Running an Art of Hosting workshop this week for employees of the City of Edmonton. We are about 30 people all together looking at the art of hosting participatory process, convening and leading in complex environments where certainty is an artifact of the past.
Naturally because these people work for a municipal government, the conversations we are having tend to be about systems. We are working at the level of what it takes a system to shift itself as well as what it takes of an individual to lead when the answers are unclear.
For me, lots of good insights are coming up. A few that cracked in a cafe conversation this morning included these three:
- The fundamental question facing governments is not why or what or who, but HOW. How can we deliver services differently? How do we change to include more public voice in our work without losing our mandate? How do we cope with the scale of change, chaos, interconnection and complexity that is upon us? These questions are powerful because they invite a fundamental shift in how things are done – the same question is being asked of the Aboriginal child welfare system at the moment in British Columbia, which is looking to create a new system from the ground up. Shifting foundations requires the convening of diversity and integrating diverse worldviews and ideas.
- New systems cannot be born with old systems without power struggle. As old ways of dong things die, new ways of doing things arise to take their place. But there isn’t a linear progression between the death of one system and the birth of the new: the new arises within the old. Transformation happens when the new system uses the old to get things done and then stands up to hold work when the old system dies. While old systems are dying, they cling to the outdated ways of doing things, and as long as old systems continue to control the resources and positions of power and privilege, transformation takes place within a struggle between the new and the old. Ignoring power is naive.
- A fundamental leadership capacity is the ability to connect people. This is especially true of people who long for something new but who are disconnected and working alone in the ambiguity and messy confusion of not knowing the answer.
Its just clear to me now that holding a new conversation in a different way with the same people is not itself enough for transformation to occur. That alone is not innovation. The answers to our most perplexing problems come from levels of knowing that are outside of our current level. The answers for a city may come from global voices or may come from the voices of families. Our work in the child welfare system was about bringing the wisdom of how families traditionally organized to create a new framework for child welfare policy and practice, and that work continues. Without a strategic framework for action, for transforming process itself, mere reorganization is not enough.
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I recently wrote a white paper for a First Nations organization on participatory community engagement. The paper outlines several models, principles and processes that I am mcurrently working with as I help groups design and implement longer term community engagement processes.
Here is the most recent version of the paper for your reading, in .pdf format. The paper talks about mental models and comes from a perspective of decolonization. I’d love to have your thoughts in the comments so I can refine it further.
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This week I am in Kuujjuaq, Quebec, a settlement which lies about 20 miles upriver from Ungava Bay. I am working with government agencies, Inuit claims organizations and Inuit polar bear hunters on a user-to-user meeting between hunters from Nunavut, Nunavik and Nunatsiavut. Nunavut is a Canadian territory, Nunavik and Nunatsiavut are sort of semi-autnomous Inuit regions of Quebce and labrador respectively. All three areas arose from the settlement of land claims with Inuit organizations.
It’s an interesting meeting. All of the hunters are Inuit and they all hunt polar bears in the Davis Strait area, but they have different ways of doing it, and different cultural practices and even their dialects are different. There are a few unilingual hunters who only speak Inuktitut and so we have simultaneous interpretation between Inuktitut and English. Most of the meeting is being conducted in Inuktitut. The reason for the meeting was for the hunters to meet each other and see if there is anything they would like to do together with respect to the polar bear populations in the Davis Strait area. I won’t comment on the content of the meeting as we aren’t finished yet and it’s not for public consumption anyway, but I will make a few observations on the design and the challenges I have had as a facilitator.
I worked with a number of colleagues in designing this meeting using a Theory U framework. We knew that the first day would be much downloading, with some presentations and declarations and political positions. Even though these guys spend a lot of time on the land they are all very active in conferences and planning meetings and several of them are canny politicians. Day two was designed to take us through the bottom of the U, into presencing the emerging future, that which is not yet known. That included getting us out of the meeting room and on to the land where we hoped new insights would be sparked and the hunters in particular would feel able to stretch themselves. And day three was envisioned as a day of relaizing some new plans and ideas for working together. It didn’t break down exactly by days, but that was the gist.
Yesterday we began with the room set up in a cafe style and it quickly became clear that that wasn’t going to work for the participants. I wrote about this a little yesterday in a post that distilled my lessons from the day, but the short for is that they weren’t ready to try something radically new. They wanted a familiar room set up, which meant a hollow square that seated 40 people and a chair for the meeting. My colleague and I were happy to accede to this request. The design of the meeting would otherwise have become a massive distraction for the participants.
Interestingly, even as we changed the room around, and changed our facilitation style, the basic architecture of the flow remained the same, and today the process shifted even more. We spent the morning on the land out of town, on an excursion to a hunting camp. We were perched high above the Koksoak River, away from the tree line on some very rich and abundant tundra. The day was bright and very warm and the land was teeming with berries: crowberries, blueberries, and cranberries mostly. We spread out in smaller groups, some walking, some sitting and talking, others on little solos. We didn’t give any context for the time on the land this morning, but I had said last night as we broke up that we would be out on the land tomorrow, thinking and being in a different way.
After an hour or so of milling around, and picking a few cups of berries, the hunters all headed into to the small hunting cabin. When I went in to get some tea, I found them sitting in a circle, in deep conversation in Inuktitut. They had begun the meeting again and we simply let them go for it. At lunch time, some stew was brought out and someone unveiled a large piece of bowhead whale muktuk which was sliced with an ulu and laid out on the floor on a cardboard box lid. We ate together and then the hunters decided that they wanted to go back to town, to the meeting room and continue meeting there in a caucus.
So we headed back into town and the users hid away in our meeting room for the rest of the day discussing proposals with each other. My colleague and I stayed outside the meeting room and waited for what needed to happen to happen. The participants facilitated their own meeting and the government reps went off and did some business together awaiting an outcome from the users. All afternoon the hunters met and worked on various agreements and resolutions together, sometimes in small groups and other times in a de facto plenary. They have adopted a more traditional Robert’s Rules way of working in order to plan together because that is what is known to them. They are doing their own work and even though I didn’t technically “facilitate” anything today, I held space. Sometimes to wisdom not to intervene is what is required to keep space open. We have kept tabs on what is going on and expect to play a role as facilitators tomorrow as the users present their recommendations to the government reps, but in this meeting, we’ll see how the flow goes. It is a dance between shallow form and deep form, between holding on to the right things and letting other things go, and all while working in a context I know next to nothing about in a language I can’t speak. What is serving to guide me is the deep architecture of the gathering, my constant private checking in with the flow of the U which I know will bring us to some emergent learning. So far, the meeting is going as we planned it – at a deep level. On the surface everything is changing all the time.
A very interesting meeting.
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Meetings reflect the basic operating system of a group of people. In organizations where power dynamics are heavily at play you will see lots of meetings chaired by those with the power. In flat organizations, circles and open space events are probably more the norm. Communities meet in all kinds of different ways, but essentially a meeting is a good way to make the operating system visible.
A great deal of the work I do involves helping organizations and communities shift to more participatory meeting processes. It isn’t always easy, and today I had one of those days when the stars didn’t quite align in a way that created the magic. I needed to return to a default setting for the group, because they weren’t prepared for such a massive shift in how they were meeting. To have gone on would have been to alienate them and prevent real work from getting done. So we had to shift on the fly, change our hosting styles and reconfigure the room and the process architecture to enable people to be comfortable enough to dig into difficult content. It is a tough call and a fine line to walk but flexibility, curiosity and willingness to learn will help you as a facilitator stay present to the group’s needs, which is after all, of primary importance.
So what if you want to change that operating system? What if you want to tinker with the DNA of a meeting process? What does it take?
In my experience it takes a lot of work up front and not just in the planning phase. You also have to change the WAY you do planning. If you are trying to move from a top-down, command and control meeting style to something more participatory, here are a number of factors to pay attention to:
1. Create a core team that learns together. This is a basic tenet of any systems change initiative. A core team stewards the change and creates the shift. In doing so they also embody the change, which means that they have to be reflective of the whole in their composition and willing to learn together about new ways of working. Successful core teams in my experience spend equal time learning, building relationships and working together. They are made up of a variety of people with a variety of experiences and interests and the very best teams contain people who are willing to stretch, perhaps host part of the meeting in a way they have never done so before. The core team become the designers, champions and leaders of the change, reflected in the way they approach the shift. They don’t simply hire a facilitator and give orders: they host. They have a stake in the outcomes, and they believe in change.
2. The invitation is a process. I’ve written about this before and it is crucial: invitation is not a thing that you send out over email – it is a process. It includes conversations with key potential participants, it is an iterative process of learning, refining, communicating and listening. It involves writing something, creating web presences, making phone calls, taking people out for coffee. If you haven’t gone out for lunch with at least one potential participant as a part of your invitation process, you aren’t doing it right! Short changing invitation will result in poor preparation for participants and perhaps even a rude surprise when they arrive and see that you have changed everything. Too much change all at once to the unprepared can be shocking.
3. Participants have to want it. Successful shifts in meeting culture come in part from participants who show up because there is compelling work to do AND because there is a promise of a new way of working. If people show up just to do the compelling work, they aren’t going to want you to monkey with their meeting process too much. Creating that frame of mind in participants is a time consuming process but it pays huge dividends in shifting a culture of meeting. This is a key plank in the invitation platform and shouldn’t be dismissed.
4. If you don’t get it right the first time, don’t fight it. Learn from mistakes. If you get a world cafe set up and the group rebels, take a stand for the work, not the process. The worst kind of facilitators are those who let their attachment to process stand in the way of good work getting done. Instead of forcing yourself on people who “just don’t get it” get out of the way and help them do the work that they are hungry to do.
Systemic change does just happen because you have a good theory and some smart ideas. It happens because you have sensed the timing and offered the right things at the right time. I’m not saying that we should shortchange people either and simply offer them comfortable options, not by any means. But a system’s tolerance for challenge is a sensitive thing and walking the edge comes with high stakes. Learning how to do this is a lifelong skill.
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A lovely reminder about authenticity. Too often facilitators adopt the role of the uninvolved, disinterested session leaders. This little post reminds us that who we are is as important as what we are doing:
Once long ago, when asked by a reporter if he had a message he wanted the world to hear, Gandhi replied, “My life is my message.”
Whether we like it or not, this statement is just as true for you and me today as it was for Gandhi then. Who we are and how we are is the medium through which our message travels. That medium is far richer and truer than what we say in words. ”¨”¨When we present our material to a group we are facilitating or training, what we’re really presenting is ourselves. Our deepest, thoughts, feelings, fears, hopes, and aspirations come through as an unspoken wave of information that others pick up at a level usually below their conscious awareness. Yet this material influences others more powerfully than mere words. So in a very real way, you are your material, and your life is your message!
via The Center for Graphic Facilitation