A braided river delta in Alaska, image courtesy of NOAA
Not as the be-all and end-all of their organizations and teams, but a good leader will hold a container in the workplace in which disagreement is productive, generative and honouring of different perspectives. The best leaders will also hold coherence.
I’ve often said that organizations need to be a bit like rivers, in that there is a coherent direction of flow but many back eddies. If you think about the way a large river travels through an estuary, it creates side channels and cuts of corners and bends while still channeling across the land. Life lives in these eddies and its even possible to productively travel in the opposite direction from the river flow efficiently using these back eddies. Organizationally speaking, sometimes you need to retreat from a well established course of action, and having disagreement and dissent within the organization can sometimes show you the path back to another way of doing things.
Peter Levine and Dayna L. Cunningham have a link-rich piece in the Stanford Social Innovation Review today that discusses this, and its implications for civil society beyond just organizational or movement-based settings. The final paragraphs are good:
Leaders must attend to two related responsibilities. Internally, they must protect and encourage voice by clarifying decision rules, distinguishing disagreement from disloyalty, and building routines that prevent conflict from hardening into factionalism. Externally, they must establish clear guardrails for responding to dissenting public voices, including those from activists, shareholders, elected officials, and the media. When organizations become the object of public disagreement, the question is not whether pressure will arise, but whether their principles are strong enough to guide their response.
Clear commitments, embedded in durable practices and governance structures, help prevent reactive shifts driven by momentary outrage or market fluctuation. They allow organizations to absorb criticism, weigh competing claims, and respond without abandoning core values. In doing so, institutions do more than manage disagreement; they demonstrate how pluralistic societies can remain steady amid strain.
Organizations that invest in the structures and norms that make disagreement constructive—both internally and in response to external scrutiny—help sustain the civic habits on which democratic life depends. In an era of polarized public discourse, institutions that learn to govern both expression and response become quiet stabilizers of the democratic order.
If we cannot practice disagreement in places where we also have an incentive to collaborate together, we will be hard pressed to do it in the looser fields of community and broader society. And that enables those who would like us divided to use disagreement to generate separation.
The Eternal Flame at the King Centre in Atlanta which I visited in 2013
I was born in Toronto two months after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. The US civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s were as distant to me as was apartheid in South Africa or the Vietnam War. Even as I grew up through my first 16 years, the heightened social justice actions and liberations struggles of the 1960s were mere whispers across time and borders. Neither the Globe and Mail or the Star, the CBC or CTV, offered us much in terms of what was really happening in the world. No internet. No videos. No social media.
On October 20, 1984 I participated in a huge anti-nuclear march in Toronto and that day met dozens of people who handed me pamphlets, bent my ears to their causes and opened my eyes to what was happening in the world from Kurdistan to South Africa, to the revolutions in Nicaragua and the resistance in El Salvador, and to issues at home, the recognition of Aboriginal rights, the pursuit of justice and equality for women and queer folks and people of colour. It was a carnival of struggle and hope.
A few weeks later the US held an election in which Ronald Regan won a second term. Jesse Jackson ran in that election, for the Democratic Party nomination, but it was Walter Mondale and Gearldine Ferraro who were on the opposite ticket. Nevertheless, Jesse Jackson had become a voice for the continued struggle for civil rights, turning his prophetic attention to the damage that Reaganomics was already starting to do in the world, decades before that economic philosophy had been debunked. (Even today, after 45 years of wealth inequality and economic violence, people seem to believe that trickle down economics is still worth a go – “cut those taxes!” they say, plunging us further into despair).
Jesse Jackson was my generation’s Martin Luther King Jr. His era as THE public face of civil rights and racial justice has been over for some time, due in part to his illness, but also due to the new faces of the struggle that have emerged in this century, speaking to and meeting this century’s challenges and needs. Nevertheless, reading of his passing today sent me to a state of nostalgic gratitude for how his work and voice and presence brought the spirit of Martin Luther King to a new generation of social change activists like me. We could see and hear him speak. We could catch the cadence of his voice and the relevance of his message to the times we were living in. When you heard him speak, you could look around yourself and confirm the truth of his observations, and take inspiration from his calls to action and his “perfect mission.”
I liked this obituary from the Guardian this morning. It contains some quotes that resonate.
“My leadership skills came from the athletic arena,” Jackson told the Washington Post in 1984. “In many ways, they were developed from playing quarterback. Assessing defenses; motivating your own team. When the game starts, you use what you’ve got – and don’t cry about what you don’t have. You run to your strength. You also practice to win.”
You work with what you have, and you play the field in front of you.
“The arc of the moral universe is long and it bends towards justice, but you have to pull it to bend. It doesn’t bend automatically. Dr King used to remind us that every time the movement has a tailwind and goes forward, there are headwinds…[in these times] he would have said: ‘We must not surrender our spirits. We must use [these times] not to surrender but fortify our faith and fight back.’”
I think that teaching is the one for our times, one for all of us, and one for the legacy that Jackson, King and others have delivered to us all along the long arc of the moral universe.
Rest in power.
For those of us who facilitate for a living the question of online vs virtual dogs is constantly. The surge of good online technologies has enabled participation across massive distances at very little financial and environmental cost. A good online facilitator (and they are NOT common) can create a warm and effective dialogic container using virtual tools. Online tools are useful and online spaces are a brilliant option for accessibility. They help in all kinds of ways. Since well before the pandemic I have offered courses and workshops online but I have to admit that I still prefer face to face especially if I know what we are doing requires building a strong and enduring relational field.
Yesterday a prospective client told me for the first time that they no longer do zoom trainings for their staff. It is not a good use of their training budget because staff don’t like it, it’s is not effective and by now most folks have figured out how to be online with as little participation and attention as possible. As a teacher I too find this state of affairs to be pervasive and I expressed my admiration for this policy.
This person is pointing to the biggest problem I have with online: it doesn’t seem to build the enduring relational field that face to face meetings do. For transactional outcomes I suspect online is fine but if you spend all of your time relating to people mediated through technology, I suspect that it has an enduring negative effect on relationality, and therefore long term sustainability of a team’s culture and intangible outcomes.
I’d welcome research on this. Today I came across an article in my feed that reports on a court case from Ontario that ruled on the question of whether online was the appropriate forum for a settlement conference. The judge ruled it was and the article summarizes his findings this way:
Spiegelman does not state that mandatory mediations should presumptively be virtual, nor does it elevate technology over judgment. Justice MacLeod was careful not to replace one rigid default with another. None of this will surprise experienced mediators or counsel. But the decision carefully probes the lingering assumption that physical attendance is inherently superior and reframes face-to-face presence as a question of process design, evidence, and proportionality.
For mediators and counsel this confirms the reality and post-COVID experience that virtual and hybrid processes are no longer provisional. They are part of how mediation in civil justice now operates and they will be evaluated by courts by considerations of function, not nostalgia.
This case provides a clear message. Courts will have little patience for procedural skirmishing over mediation logistics unless a genuine process concern is identified as the issue. What drives settlement is not the room, but the readiness of the participants, the authority at the table, and the quality of the process design.
Spiegelman is a reminder that, in every mediation, form should follow function and disputes about form should not be allowed to derail the goal of resolution.
The article points out that there is little evidence to suggest that there are differences in outcomes between online vs in person settlement conferences. My observation is that this is probably true depending on what you consider the outcome to be. If the outcome is simply “a settlement” then perhaps this is the case. But alternative dispute resolution, practicesd more broadly, can also be about conflict transformation, relationship repair, and enduring accountability.
To that end I looked for some research that discussed this further. To my surprise there was very little. I would have thought over the past five years that justice system researchers might be interested in this question. but perhaps they were simply not asking the RIGHT question. Also, it should be said that I didn’t scour the entire internet for answers!
But I did find this paper from Paul Kyrgis and Brock Flynn at the University of Montana: The Efficacy of Mandatory Mediation in Courts of Limited Jurisdiction: A Case Study from the Missoula Justice Court.
The authors examined a number of landlords-tenant disputes to see if virtual conferences were effective in not just settling a case but creating an enduring settlement. To do that they simply looked at whether cases returned to court.
Finally, remote mediation appears to have mixed results. Remote mediation has undeniable benefits in facilitating participation and program scalability. But those benefits come at a cost. The ultimate settlement rate for remote mediations was a full ten percentage points lower than the aggregate ultimate settlement rate. That lower ultimate settlement rate suggests that remote mediation may not foster the same level of accountability or engagement as in-person sessions.
Their full paper is worth reading for the literature review and their methods. They alos spend a lot of time discussing all the various factors that may or may not contribute to enduring settlements and the cases that make up their sample. And I am definitely extrapolating from their conclusions a bit when I say that something happens face to face that builds relational accountability.
But still, this is one useful way to look at what else happens in face to face meetings vs online because in dispute resolution I surmise that some forms of relationship repair helps to make the settlement enduring.
Those of us responsible for designing and hosting meetings of all know in our bones that something different happens when we are all in the room together. We know that relationships come into play much differently. we know that strong fields are built and these are essential for building enduring results.
Six years after our pandemic started do we finally have data to be able to look at this question? If you know of good research in this field drop it in the comments.
In this first instalment of this series I moved the focus of facilitation practice from tools to context. In this instalment I want to explore what it means to “hold space” and why this is only part of the work in the dialogic container.
Dialogic facilitation is concerned with meaning making events in a discrete space and time. This space and time is both physical and social, and it is what I call a “dialogic container.” These are places in which people come together to engage in meaning making and action. The dialogic container is context for the work that happens and the container gives rise to meaning between participants in the dialogue. Within the container, participants engage and interact and make meaning together. The dialogic container is the scale at which participants can take immediate action. It is intimate and vibrant. Meetings and gatherings host agency, and for this reason I think we often think of them as important for making larger changes.
Many people have talked about the role of the facilitator as “holding space” and I even wrote a book on that practice. “Holding space” is a vague term that has many definitions. It doesn’t even really convey the practice well. Nothing is actually “held” and “space” can mean a bunch of different things. The term describes a practice that is ineffable and intangible and yet important to good dialogue.
Despite its importance, I don’t want to talk about “holding space” as a practice. You can go and read my “Tao of Holding Space” for more reflections on the practice. Instead I want to point to the space that is being held: the dialogic container.
This is the first and closest level of context inside of which dialogue happens. In large group meetings, other containers form in small groups. In the large group facilitation work I do, it isn’t possible for one person to hold the variety of spaces that appear and emerge in complex dialogue facilitation. Instead the role of the facilitator is to shape the constraints of that space to enable maximum agency and self-organization of the participants and to encourage the emergence of desired insights, outcomes and actions.
Good facilitators make choices about how constraints are used to shape interactions between people. Once these constraints are put in place the role of the facilitator is to be, in Harrison Owen’s words, “totally present and completely invisible” until such a time as the group process needs to change. Facilitators have a great deal of power in these contexts. We can cut off a conversation, make a subtle adjustment in a space to separate people or encourage or prevent different things from happening. Conscious facilitation requires us to be hyper aware of our impact in dialogic spaces and to be clear and honest with our influence on the proceedings.
Take a moment to reflect on the meetings and conversations you are a part of. Think about how the setting influences what happens, how the physical space constrains or invites different possibilities. Think about how choices that are made in that meeting influence the conversations that are being had and what happens.
On reflection it should be very clear that this context is extremely influential in the process of dialogue. No two conversations are ever alike. No two conversations will render the same outcomes. No two people will experience the conversation in the same way.
In World Cafe conversations we see this happen all the time. Because that process is structured around small groups which change every 20-30 minutes, participants quickly get the sense that just changing two or three people in a conversation or taking up another spot in the room can significantly change the nature and quality of the conversation. That can be frustrating if a conversation is going really well, because a “sticky container” can form, one which is difficult to break. In other cases, having the conversation end can be a relief as people look to get out of an unpleasant discussion or an uncomfortable dynamic.
Dialogic containers form around constraints, including attractors that draw people’s attention together. A powerful and necessary question is an attractor. A shared purpose can be a strong attractor. Attractors bring coherence. In a conversation about the future of a social services agency, it doesn’t make sense to talk about manufacturing cars because the topic is incoherent in the context of the conversation.
Power is another form of attractor. When powerful people are in the room it changes the nature of the conversation. We say of circle for example, that the shape does not equalize power relationships. It simply gives people equal access to the centre of the room, and figuratively it symbolizes that participants are offered equal access to the dialogue topic. But power still exists, and it is endlessly fascinating in a highly democratic process to watch a group organize itself around the twin attractors of shared purpose and powerful people.
At some point in a dialogue session the facilitator is the most powerful person in the room. To the extent that there is trust between the group and the facilitator, participants will consent to the proposed process of dialogue. In situations of extremely low trust, it is possible that a meeting will simply fail to get off the ground. Sometimes the facilitator becomes the common enemy, and the group rebels against any shaping of its time together.
But in situations of high trust, a group may consent to a process because they are clear that it helps them to address as persistent need amongst them. As a facilitator I spend massive amounts of time with my clients in design and co-creation of processes – especially novel processes – so that we don’t show up on the day and need to overcome suspicion and anxiety before getting started. If I am to occupy to most important space in the room, even for a short time, I must be able to have trust to be there.
In this respect there are no neutral facilitators. The role is far from neutral; rather it is influential. One may be agnostic or even ignorant about the content of the gathering (and I’ve run meetings in languages I don’t speak, like Irish, Turkish, Estonian, French, and multilingual meetings too, which shows that connection to content is not essential) but you are not neutral in terms of influencing the group’s process. The choices that the facilitator makes, especially in a container in which one has a lot of trust, will shape the process significantly and influence the nature of relationships between people going forward.
So the dialogic container is important, because in any process, it is the space of immediate encounter and immediate agency. People will make meaning and act together. They will bring story and expectations and history into the room with them and they will form relationships (or break them) which will influence outcomes as much or moreso than the decisions made in the meeting.
While meetings are important, my experience is that the most significant results of most meetings is the relational field that is built by being together. Many clients expect high stakes meetings to produce miracles – fundamental transformations in insight or decision making that changes everything. In my experience, a single meeting is inadequate for this. However, dialogic containers can be powerful places where people learn new things, change views, form new relationships, or discover new insights. That is their promise.
Still, it is common to hear from participants in a container “this is all good, but how will it be when we return to the ‘real world’.” This is a valid question and it has to do with the next post in this series, on the contexts in which dialogic work is embedded. Dialogic containers are necessary for meaningful action, but rarely sufficient for sustained change. They are embedded in larger contexts that shape what happens once the meeting ends.
For now though the point of this post is to establish the importance of container and context in which dialogic works happens. The nature of the container, in all of its complexity, plays a significant role in the tangible and intangible outcomes of dialogue work. Once we see that, we can begin to see that the work of dialogue facilitation is both about “what happens in the room” as well as what happens in the context in which that room is situated.
I am using Patti Digh’s title for this post. She posted today on Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert, in which he had to perform on a piano that was far from ideal. But he accepted the constraint and played one of the most enduring and transformative jazz concerts of all time.
It reminded me of the time that Geoff Brown and I played with two Turkish musicians at the Applied Improv Network conference in Portland. The image above shows us in full flow.
I had just met Geoff, and we were beginning a friendship that has lasted nearly two decades despite having been together only three times – in Portland, working on a sustainability conference in Melbourne, and doing one on Indigenous Housing here in Vancouver.
The show in question was the gala improv show, held I believe at the Portland Schweitzer Concert Hall, which is a big venue. The four of us were invited to be the band for part of the show. Geoff had his guitar with him and the Turkish musicians had their instruments, but I had nothing. The show organizer said “my son has a really nice guitar. I’ll bring it for you.”
We showed up on the evening ready to go (this was an improv show remember, no rehearsals!) and the organizer handed me the guitar case. I opened it up and instead of “a really nice guitar” he handed me a battered beginner classical guitar that was missing the A string. “Oh shit,” he said.
His son had evidently swapped guitars at some point and dad just grabbed the case without checking and left.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
I took one look at the guitar and, after three days of accepting every offer that came my way, I said “it’s good. I’ll play it.”
And that’s how I found myself playing onstage in a soft seat theatre in Portland in front of hundreds of people on a battered old five string guitar with an Australian blues man and two Turkish musicians. You can tell from the photo above that we had a ball.