset, to take a breath and move to a higher level conversation about what’s happening. Early in my facilitation career I hosted a meeting which felt like pulling teeth. No one was participating, there was very little creativity and it was stifling. I made the mistake of believing that it was my job alone to fix the situation and the more I tried, the more desperate the situation became. Finally, I realized that I was not alone in the room. There were thirty other people there I could ask for help. I stopped and asked the question “what is going on?”
To my relief one of the participants said “This is not the conversation we want to have right now. You keep asking us to do work that no one is interested in.”
“What should we be working on, then?” I asked. The participants all shouted out the topic they were expecting to be discussing. And so I pivoted the conversation there and said “okay, let’s talk about that then!” and away we went. As a facilitator, you don’t have to have all the answers. If the process you have designed isn’t right, ask folks to help you get it right.
Create a container for conversation using ABIDE. A few years ago I published a paper on using Dave Snowden’s ABIDE framework to design and host dialogic containers. I have since grown to really appreciate this framework and have altered it a little to blend in some of the work from Glenda Eoyang’s CDE model from Human Systems Dynamics. I now have an acronym that neither of them created, but which is insanely useful.
ABIDE points to five things you can change in the structure of a container that will change the interactions of the participants. I would say that every good facilitator and leader working in complexity knows this. Learning this helps you to be able to shift patterns without dictating the outcomes and is an essential step for facilitator development to move beyond simply using tools. I’ll write a longer piece about this later, but here is my current version of these five important characteristics that constrain group behaviour.
- ATTRACTORS. These are things around which patterns are organized in a system: a story, a question, a powerful person, even the physical focus of attention in the room.
- BOUNDARIES: These are things that constrain a system, including physical space, time, money, and mandate Basically these are lines within which a meeting operates.
- IDENTITY: Identities are deep patterns that shape behaviour, and we often wear them unconsciously. They can be formal roles (leader, manager, administrator), archetypes (bully, victim, hero, elder, child), or social constructions rooted in norms around race, gender, class, and other distinctions.
- DIFFERENCES: Difference and sameness can flavour a conversation radically. Too much of one or the other can sap the energy from a container. Homogeniety can create massive spots of unawareness, and complete diversity can become a Tower of Babel.
- EXCHANGES: These are things that flow in a system, be it money, power, ideas, information, or knowledge.
When conversations are stuck it’s often because one of these things is creating a pattern that is unhelpful. Shifting one of these things can shift the whole process.
Be mindful of how you use constraints. Decolonize constraints as much as possible. A container in one context is an enclosure in another. This is an important consideration. In the literature on dialogue, much has been written about “containers” and it has become a technical term in the field. All human process happens within constraints, but different peoples have different experiences of what it is like to be constrained, especially by others. It is very easy to use the term “container” and have it become a colonizing concept. In Indigenous communities, containers can be conflated with the reservation system. In Ireland, the word can evoke the pain of enclosure, the legal process whereby the land was privatized and colonized by the British Crown. And yet in both these contexts, containers for life giving conversation are well understood using terms like “nest” and “hearth.” As with all tools, be mindful of where you are and how you are using it, and how your words will land.
I’m on the road, currently in Columbus Ohio, working my way through a two week road trip that has taken me to Ontario to visit family and to New Brunswick where I was part of a remarkable hosting team for the Art of Hosting Working Across Divides. It was a timely gathering for 70 people from government, civil society, and social enterprise to come and learn how to work with differences.
In Canada’s only bilingual province, language is a massive difference between people, and New Brunswick has a multitude of language cultures. There are 34 local French accents alone in New Brunswick and probably just as many English ones too, having to do with class and ethnicity and proximity to the sea or the woods.
In the last provincial election there, the virus of populism had its day and took these existing differences and turned them into divides. Right wing populists have a well-trod strategy for doing this. Instead of pointing to differences between people, they tap the fear that people have of people who are different than them, without naming the other. This is called “dogwhistle politics.” Once they find a fear of the other that elicits an emotional response, they double down on the fear often, but not always, with lies and misrepresentation. When their political opponents offer up diversity and difference as an asset to a healthy society, the populists accuse them of “divisiveness.” They claim that only their approach will bring “unity” typically by eliminating any conversation that recognizes the value of differences. Often their “unity” platform is basically assimilitation: “if only you were like us, we’d have unity; if you want to be different, you’re creating division.” Sometimes they outright declare such an emphasis on difference to be “racist.” If you want to see this in action, visit Rebel Media, an organization I will simply refuse to link to. They are great at this.
The pithy insight on difference and divisiveness that struck me in this Art of Hosting is this: differences are real and useful, and division is one thing you can do with them. People are different, and offer different perspectives, lived experiences, and world views on things. These differences are essential to living and working in complexity, because a homogeneous view of a situation leaves you open to crises hitting you unawares. Cultivating difference is a good strategy for surviving and thriving in a complex situation. Seeking out differences of opinion is essential, finding people who are different than you and working with them makes you all smarter.
Divisions happen when people become so afraid of the other that they stop making the effort to bridge the gap. When this happens a kind of vacuum opens up between people and that gap is the thing that populists exploit. Political power can be won and held with a very thin margin these days in Canada. You only need about 20% of the voters to vote for your party. If you get your vote out, and the opposition is split or apathetic, you can form power. In New Brunswick the current government was formed on this exact number: about 31% of voters voted Conservative, and only 67% of the eligible voters cast a ballot. The populist People’s Alliance hold the balance of power. (In Ontario, Doug Ford came to power with 23.49% of eligible voters supporting his party.)
The way to defeat populism is to not allow people to play on your fears of other people who are different from you. It means convening incredibly diverse spaces and creating the conditions for people to show up with their unique perspectives, working WITH differences. That sometimes means doing things that make differences more stark, to explore different experiences, different ideas and different stories, so we can learn from each other. And it sometimes means making differences less pronounced so that we can find common purpose or shared perspective.
Divisiveness does not come from people working with differences. Divisiveness comes from people inserting fear into the gaps between people who are different.
Back in December I announced my intention to take a sabbatical from Facebook and see what would happen. There were a number of factors in that decision, and I’ll share what I learned and what I’m doing now.
I had a few reasons for wanting to take a break:
- Facebook was a huge time waster, and earlier last year I deleted the app from my phone (it and Messenger and Instagram track your life your life and serve you ads based on what you’ve been doing). As a result, I have spent a lot less time there, although I do spend a lot of time on twitter.
- Facebook in engaged in undermining democracy and articles I was reading in 2018 pointed to their intentional and unintentional aiding and abetting behaviour with respect to undermining elections and eroding democratic engagement. Here is a good Atlantic article on that.
- Facebook creates a deep gravity well for conversation. It tailors your news feed using algorithms to only serve you a very small slice of your friends’ activity. Much of what you see confirms what you know and it is designed to activate your brain in a way that causes you to share information and pass it on, deepening confirmation bias, and spreading rumours and lies.
- People communicate on Facebook in shallow and brief ways, meaning large and important conversations for local communities become pile ons, where people that have never made the effort to introduce themselves to others in real life nevertheless feel free to be mean spirited and even borderline libellous while hiding behind their virtual identities. This has major implications in a small community like mine, where big local issues result in people starting rumours, passing judgements and ostracizing and slandering others in a way they would never do if they had to write to the newspaper, or see these people at the General Store. Discussions of complex ideas have devolved into the equivalent of drive-by shootings, often deeply personal.
These were the reasons I took a break and these are the reasons I am not coming back in a meaningful way.
When I started blogging in 2001, the promise of the Web 2.0 was that it would usher in the era of the creator. Any one could now create work on line. Recording studios, radio stations, television and film productions, newspaper, and magazines and book publishing all used to be inaccessible for the common person or the beginner artist. Now anyone could use whatever form of medium they wanted to say what is important to them. Before social media, Web 2.0 was about content creation media. It took time and effort to do it, but you could build a life, connect with others, find community in far flung corners of the globe, and make a contribution.
When social media came about into widespread use, around 2007 in my case with Facebook, the blogging world almost completely disappeared. People whose blogs I followed moved into facebook where I followed them for a while until their well crafted posts were lost in the endless stream of mindless diarizing, half-baked opinions and, later, the endless copypasta of shared memes and viral content. I had a hard time finding my people, but I was enjoying wishing friends a happy birthday and connecting with people from school, 30 years ago.
Over the past ten or so years what has happened is that my time has disappeared into the suck hole of scrolling through useless content instead of producing some of my own. Yesterday, talking with my friend Julien Thomas, I remembered that somewhere I said that democracy depends on us being active participants and not consumers.
Social media has made us consumers of other people’s content. In the 2001-2007 era of blogging, someone would write a post and if it was meaningful to you, you would quote it with an annotation about why it mattered and what your take was on it. Conversation was more considered and content was savoured and appreciated and hardly ever simply passed on. We were all content creators, hyperlinked to other content creators. When commenting began, discussion started to remain in a limited number of places but it was all open in the public and available to anyone. Comment spam really killed open discussion on blogs and maintaining spam-free comments sections became time-consuming. (Luckily there are better tools now, which is why you need to wait for me to approve comments on my blog).
With the dawn of Facebook however, content creation became highly concentrated in only a relatively and proportionally small number of places. Most people on Facebook simply pass it on other people’s stuff, often without any credit or link back to the original creator, and discussion happens behind closed doors and isn’t archived or very easy to access.
These days we are consumers of other people’s content, and we generally pass on what we like and agree with, amplifying it’s impact without adding to it. A few people have complained that they miss me on facebook, that they miss my voice and the things I say. But what I notice is that they like those things mostly because they can pass them on, or because what I have to say validates their views. It makes me I wonder where THEIR voice is, why they haven’t been thinking about things and sharing original opinions. And I wonder half-heartedly why I never get stuff from in my news feed that challenges my biases and my ideas anymore.
I have recently created a sock puppet twitter account to engage with conservatives in Canada, including those who are nationalist, populist and extreme right-wing. I am curious and concerned about the rise of populism and nationalism in Canada and the global connections between far right leaders who are promoting anti-immigrant, anti-globalist politics and messages. Through my “fake” twitter account, I am meeting conservatives that are also opposed to these far right echo chambers, and I am having my own ideas challenged. I am getting into debates and conversations with people I vehemently disagree with. I am posing on twitter as a real person, but not as “Chris Corrigan.”
I’m not going to reveal the identity of that twitter account. It says something to me about the nature of the social media landscape that I feel deeply uncomfortable showing up as my own self in those conversations. Debating with Nazis is not a safe thing to do, especially when one is debating with people hiding behind anonymous identities. And so I show up as a real person but with a fake name. Interesting.
Social media has become a place where relationships have become commercialized transactions and where democratic engagement has devolved into a fact free festival of insulting the other and patting your friends and allies on the back while being served highly specific advertising messages from corporations and political influencers. All the while, someone other than you is getting rich every time you connect to a friend. While it is nice to “stay in touch” I have to say that most of what passes across my screens on facebook is of very little value to me.
I would encourage people to go back to, or start blogging, and I’d encourage you to do it in the spirit of 2001 blogging, not in the spirit of “blog as PR tool” that we see today: share things, speculate, use it as a platform for what I call “Open Source Learning.” Use it as a gift exchange, not as a digital business card. Embed links to other people and add to the gifts of knowledge you receive before passing them on. You can start with WordPress as a powerful, free and easy-to-get-started-with tool.
For me I’ll be using facebook in these ways going forward:
- I’ll be continuing to promote workshops and events there, and for limited times, participating in facebook groups where that is chosen by the group as a way of keeping in touch.
- I will occasionally scan my feed and if I see that you have a birthday, or have experienced a death in the family, and you are a person with whom I have a personal relationship, you may well get an email or a phone call from me.
- I will share blog posts on facebook, but encourage discussion to happen here on the blog, where the world can see it and anyone can participate.
I’ll be going off Instagram and What’s App entirely (both owned by Facebook) and continuing to use twitter (@chriscorrigan) as a place for spontaneous conversation and meeting new voices. You can find my photos on Flickr, which has recently become revitalized and awesome again. If you have a blog, let me know and I’ll add you to my RSS feed (I use Inoreader for that)
I’ve been enjoying reading Adam Nicolson’s book “Sea Room” about the Shiant Islands in the Hebrides. The history of the small group of islands that he owns obsesses him. He charts the archaeology and natural history of the islands, and the book is filled with the characters who are the real owners of the place – the crofters and shepherds that work the land as tenants witinn the strange Scottish systems of private land ownership.
Nicolson expresses some astonishment at the amount of activity that has taken place on the Shiants over history because they are considered so remote now. It doesn’t escape him that this might be by design
When I was on Iona last month I was also struck by how somewhere so remote was at one time the focus of a mass pilgrimage. In the 15th century thousands of people travelled every year to visit the relics held at the Abbey there.
When you look at a map of the Hebrides, you can see that these islands are beyond the ends of the world, connected as it is these days by roads. To get to Iona from Glasgow involves two ferries and when you’re finally there, you’re much closer to Ireland than to Glasgow. But Ireland is away across the sea. You can’t get there from here.
Yet, it wasn’t always that way. When the traditional cultures and communities of the Hebrides were strong, families rowed and sailed through the islands for work and trade and spiritual reasons. For a culture based on the sea, places like Iona are at the very centre of the world. The abbey at Iona was as important and accessible to worshippers as St. Paul’s in London, or The Vatican.
During the period of most recent colonization, since the late 1700s, Hebridean culture ended up on the margins of the world. Travellers like Samual Johnson visited and wrote patronizing books about the lives of the people huddled together in large communal blackhouses, shared with their animals, surviving on meagre soils, livestock and fish. The colonizers paint a picture of Hebridean communities that need saving.
This same strategy – of decentering a culture and a world – happened on the west coast of Canada too. Place like Bella Bella, Kitkatla and Wuikinuxv all which are considered remote now. They are inaccessible by car, and can only be reached by water or air. But the Heitlsuk, Tsimshian and Wuikinuxv peoples are canoeing cultures. Traversing the waters of the central coast was never a big deal. Bella Bella sits right in the middle of the BC Coast, a place of strategic importance between many different cultures. Until Europeans showed up and began building roads and cities elsewhere, these communities were the heart of the 9000 year history of human occupation on the coast. Almost overnight they went from places of immense importance to places of massive inconvenience. People were moved, villages relocated, children stolen and housed in residential schools so that the colonial governments could “care for” their wards.
The result of course has been a massive seismic upturning of culture and power. That is being resisted today with increasing vigour, and on the central coast in particular, it is becoming obvious that the indigenous governments are the ones best equipped to manage resources, develop economies and protect marine and territorial ecosystems. This ultimately benefits everyone who lives in these territories, both indigenous and non-indigenous.
The decentering of entire cultures is a core tactic of colonization. People that never needed help are suddenly cast as poor, disconnected and in need of aid for their very survival. What is needed instead is a recentering of the world on their communities and ways of life. Governance, ownership and leadership should lie with the people who best understand the land and seas. When that happens, the results are better for everyone. This is what reconciliation can be.
I think that doing strategic work with organizations and communities is really about learning. If a group is trying to confront newness and changes in its environment and needs to come up with new strategies to address those changes, then it needs to learn.
I love the term “desire lines.” Most of my initial work with organizations tries to get at the desire lines in the organization; the patterns embedded in the culture that help or hinder change and resilience. Naming and making visible these entrained desire lines (including the ones that that group takes into the darkness of conflict and unresourcefulness) is a helpful exercise in beginning to first reflect and then disrupt and develop capacity. When a group can see their patterns, and see which are helpful and which are not, they can make the choice to develop new ones or strengthen the stuff that works.
When problems are complex, then the people in the group need to focus on learning strategies in order to discover and try new things, rather than adopt a best practice from elsewhere. It is, as Steve Wheeler says in this video, the difference between designed environments and personal choice:
“Students will always find their own unique pathways for learning. They will always choose their own personal tools and technologies. Our job is not to try and create pathways for them, but to help them create the pathways for themselves and the scaffold and support them as they go through those pathways.”
Hosting groups is always about learning – in fact one core question of the Art of Hosting community is “what if learning was the form of leadership required now?” To support learning, help groups find the desire lines for learning and good strategic work to address change that is owned by the group will follow. That is how learning builds capacity and capacity builds sustainability.