Peter Levine shared a video today of a panel he was on back in June, discussing practical ways to have difficult conversations. We could all do with a little more practice in this these days. I know I certainly could.
I found the audio hard to hear, but Peter’s post helpfully summarizes what each presenter practices, and I have gathered these principles here in a list for future reference. Each person is working in a different context, but the gathering was about teaching civics in schools in the United States. I think there is some useful transferrance of these principles, so I’m going to slightly rephrase them to be more general.
- Ground discussions in shared principles, such as living well together or a desire to find common ground
- Explore tensions (such as between equality and liberty(
- Use historical rather than current examples.
- Let the other lead.
- Set norms for addressing identities
- Allow a person to opt-out of “representing” a group
- Take responsibility for imbalances in credibility
- Give full attention to the other
- Practice receptivity, curiosity and open-heartedness
- Allow long pauses to allow quieter voices to emerge
- Make the conversation multi-centred, in other words allow it to become a real conversation rather than a mediated exchange of ideas through one person with power in the situation.
- Ask “What are you concerned about?” to uncover core values
- Legitimate concerns without needing to agree with them.
- Ground the discussion in a shared moral foundation
- Understanding your own philosophical, moral or ethical principles can help you generate good questions.
- Listen for understanding, not debate or attack.
Peter Levine (my summary , because he doesn’t cover his own talk in his post!)
- Name your own biases and make them visible
- Find a share ground of values
- Ask questions that are neither too abstract but also not settled.
- Explore unresolvable tensions
I recently found myself in a difficult conversation and I handled it really badly. It stemmed from a poor comment I made on a social media post during an election campaign where I accused my interlocutor of posting a hoax becasue a meme he shared did not reflect the data that was contained in the report it referenced. I know this person in real life, and the conversation did not go well online. When I saw him in real life, I apologized. A few days later we found ourselves together in the community and we started discussing the point of the post he made. It became a dogfight. I was triggered and upset, feeling some shame and guilt that I had kicked this whole thing off with what he perceived as a personal attack online. For his part, he is a lawyer, so the conversation became a debate, both of us convinced we were right. I was without any kind of skillfulness in creating a good curiosity based conversation. It wasn’t a proud moment.
Practicing these kinds of conversations is incredibly hard. None of us are saints. Principles like the ones above are just basic good sense for anyone hosting or participating in a difficult conversation, but they are incredibly difficult to remember and practice when we are in an emotional state and when the conversations we are having may ultimately have existential implications for the folks in the discussion.
I think at the end of the day one of the key principles that is my own personal responsibility to take is “I want this to go well, for me and the person I’m talking too.” I don’t mean that we should avoid conflict and just be civil to each other, or that we should deny any part of our emotional response to a situation. What I mean is that we should embrace a relationship, even if only for a few minutes, that can hold different experiences, different points of view and different aspiration side by side. For that we need a practice ground and before we step out onto that mat, we need some principles to guide us.
Here are some. What are yours?
Yesterday I came across a paper that was published in a well-respected journal discussing how a group of computer scientists had discovered that participatory methods are much better way of organizing a conference that traditional methods of presentations, panels, and concurrent sessions (which are often just smaller presentations). They took the time to document their work and share it with their community of scientists, which is excellent. The conference itself seems to have included a great deal of dialogue and conversation around topics that were chose in advance by the participants and scheduled by the organizers. But, I won’t share the paper because it has significant issues with the name it uses for the method involved.
The paper refers to “World Cafe” and then proceeds to describe a process where over the course of the conference, two 45 minute sessions were held during which participants talked about topics that had been submitted weeks in advance and selected by organizers who then also appointed people to lead these discussions There were also panel discussions and social events.
On its own this is a fine conference design. Not especially ground breaking in the world of conferences, but novel to the organizers, and the feedback was positive from the participants which is what really matters. The issue I have is what appears to be the misattribution of the term “World Cafe” to the dialogue method that the organizers used. In defining the term, the paper references a website (now a dead link, but archived here) which does indeed provide a reference to the World Cafe method, but I don’t think they used the method per se in the conference itself.
Here’s why this matters.
I do believe that methods like World Cafe and Open Space Technology are powerful and extremely useful ways of organizing and working wth large groups of people in dialogue. It is the core of my work – convening large groups for strategic learning and engagement. There are many ways of working with large groups, but these methods are well established and they share a common feature: leadership or facilitation of these methods is a very particular act, one that has a very different relationship to control and power than working with small groups. Being able to “hold space” in these processes involves using enabling constraints to create the conditions for emergence. Technically speaking: enabling constraints are boundaries that contain an activity such that certain kinds of things can happen within the dialogic container. That is, in the context of a World Cafe for example, organizers and process hosts make decisions about what the conversation is to be about and design questions that enable every person in the process to participate. We also provide the conditions so that conversations can be self-hosted by small groups by making it as easy as possible for people to engage. What happens in these contexts is therefore emergent.
Sometimes I use a metaphor like this: classical facilitation is like sailing a boat – you respond to the wind and the waves to help guide the vessel on its journey towards its destination. Large group facilitation is more like pushing a boat out onto a lake in such a way that it also ends up travelling towards its destination. Once you’ve pushed the boat out, you have no more contact with it, practically speaking. Whatever will happen will happen (or as Harrison Owen wrote, “Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.”) Therefore, the art of facilitating large group methods is very much in how the container and the participants are prepared, how the first few moments of hosting are framed, how the room and space is set up to enable the work, and then it is very much about NOT doing anything after you have let people get down to it. This is extremely difficult, but the results can be extraordinary in terms of ideas, engagement, and the overall revelation of capacity of the group itself. This is the heart of participatory work. The Art of Hosting, if you will.
The methods that have arisen around this common garden of practice and experience are well documented. When a person uses a term like “World Cafe” or “Open Space Technology” I would expect them to reference the primary material that exists in published form and use that method with some fidelity. I don’t mind if people change or create new methods from the world that has gone before, and in fact, as long as one has a good understanding of the basic principles and practice of participatory work, this kind of thing is to be encouraged, so that the needs of the group can be best met. But I have significant issues with what happens when this is done poorly.
Many people over the years have asked me to run an Open Space meeting and what they then describe is something that is far from Open Space. Commonly they describe a process whereby some or all of these kinds of features are present: people submit topics in advance, or organizers choose from a list of topics, or there is some voting on which topics will be discussed on the day, or perhaps organizers look at the agenda and then cluster conversations. All of these “modified Open Space events” are not just modified Open Space events. They actually are different kinds of events. They reveal an unstated limiting belief held by the organizers. They take the form of Open Space and introduce some level of facilitator control that is deliberately NOT a part of Open Space Technology facilitation. Why this happens, I think, largely depends on organizers’ feeling that they cannot fulfill Harrison Owen’s oft stated but rarely recorded admonition to “trust the people, not the process.” Open Space Technology in particular is a method that enables facilitators and leaders to fully trust the participants. Ironically, if you follow the method very closely (trusting the process), it initiates radical trust in the people. If you find yourself afraid of some outcome or another happening that you won’t have control over, then you are more likely to take Harrison’s original method and introduce a point of control there. That MIGHT be fine, but I always coach people to do this very mindfully and consciously and not to call what they have done “Open Space”
In its worst case, I have seen so much of the unexamined limiting belief creep into a process that the process is no longer “Open Space” or “World Cafe” but something else entirely. And once again, that is fine, but if you insist on still using the term “Open Space” or “World Cafe” to describe what you are doing (or even using the world “modified” before those terms) then you are doing the field a great disservice, and you are risking having knowledgeable participants view your motives with suspicion. These methods are not new, even though most people in the world don’t know the jargon or technical language associated with our field (and they don’t need to at all to be able to participate.) But if someone thinks they are coming to an Open Space Technology gathering and they are then met with a process whereby they have to pitch their idea to a large group of people who may vote to reject it from the agenda, they are going to be confused at best, and probably angry at worst.
So I want to leave this with a couple of encouraging ideas. First, use the methods. They are amazing. They have been honed in grounded practice, they are grounded in good theory and they work. They are widely and freely shared by the founders or designers and they are useful because they don’t need any modification beyond choosing the theme or questions for your own context. When you use them with fidelity to the original work, let people know that is what you are doing and share your sources.
Second, make up new methods. Go for it! There is nothing to stop you from really thinking through what a groups needs and creating a new method that will help people meet the urgent necessity of the moment. Use a good design tool like the chaordic stepping stones to help you think through your design. If you alight on something really good that no one else has ever done, make it replicable and share it in the myriad of communities of practice, like the Art of Hosting community, that are interested in such things.
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PS. If you are going to publish a paper on your work and your findings, using participatory methods for large scale self-organized dialogue, here is a good example, with proper references and a discussion of the methods and how the final design relates to those methods. Please do publish! I have contacted the lead author of the paper I referenced at the beginning of this post to help make peer-reviewed changes to the paper to have it better reflect the knowledge in the field of participatory dialogue methods, so that it can be more widely shared without skewing academic references to World Cafe. If we get to make those changes, I’ll happily share their work.
Don’t build beautiful things that need to capture life before they are functional. Start with life.
Here are four key insights from a conversation on designing good invitations for Open Space meetings. This is the real work of hosting self-organization. It’s not JUST about facilitation.
From time to time I have conversations that remind me of the principles that guide my own work in different aspects of facilitation and engagement. Today, in two different design conversations, I was reminded of these again, and I took a few notes as we were talking. These aren’t the be-all and end-all of good practice, but they are things that roll off the tongue and are basic heuristics for how I structure and facilitate public engagement sessions.
- Ask constructive questions. One of my pet peeves is when folks want to structure a public engagement with a presentation of a half- or well-formed policy proposal and ask “What are we missing?” In most cases once a piece of legislation or a plan reaches the consultation stage, the decision is already made that we are going in THIS basic direction. The “What is missing?” can imply that there is room to throw the whole thing out, or it invites ideological contributions that can derail the conversation. Instead, share material and then ask “what would make this stronger?” or “What would make this fail if we didn’t’t address it now?”
- Foster participant ownership: Real transparency can demand of us that we ask participants to share information with us in their own words, in their own handwriting, and in their own voice. As much as possible, have your participants shape their own input, and make sense of it together. The extent to which you are coding data, making summaries, and writing reports and responses alone and outside of the group’s work, is the extent to which they are being left out of the process. So think very consciously about that.
- Ask authentically curious and open-ended questions: in North American culture we have a pre-disposition to asking yes/no questions. We can often appear very curious in doing so, but a question that leaves only two or three possible answers doesn’t actually allow a person to fill it with their wisdom. A simple example is something like “Do you think this proposal will work?” questions that start with verbs and ending question marks usually logically invite a yes or no answer. So practice crafting a question that allows for thoughtful reflection, and provides answers that you cannot yet see such as “how can you see this proposal working?” or “what is your reaction to what we just shared?” Also, avoid questions like “do you think we should go with this proposal or something different?” which still invites a binary choice even though people may choose to answer it with more detail. If you require a follow up question to make a person’s answer more clear, then ask that question in the first place.
- Clarify how responses are to be used: There is nothing worse than being invited to a public consultation meeting only to have your ideas dismissed or ignored. Perhaps the only thing worse is being invited to a process where you believe you are helping to make a decision when in reality the decision is being made elsewhere. I call this “engagement washing.” It’s so important to frame public meetings so that participants are clear about what is happening and what is not happening so that they can make an informed choice to participate and how to participate.
- Facilitate difference, not consensus: Most public engagements are not decision-making processes. Many times in my career I have had to hold decision-makers accountable for making decisions and not outsourcing them by saying “the community needs to agree on this before we implement it.” The role of the community is to be a difficult, diverse, conflicted, heterogeneous, mass of opinions and ideas. Decision makers are elected to make decisions in that context. When facilitating public engagement, I tell my clients that our job will be surfacing differences and not arriving at consensus. Illuminating differences helps decision-maker make good strategic choices and helps them to understand the costs and impact of their decisions.
- PAvoid the tyranny of inclusion. Many engagement processes suffer from what I call the tyranny of inclusion. This operates when we believe we need to respond to every single comment and piece of advice equally. Practically speaking, that requires us to respond to a focus group or expert panel in the same way as we might respond to an anonymous troll who left a comment in passing on a survey form or in a social media thread. When structuring engagement processes, I usually shape circles of engagement that make it clear that the more responsibility you have for the outcome. The tighter the feedback loop for your advice. This principal goes hand-in-hand with design principles of equity of voice and inclusion of different lived expertise in engagement and decision-making, and there is no perfect balance.
- Engagement practice can sustain or undermine democracy: in the courses I teach on engagement I stress this point constantly: how we engage affects people’s feelings and trust of democratic processes. Engagement processes that are restrained, restrictive, or opaque signal and unwillingness to engage with the messy realities of community and citizen. Open, validating and meaningful engagement that can help shape public policy. Decisions helps build, and strengthen democratic participation. This should go without saying, but seeking efficiencies in engagement processes can have the effect of smoothing over all the tricky bits that make democracy and participatory life rich, creative, and co-owned. So be conscious about the choices you make when structuring engagement.
So those are a few. There are many more besides these, not to mention rigorous thinking about power. But these are among the most important ones to begin with for me.