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Category Archives "Facilitation"

Running a very interesting meeting

September 15, 2010 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, Design, Emergence, Facilitation, Flow 5 Comments

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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What it takes to change an operating system

September 14, 2010 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, BC, Facilitation, Organization 5 Comments

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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You are more than you think you are

September 9, 2010 By Chris Corrigan Facilitation

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

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An invitation to go over the waterfall

August 23, 2010 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, BC, Collaboration, Community, Facilitation, Leadership, Open Space, Organization One Comment

Harrison Owen periodically restates his invitation to the world to not only join in Open Space but to go as far as you can in Open Space and see where it takes you.  I feel like my work of late has been about this in many ways, and Harrison’s recent post to the OSLIST came at just the right time for me.  Here is what he says:

A long time ago a good friend, Ralph Copleman, was to be found in the middle of a large circle of peers dressed in a flowing cape and repeating the words, “Everything is moving, Everything is moving.” Odd to say the least and some doubted Ralph’s sanity. Some still do, but that image has stuck in my febrile brain ever since – and as time has passed it occurs to me that Ralph had it precisely right: This is an energetic cosmos. The problem arises when we (and that includes all of us some of the time) desperately want everything to stop and stand still. So desperately in fact that we have created a mental image of our environment exclusively populated by static things which include everything from mountains to super nova along with the oddments of our life like professions, chairs, relationships, organizational structures, corporations, countries and empires. Unfortunately this mental image is a radical illusion, one might say delusion. Ralph is right. Everything is moving and what we perceive as stable structures are but the momentary, slice in time, freeze-frame constructs of our imagination.

Heresy? Psychobabble? Advanced esoteric insight? – None of the above, I think. As a matter of fact, Ralph’s observation is nothing but a short (poetic?) version of the (now) standard scientific understanding of the nature of the cosmos. Starting with the Big Bang it is all flowing energy, albeit now clumped in momentary configurations – but still flowing energy for all of that. Scratch any rock hard enough and its essential nature comes through – a whirring bunch of quarks and neutrons doing the cosmic dance. Doubtless my physicist friends would take issue with my phrasing – but not, I think, with the core message. Everything is moving.

So what does all this have to do with the price of eggs? Or for that matter – Open Space and our role as facilitators and consultants? A lot, I believe.

Starting with Open Space which is many things to different people. For some it is a Large Group Intervention. Others might see it as an aberrant phenomenon peculiar to a cultish few. For myself Open Space is a trial ride in the flow of life which has a lot of similarities to my boat.

My boat is smallish in size (32 feet) but definitely larger than the average punt. She is very seaworthy and shares a common heritage with the local Lobster Boats here in Maine. We have many visitors, most of whom have never been on a boat such as the Ethelyn Rose. When you walk on board, things look sort of familiar. Chairs for sitting, a comfortable nook for dining, and even an oriental rug on the floor – excuse me, sole. If you look further there are the standard amenities such as a shower and commode, all sequestered in their separate quarters. Even a complete landlubber will feel more or less at home.

But the moment we leave the dock the world changes – apparent stability yields to constant motion. Everything is moving even if it seems to be staying in the same place! In the harbor motion is minimal, but the moment we clear the breakwater marking the harbor entrance the experience can be radically different. Sea swells from the open Atlantic Ocean take us up and down in distances measured in yards, and should we have a good cross wind the surface chop adds an interesting side to side motion. The Ethelyn Rose is right at home, but some of our visitors have a different impression. And navigating in these conditions is a definite learning experience. Even a simple walk through the main cabin can be a challenge. Hand holds that you had carefully plotted at the start of your journey suddenly changed position relative to you as you made your way. What was up is now down and who knows what is happening in between. Interesting, and as they say, It ain’t Kansas.

Most people meet the challenge and after a few educational bumps to various parts of their anatomy they learn not to fight reality. No matter what you may have thought you were going to do, the only useful option is to go with the flow. And the next level of learning is that when you do that well (flow) you can actually arrive where you need to be. Wonderful! Sounds a lot like Open Space.

We start in the static stability of a circle. This may seem strange to some, but there is a place for everybody and everybody finds a place. A familiar and enduring structure for sure. Then it happens. The circle crumbles in bits and pieces as people come to center, announcing their passions – only to be briefly restored as they return to their seats. However the restoration is but momentary. Shortly everybody leaves their seats to join a chaotic gaggle at the wall. So much for static structure, and it goes downhill from there.

Ebbing and flowing, groups form and reform all without benefit of the standard constraints essential for orderly organizational life–or so we might have thought. Pre-arranged agenda (sometimes called Mission, Goals, Objectives) is nonexistent. The Schedule might be posted but never followed – things start when they start. Assigned participation is nowhere to be found, and yet the right people show up. And to make things even worse, the air is filled with buzzing and flutters as Bees and Butterflies do their thing. Madness! To be sure there may be a few people who are utterly flummoxed as the hand holds they may have expected (see above under “Ethelyn Rose at Sea”) disappear . . . or reappear in unexpected places. Their condition is not helped, for should they ask what to do the answer is likely to come back as a question – What would they care to do?

A trifling few will lose heart and head for the shore – perceived stability. But the vast majority, as we have seen over the years and around the globe, will be totally captivated by the moment, and a smaller group will experience that moment as total exhilaration. They are doing what their prior life experience taught them could not be done – seriously and intentionally going with the flow. And rather than being rank hedonism, the experience proves to be massively productive and fulfilling. Doing well and good – and feeling great. A hard to beat combination.

And then we come to Monday Morning. Back to reality, as they say. But is it? The truth, I believe is rather different. They have experienced reality and come to the edge of shedding illusion/delusion. In the words of friend Ralph, “Everything is moving” – and this is now a fact of life to be savored and enjoyed. No longer a terrifying unknown, it is to be affirmed and embraced. Not without a few “white knuckle” moments to be sure – but infinitely better than hanging onto the (illusory) rock of stability.

So what about us – those privileged folks who have accepted the honor of opening space in people’s lives? Short answer: Invite our guests over the edge. Please note I did not say, Push them over the edge.

Crafting this invitation is always a matter of personal style and must come from the heart. The invitation I have in mind never appears on a piece of paper (or the electronic equivalent). It arrives in our personhood – who we are and how we present ourselves, which is to say, from the heart. Not to be confused with a gushy valentine or formulaic presentation, the invitation manifests in our simple presence, revealing our own acceptance and joy in the moving flow of life. Without words we express the swimmer’s call: Come on in, the water is fine! Of course you have to be in the water for that call to have any credibility.

It is perhaps easier to say how NOT to create this invitation. First off, it is not a matter of rational argument and presentation of facts. Most people already know the facts at some level, and I think the case could be made that it was “rational argument” that has gotten us into the bind we experience. Given the “fact” of a moving, changing world which can be very uncomfortable, it is quite “rational” to define that world in terms of controllable static chunks that may be contained, or better, bent to our specifications. This has led us to such wonderful things as “Flood Control” which works until such time as Mother Nature and Old Man River decide to take a different course. It turns out that The River is not a static, definable thing but part of a vast ever changing system. Effective Flood Control would require close management of the Planet’s atmosphere to say nothing of the cosmos beyond. Good luck!

Also under the heading of “NOT to be included” are well intentioned efforts to sugar coat the pill, as it were. Which is to say that we might propose certain limitations that will restrict the possibility of change in Open Space. Some of us have called these “givens” but so far as I can tell the only given is change itself. And to suggest otherwise is not so much to violate the “Spirit of Open Space” but rather the essence of the cosmos itself. Ralph had it right: Everything is moving. In this context, Open Space Technology is a minimal consideration.

I am by no means suggesting that our invitation look like the back panel of some medication listing every possible adverce reaction, if in fact unexpected change is such an adverce reaction. And truth to tell I find the appearance of unexpected change in the midst of an Open Space to be one of its (OS’s) most delightful consequences. I also think that it is important to note the OS is not the engine of change. It simply provides the space for change to show up and the cosmos (or whatever) takes care of all the heavy lifting.

For me an invitation to Open Space is an opportunity to include friends and strangers in the deepest experience of (my) life. It has little to do with selling a product, doing a process, excersizing some sort of professional competence – although there are doubtless elements of all of that. Fundamentally it is my invitation to experience life at its fullest in which chanagability is not the enemy to be suppressed but rather the rich tapestry of an evolving future. I don’t make it, I can’t predict it – but I can participate both as a sojourner and a co-creator. Stuart Kauffman speaks of being “At Home in the Universe.” That is my elemental experience, and I am always looking for playmates.

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Simplest ground rules?

July 31, 2010 By Chris Corrigan Collaboration, Conversation, Facilitation

Like  Johnnie Moore I don’t generally set ground rules when I facilitate a meeting.  For most meetings, it’s demeaning and it tends to enforce the authority of the facilitator to act as a judge rather than as a host for the conversation.

The odd time there are meetings in which the tension is explosive and if necessary I do this simple exercise with a group:

1. Invite each person to reflect on these two questions:

  • How do you want to be spoken to by others in this meeting?
  • How do you want others to listen to you in this meeting?

2. Break into groups to compare these relfections and bring one or two as operating principles back to the whole.

Yes, it’s the Golden Rule. What I want for myself, I should also want for others.  It’s a useful exercise for focusing us on mindful conversation, while at the same time giving the group a quick thing to work on together, and not being prescriptive in our rules of behaviour.   By definition, the ground rules are already owned.

(Incidentally, the most common answers to these questions are things like “don’t shout at me, don’t interrupt me, hear what I am saying, don’t blame me.  Of course it is easier to want these things than to do these things, but the group can find more skillfulness if these principles are made explicit.)

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