Part three of a seven part series on the Seven little helpers for dialogue and action.
3. Use a talking piece
Think about any conversation you have ever had. If it ws a good conversation, there was a purpose or a question or a topic that was compelling and interesting to the people taking part. You may have found yourself “leaning in” and listening with curiosity, offering your own stories and perspectives, finding commonalities and exploring difference. In our natural setting as human beings, conversation sis easy and a wholly natural way of exploring ideas and making sense of the world. If so you have found yourself in a dialogic container, a social structure with a centre and a boundary and all kinds of things happening inside.
So much of organizational life though runs counter to our instincts, and even when there is an important need for a conversation we can find ourselves resistant to it. The timing doesn’t work naturally, or the conditions aren’t conducive to the natural flow and participation of a good conversation. There are many times when we need to stop what we are doing and enter into a space where we can pay attention to each other. Good dialogue practice helps us to do that by creating a container which encourages speaking, listening, sense making and decision. in times of conflict or stress, a thoughtful method that allows everyone to speak and be heard is essential.
A simple method for every facilitator is using a talking piece: some item that can be passed around a room and allow the person holding it to speak while others listen. The talking piece, and its rules and rituals, structures the process and creates the container. Every facilitation tool, agenda, or set of guidelines and principles functions to structure process. Every facilitator decision functions like a talking piece. When Toke added this one to his list of “little helpers” it was with the caveat that such a tool needed to be chosen and used with great care and consciousness about how it would affect the group. As a facilitator you wield a lot of power and it’s quite difficult to strike the right balance between too much freedom, which doesn’t provide creative constraints, and too much control, that throws people into apathy. Learning how to strike the balance is a practice, which means that you get better at it the more you do it and reflect on it. There is no answer for how to strike the right balance, but here are a few principles that might be helpful.
Host the process in a way that allows the group to do the work themselves. As much as possible, stick to creating the conditions for people to do their own work. Don’t tell people what to do or what they will feel. Try not to be the person interpreting the words of participants or the overall insights of a group. Instead create good process that allows people to make contributions, listen and learn and mitigate their personal impact on a collective conversation.
When things go awry, pause and go back to the simple question: “what’s happening?” Conflict is inevitable. Things go off the rails. People get angry and hurt. The facilitator makes mistakes. Remember that when these things happen, you are not alone. You are allowed to reset, to take a breath and move to a higher level conversation about what’s happening. Early in my facilitation career I hosted a meeting which felt like pulling teeth. No one was participating, there was very little creativity and it was stifling. I made the mistake of believing that it was my job alone to fix the situation and the more I tried, the more desperate the situation became. Finally, I realized that I was not alone in the room. There were thirty other people there I could ask for help. I stopped and asked the question “what is going on?”
To my relief one of the participants said “This is not the conversation we want to have right now. You keep asking us to do work that no one is interested in.”
“What should we be working on, then?” I asked. The participants all shouted out the topic they were expecting to be discussing. And so I pivoted the conversation there and said “okay, let’s talk about that then!” and away we went. As a facilitator, you don’t have to have all the answers. If the process you have designed isn’t right, ask folks to help you get it right.
Create a container for conversation using ABIDE. A few years ago I published a paper on using Dave Snowden’s ABIDE framework to design and host dialogic containers. I have since grown to really appreciate this framework and have altered it a little to blend in some of the work from Glenda Eoyang’s CDE model from Human Systems Dynamics. I now have an acronym that neither of them created, but which is insanely useful.
ABIDE points to five things you can change in the structure of a container that will change the interactions of the participants. I would say that every good facilitator and leader working in complexity knows this. Learning this helps you to be able to shift patterns without dictating the outcomes and is an essential step for facilitator development to move beyond simply using tools. I’ll write a longer piece about this later, but here is my current version of these five important characteristics that constrain group behaviour.
- ATTRACTORS. These are things around which patterns are organized in a system: a story, a question, a powerful person, even the physical focus of attention in the room.
- BOUNDARIES: These are things that constrain a system, including physical space, time, money, and mandate Basically these are lines within which a meeting operates.
- IDENTITY: Identities are deep patterns that shape behaviour, and we often wear them unconsciously. They can be formal roles (leader, manager, administrator), archetypes (bully, victim, hero, elder, child), or social constructions rooted in norms around race, gender, class, and other distinctions.
- DIFFERENCES: Difference and sameness can flavour a conversation radically. Too much of one or the other can sap the energy from a container. Homogeniety can create massive spots of unawareness, and complete diversity can become a Tower of Babel.
- EXCHANGES: These are things that flow in a system, be it money, power, ideas, information, or knowledge.
When conversations are stuck it’s often because one of these things is creating a pattern that is unhelpful. Shifting one of these things can shift the whole process.
Be mindful of how you use constraints. Decolonize constraints as much as possible. A container in one context is an enclosure in another. This is an important consideration. In the literature on dialogue, much has been written about “containers” and it has become a technical term in the field. All human process happens within constraints, but different peoples have different experiences of what it is like to be constrained, especially by others. It is very easy to use the term “container” and have it become a colonizing concept. In Indigenous communities, containers can be conflated with the reservation system. In Ireland, the word can evoke the pain of enclosure, the legal process whereby the land was privatized and colonized by the British Crown. And yet in both these contexts, containers for life giving conversation are well understood using terms like “nest” and “hearth.” As with all tools, be mindful of where you are and how you are using it, and how your words will land.
I live on a small island in the sea with a very complicated water supply. We have some community water systems, and a complex geology that means that many people are on wells, and nearly every well seems different. As our population increases, and as the moisture decreases, we are finding ourselves subject to more and more restrictions on what we can do with water. This is as it should be. We cannot live on our island beyond our limits, with a bigger water footprint than the water we have available to us. In the past, you were free to run taps as long as you want. Now we are metered and in some neighbourhoods there are daily sue restrictions. Signs at the entrance to these areas say “Converse Water Or Have None.” It’s not an alarmist message. It is true.
One of the arguments I often hear people using against things like climate change mitigation is that it will somehow restrict their freedom. Libertarians, for whom all taxation is theft, protest against carbon pricing as a tax grab, even though it was always the preferred mechanism of free market economists. Oil companies and manufacturers complain about excessive regulation of fuel standards and emissions, and consumers object to high prices which limit what they are able to do.
Climate change requires a radical shift in the way economies and societies work, and it’s interesting to look at this from a complexity perspective. Ideally in a society you want to manage complex dynamics with complexity based policy solutions. In other words, instead of dictating behaviours, it’s better to influence behaviours by incentivizing things that lead in a positive direction and dis-incentivizing things that lead in a negative direction. This can be done with laws, regulations, pricing incentives, policies, and taxation. These attractors and boundaries create the conditions for behaviour change.
The free market is indeed a self-organizing mechanism, but it is also amoral. There is a reason why, even in the United States where gun ownership is a right, there are plenty of weapons and firearms that are highly restricted and outright banned. There is a good reason why it illegal to dispose of PCBs and dioxin in the atmosphere, despite the fact that for years companies used the fact that air wasn’t taxed to dump their waste products. So markets are regulated and behaviours change. That is a complexity based approach to trouble.
In chaos, the only response is a massive imposition of constraints and restriction of people’s freedom. Think of situation in which you might have required a first responder like a paramedic. If you are injured, you will accept a high degree of control over your life in order to stabilize the situation. First responders impose sometimes extreme levels of command and control to manage a situation. When things are more stable and heading out of chaos, the constraints relax and the complex task of healing or rebuilding or moving on can begin.
The argument I find myself making with folks who object to climate solutions is this: if you think that a simple carbon tax is an infringement on your freedom now, are you willing to live with that freedom now in exchange for much more brutal constraints on your freedom later? As climate emergencies continue to increase, it is very likely that people will be told where they can live and where they cannot, how they are allowed to travel, how much water they can use, what they can do with their land. The increase of control over people increases with the level of crisis and chaos. At a certain point you simply cannot live free beyond the limits of your bio-physical system to maintain you. The system imposes the constraints, and you will have no choice but to be told what to do.
For libertarians and others who value personal choice, now is actually the time to get on board with the complexity tools that can help us make choices that limit our impact on the climate. If we fail to influence populations into positive choices now – and it may already be too late – we will find ourselves increasingly being subjected to highly controlled environments later. One way or the other, our freedom to do whatever we want needs to be curtailed. We have lived for decades in unmitigated commercial and economic freedom on the backs of future generations, and the planet is telling us that it’s over. Choose differently now, or be told what to do later.
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’m on the road, currently in Columbus Ohio, working my way through a two week road trip that has taken me to Ontario to visit family and to New Brunswick where I was part of a remarkable hosting team for the Art of Hosting Working Across Divides. It was a timely gathering for 70 people from government, civil society, and social enterprise to come and learn how to work with differences.
In Canada’s only bilingual province, language is a massive difference between people, and New Brunswick has a multitude of language cultures. There are 34 local French accents alone in New Brunswick and probably just as many English ones too, having to do with class and ethnicity and proximity to the sea or the woods.
In the last provincial election there, the virus of populism had its day and took these existing differences and turned them into divides. Right wing populists have a well-trod strategy for doing this. Instead of pointing to differences between people, they tap the fear that people have of people who are different than them, without naming the other. This is called “dogwhistle politics.” Once they find a fear of the other that elicits an emotional response, they double down on the fear often, but not always, with lies and misrepresentation. When their political opponents offer up diversity and difference as an asset to a healthy society, the populists accuse them of “divisiveness.” They claim that only their approach will bring “unity” typically by eliminating any conversation that recognizes the value of differences. Often their “unity” platform is basically assimilitation: “if only you were like us, we’d have unity; if you want to be different, you’re creating division.” Sometimes they outright declare such an emphasis on difference to be “racist.” If you want to see this in action, visit Rebel Media, an organization I will simply refuse to link to. They are great at this.
The pithy insight on difference and divisiveness that struck me in this Art of Hosting is this: differences are real and useful, and division is one thing you can do with them. People are different, and offer different perspectives, lived experiences, and world views on things. These differences are essential to living and working in complexity, because a homogeneous view of a situation leaves you open to crises hitting you unawares. Cultivating difference is a good strategy for surviving and thriving in a complex situation. Seeking out differences of opinion is essential, finding people who are different than you and working with them makes you all smarter.
Divisions happen when people become so afraid of the other that they stop making the effort to bridge the gap. When this happens a kind of vacuum opens up between people and that gap is the thing that populists exploit. Political power can be won and held with a very thin margin these days in Canada. You only need about 20% of the voters to vote for your party. If you get your vote out, and the opposition is split or apathetic, you can form power. In New Brunswick the current government was formed on this exact number: about 31% of voters voted Conservative, and only 67% of the eligible voters cast a ballot. The populist People’s Alliance hold the balance of power. (In Ontario, Doug Ford came to power with 23.49% of eligible voters supporting his party.)
The way to defeat populism is to not allow people to play on your fears of other people who are different from you. It means convening incredibly diverse spaces and creating the conditions for people to show up with their unique perspectives, working WITH differences. That sometimes means doing things that make differences more stark, to explore different experiences, different ideas and different stories, so we can learn from each other. And it sometimes means making differences less pronounced so that we can find common purpose or shared perspective.
Divisiveness does not come from people working with differences. Divisiveness comes from people inserting fear into the gaps between people who are different.
Five links that caught my eye over the holiday.
New Power: How it’s Changing the 21st Century and Why you need to Know
A book review from Duncan Green, whose work on power, evaluation, and complexity in international development, I much admire. Seems this new book invites a shift in thinking about power from quantity to flows:
Old Power works like a currency. It is held by a few. It is closed, inaccessible and leader-driven. It downloads and it captures. New Power operates differently, like a current. It is made by many. It uploads, and it distributes. The goal with new power is not to hoard it, but to channel it.’
New Power is reflected in both models (crowd-sourced, open access, very different from the ‘consume and comply’ Old Power variety or the ‘participation farms’ of Uber and Facebook) and values (informal, collaborative, transparent, do it yourself, participatory but with short-term affiliations).
Understanding the Learner and the Learning Process
I am fascinated by the connection between how we learn in complex systems and how we strategize in complexity. I think they are the same thing. And there is no better lab for understanding good complexity learning than complex sports like basketball and football. Here is an annotated interview with Kobe Bryant, in which Richard Shuttleworth makes some notes about how learners learn in complexity from Mark O Sullivan’s excellent footblogball.
Jacob Bronowski, a holocaust survivor, discusses the dehumanizing power of arrogance and certainty in a powerful clip from a video where he visits Auschwitz and reconnects with the violence of knowledge.
This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. Thisis where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas — it was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance.
When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.
Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible…
We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.
Design Thinking Is Fundamentally Conservative and Preserves the Status Quo
A solid challenge to the ubiquitous application of design thinking to solve complex problems.
The political dimensions of design thinking are problematic enough on their own, but the method is particularly ill-suited to problems in rapidly changing areas or with lots of uncertainty, since once a design is complete the space that the method opens for ambiguity and new alternatives is shut down. Climate change is one such area. The natural environment is changing at an astonishing rate, in ways that are likely to be unprecedented in human history, and that we are unable to fully predict, with each new scientific discovery revealing that we have far underestimated the complexity of the systems that are at play and the shifts on the horizons may very well mean the end of our existence. Yet, design-thinking approaches, adopted with much fanfare to deal with the challenge, have offered formulaic and rigid solutions. Design thinking has allowed us to celebrate conventional solutions as breakthrough innovations and to continue with business as usual.
Intellectual humility: the importance of knowing you might be wrong
An antidote to the above challenges: admitting that you might be wrong as a disciplined act:
Intellectual humility is simply “the recognition that the things you believe in might in fact be wrong,” as Mark Leary, a social and personality psychologist at Duke University, tells me.
But don’t confuse it with overall humility or bashfulness. It’s not about being a pushover; it’s not about lacking confidence, or self-esteem. The intellectually humble don’t cave every time their thoughts are challenged.
Instead, it’s a method of thinking. It’s about entertaining the possibility that you may be wrong and being open to learning from the experience of others. Intellectual humility is about being actively curious about your blind spots. One illustration is in the ideal of the scientific method, where a scientist actively works against her own hypothesis, attempting to rule out any other alternative explanations for a phenomenon before settling on a conclusion. It’s about asking: What am I missing here?