Over the years I’ve noticed a trend in consultative facilitations that goes something like this: a client calls wanting to consult with the community about something. Sometimes this takes the form of a leader wanting to engage employees. The request is usually to design an event where we can hear from people without them being dominated by more powerful voices. At some point the client says something like “we’d like to have our people there as observers or table hosts or mixed in as silent listeners.”
Often this looks like elected officials not wanting to dominate citizen meetings, government or agency staff not wanting to dominate community meetings, or executive teams not wanting to dominate the lower level employees.
My response to this over the years has been to push back hard against that idea, despite how noble it seems. Often it comes from a good place: that those with power want to create space for people without power to speak and have their ideas taken seriously. I get that, and I honour it, but truthfully the best way to do engagement is to, well, engage. It’s entirely possible to design engagement to maximize what you want and minimize what you don;t want all the while not create
Let’s get a few things out of the way
- Groups of people are never free of power and dominating behaviours. It doesn’t matter if you are using a well conducted circle process or a self-organizing process, or placing limits on who can speak and who cannot. It is impossible to build a group process that is free from these behaviours. So the challenge is to mitigate them.
- In truly participatory processes, observers are indeed influential. Have you ever been somewhere and there are people there not participating, just watching from the sides silently and taking notes? Does it feel like this kind of set up lessens power in any way or builds trust?
- If you are consulting because you don’t know the answer to a question, being absent from the conversations does not help you learn. The trickiest challenges we face aren’t solved by listening quietly to someone else in the hopes that they will provide you the answer you are looking for. They are addressed by diving in together and looking for ways to tackle problems in new ways.
If you are facing a truly sticky issue and you have no answers, getting as many people as possible fully engaged in exploring it is critical. So here are a few bits of advice I find myself giving out time after time, in no particular order.
Use a process like Open Space or World Cafe that allows participants to set their own agendas. These processes, and many others, place the onus of discovery, creativity and action on the participants. They operate from the assumptions that the ways forward are there to be discovered together, from the creative spaces between people. Furthermore they are founded on good dialogic principles, which you can point to and practice, such as, speak from your experience, listen to learn and be aware of your impact. Inviting a group into these practices helps them focus on each other as as potential experts.
Use small groups and break them up. I’ve never understood the aversion to small groups, but trust me when I say that you can do very little rapid creative work in groups larger than five. If you want to learn more about my approach to group sizes, here’s a post summing up what I know, and here’s a quick video my friend Nancy White made. Making and breaking up small groups is an important complex facilitation technique that allows for people to create without getting entrained and therefore sinking into domination patterns are or other kinds of bias.
Trust your people. There is an undercurrent to the base worry that clients share with me, and it’s worth addressing with them. I find that when we probe deeper, we discover that often the client has a deeper issue about either trusting their own people to behave well, or trusting a group of “lesser powered” folks to be resilient enough to speak. This is actually easily remedied by designing the session well, but it sometimes helps to have an offline conversation about the way the client feels about participants.
Have truly open questions. If you want your meeting to be truly participatory and engaging, you have to ask a group a questions you are stuck on. The questions need to be open and honest, and the group you assemble needs to be the people best suited to explore the question and create actions around it. Never bring a pre-determined answer to a participatory process, and give people the illusion that they are creating something new together. It’s unethical. Beyond that, truly open questions make it easy to encourage people to listen to one another and they de-centre expertise, meaning that the group itself can truly become the experts. If we can separate those in power from those with answers, we get a truly rich dialogue and learning experience.
Commit to supporting what you start. In my practice of chaordic design, I call this the Architecture of Implementation. You have to know what you are willing to commit to ensure that whatever happens at the meeting will have an effect. This doesn’t always mean money. It could also mean that time, space, power, connections, and many other resources can be put at the behest of the group to move to action. It could also be that you let people know that “nothing will come of this meeting beyond the learning that happens in the meeting itself. It doesn’t matter to me what the architecture is, but it does matter to the group. Being honest helps people to show up in a trusting way, and helps them to know how much time and energy to spend on your initiative.
Invite authentically. If you have designed with all of the above in mind, you can authentically invite the right people to your gathering with very little fear that there will be catastrophic domination. And authentic invitation brings people into the room ready to work on a problem that they are needed for. That is a powerful call.
I’m sure lots of experienced facilitators out there have other wisdom to add about how to address this concern. What have you got to add?
I’ve been deeply influenced over the years by Christina Baldwin’s principle that “no one person can be responsible for the safety of the group, but a group can learn to take responsibility for it’s own safety.” I too think that the principles of Open Space allow for the right balance for individuals to take responsibility for co-creating group safety. What is remarkable is that safety is an emergent phenomenon in Open Space, a true artifact of a self-organizing system. Of course I have seen some real conflicts happen in Open Space, but what seems to mitigate them is the double wall of the container.
What I mean by that is that meetings in Open Space happen within break out groups within the larger container. If a break out group breaks down, participants are still held in the larger space. I have seen very few instances where people in conflict left the bigger container, even if the exercised the law of two feet and left their breakout space. Most often a kind of “neutral ground” emerges in Open Space: near the agenda wall, around the coffee table, sometimes outside on a nice day. These emergent neutral spaces provide participants with a chance to discharge, relax, calm down and get their wits about them. The facilitator never has to do anything, in my experience, but just keep holding the space.
I don’t like the idea of safe space though, I prefer the term “safe enough” space, or even “brave space.” For many marginalized people the idea of safe space is always a myth, and there is no way that we can guarantee it will emerge in Open Space. So instead I encourage people to take a bit of a risk and enter into “safe enough” space, so that they can learn something new and let go of whatever it is they are holding on to.
I remember an event I did once on Hawaii with indigenous Hawaiians and well heeled Americans looking together at the values of reverence and sustainability. At one point, one of the Americans, a person with a net worth in the millions of dollars, asked the group that we commit to safety in the space. This raised the ire of the senior Elder in the room who snapped (and I paraphrase) “You have no right to safe space! Your desire for safety has imperilled the entire world. We do not live safe lives as a result. Our lands are colonized, our food supplies are depleted and our oceans are in danger of no longer providing for us. There is no safe space here. You must learn to live with risk and take responsibility for your role in creating it.”
When we are invited into risk together, everyone giving up safety according to their means, the possibility for real relationship exists in the shared challenge to our well held worldviews.
Today a client emailed me with a small anxiety about setting up a meeting room in a circle. The work we will do together is about rethinking relationships in a social movement and the concern was that it was already unfamiliar enough territory to work with. Setting up the room in a circle might cause people to “lose their minds.” I get this anxiety, because that is indeed the nature of doing a new thing. But I replied with this email, because I’m also trying to support leadership with my client who is doing a brave thing in her calling:
This morning we began our Harvesting and Collective Sensemaking online course. Rowan Simonsen, Amy Lenzo and I were really excited to be able to share our first little insights with people, and especially this new mnemonic that we created to capture five key principles of harvesting practice: PLUME. We are excited to introduce this into the world.
Spending a nice New Year’s Day alone at home. Pot of tea, beautiful sunny day that I will shortly head out into for a walk, and then home maybe to play some music, restring the guitar, learn a jig or a reel or two on the flute…
Listening this morning to CBC Ideas who are doing a great show on the number “50” and, because Charles Darwin wrote The Origin of Species at age 50, they have just played Baba Brinkman’s rap “Artificial Selection.”
One little line stood out, something about the fact that in evolution, little differences are what provide us with evolutionary potential. This immediately rang bells for me as I’ve been thinking about this in the work of strategy, whether that means creating a ten year plan for an organization or simply exploring options for moving forward on a discrete piece of work. Finding the pathway of best evolutionary potential requires that we introduce diversity and difference into the system. Working together across difference, as my friend Tuesday Ryan-Hart would say, is a strategic and evolutionary imperative. Accentuating the differences between each other is crucial for learning new things, seeing the world in new ways and finding new pathways out of complex tangles.
This is one of the reasons I like Open Space Technology so much. It brings a huge variety of exploration to a common topic to create multiple pathways forward for exploration. Buit whatever we can do to accentuate our differences and work together across them actually improves the evolutionary potential of the system we are in.