Part three in a series:
Part three: a collection of patterns for design and facilitation.
As I heard the story, the four fold practice was something of a flash of insight tied in with the original Art of Hosting offering made by Toke, Jan, and Monica. Somewhere in the forests of Northern California as the team was preparing to offer its first Art of Hosting training, somebody woke up one morning, after a few days of discussion and design with the strong sense that meaningful conversations had four things in common: people were present to the work, everyone was participating, the conversation was hosted in some way, and people co-created together. That’s it. It was, as the legend goes, drawn on the back of a napkin, which is the test of all useful frameworks, and it became the subject of an inquiry: so if these are the patterns that make up a meaningful conversation, what would the Art of Hosting Meaningful Conversations look like? Could we anchor our hosting practice on that? Could we teach that?
This simple observation and the subsequent inquiry has become a generative framework that holds together a global community of practitioners and theorists. We have seen that what constitutes a “meaningful conversation” in a huge variety of cultural and linguistic settings on every continent is a process that more or less exhibits these four characteristics. When brought together in the service of meaningful work these four patterns bring life and effectiveness to collective sense-making, problem-solving, and action. When attended to with good design and facilitation, these patterns become basic elements of the best kind of dialogue.
The ART of using these practices is being able to use them fluidly and fluently in many different contexts. Each of these four patterns looks different depending on the group you are working with and the work you are doing with them. It is very important that each group experience these patterns in ways that make sense to them. As skillful hosts we are trying to build containers for important and meaningful work. These containers are not the product of our role, rather they are themselves instruments that help good work to be done. The Art of Hosting is purely instrumentalist, in the sense that if the hosting is not practical and pragmatic and not in the service of something else, then it is not appropriate. Our goal as practitioners is not to simply create good dialogues for their own sake but to do so to have an effect, so we can be of service to a group.
Over the past 15 or so years of teaching and working with this art I have thought a lot about the connection between these patterns of experience and the practice of hosting. For me now, these four patterns have become the enabling constraints of my work with groups, in that I try to ensure that my designs meet the group’s purpose using this practice. The practices are broad enough that they allow for a vast array of approaches to be used so that designs can be tailored to context, but at the end of the day, it’s important to ask myself these questions:
- Are participants present?
- Is everyone participating?
- Is the space being held and hosted?
- Is the group itself co-creating its work?
In my experience, the extent to which these four conditions are true is directly related to the extent to which the group is doing good dialogic work. When I see goops faltering in their work, it is usually because one of these four patterns is crumbling. A group may lose its focus, some participants might be dominating in a way that causes others to become redundant to the process, the facilitation may be too tight or too loose, or the group may be having its work done by someone else. All of these conditions have the effect of undermining ownership, capacity, engagement, and participation. In general, when we are working with uncertainty or unknown futures, the four-fold practice is a useful checklist to enable groups to work together in complexity to understand what’s happening, make sense of their situation and make some decisions about what to do next, all the while staying connected and in relationship.
That’s a pretty big return on investment for such a small and portable practice.
Being Present
When I think back to the original learning I did around hosting and facilitation with the Elders of the National Association of Friendship Centres, and indeed before that in the governance processes of the United Church of Canada in which I was involved as a young man, I notice that important conversations were always preceded with a prayer or an invocation, or even a moment of silence before we got to work. For a conversation to be meaningful, every participant must be present to the task at hand. That means each one needs to have the time and resources to be able to participate. The work of the moment must be the only thing that holds people’s attention and so focus is important.
In later years, through the playing of Irish traditional music, which itself is a kind of social ritual and through spiritual practice influenced by both my indigenous teachers and the stream of practice that comes from Celtic monasticism, I observed and thought deeply about the nature of thresholds, which are those edges we cross that help us understand that we are in a different space, set aside for particular collective work that requires a little more depth of attention than our day to day activities. Practices to cross the threshold are very important in these kinds of spaces because they help us understand that we are in a different place and we are asked to bring a different awareness to what we are doing.
This is true of dialogue.
So whatever helps people come present to the work is a useful way to build the container for dialogue. It becomes almost ceremonial, and indeed the importance of ritual of some kind cannot be overstated. Even something as simple as taking a moment of silence before beginning, or having people silently read the relevant document together is a useful way to begin. Of course, more elaborate processes can involve more elaborate ways of bringing people to presence, but I have never been let down by a moment of silence. Even in the middle of meetings, when things are going sideways and conflict has become unproductive, a moment of silence can have a powerful effect in bringing people back to the problem or the purpose.
Whatever helps the group cross the threshold – be it physical or immaterial – will help participants come to the presence necessary to do deeper work.
Participating
In my own journey to develop the art of hosting in myself, one of the biggest mountains to climb was the idea that the facilitator is the one in charge of the room. For years I stood at the front of rooms full of people struggling with problems, asking questions, guiding discussions, commenting on ideas and writing them on flip charts. I was an influential part of the discussion, mostly unconsciously influencing decisions and discussions towards ideas and actions that grabbed my attention and excited me. It was all about me. Even though I was schooled on participatory research and Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I was also raised and mentored by people who were training me to be a preacher in the United Church of Canada and the promise to the ego of commanding an audience was the hardest thing that I had to overcome. Indeed it is still the hardest place of my own facilitation practice.
Discovering Open Space Technology was an absolute revelation to me. It allowed me to see what was possible when the facilitator radically trusted the group and let them take full responsibility for the conversations and the outcomes of their work. Radical participation is at the heart of the Art of Hosting, and the practice itself is intended to constrain leaders and hosts in such a way that the groups do theor work within constraints but with a minimum of influence from the facilitator. This is often the hardest practice for facilitators to learn when they shift their style to hosting: we are generally imprinted its the idea that facilitation means the facilitator is taking control of the space, ensuring safety, managing the agenda, keeping things moving along and dealing with conflict. Many times clients have asked me to solve interpersonal problems for them, because we have an idea that we can outsource these kinds of things to a facilitator.
But we know that when a group takes responsibility for its own work when everyone is actively participating and making sense of their own situation, we get a much more sustainable and resilient outcome from dialogic processes. The job of the host is to enable participation through careful attention to the constraints and methods that make it possible. This means first of all that hosts themselves must have a practice of participation, meaning that they must be good at engaging in dialogue themselves: sharing Ideas, listening to others, being aware of their impact in systems. It means that hosts must understand that they are never neutral in a system, that the privilege, power, and influence they bring is significant and important. Learning more about complexity, power, and privilege has made me a better host and has deepened my practice of participation in the world.
There is a reason that methods like Circle, Open Space Technology, World Cafe, and Appreciative Inquiry have been fundamental to the practice of the Art of Hosting in strategic settings. These methods have full participation built into them, and participants actively share the responsibility for the quality of the conversation and the harvest of the outcomes. Furthermore, when practitioners in the Art of Hosting global community have created methods, they also ensure full participation from all, including methods like Pro-Action Cafe, Collective Story Harvesting, and Design for Wiser Action.
Participation is at the heart of the four fold practice.
Being Hosted
In the practice of Dialogic Organization Development, of which the Art of Hosting is one expression, there is a great deal of attention given to the “container.” Participatory conversations take place within a described time and place and a set degree of freedom. The container is formed from attractors like a core purpose, a calling question, or a felt need. It is constrained by boundaries like time, space, resources, and degrees of influence. The role of the host is to pay attention to the container so that participants can operate within this space. Sometimes this involves tightening constraints or destroying them altogether. It might mean inviting attention on a shared purpose again or moving with the energy of the group and changing course. It is a dynamic and ever evolving practice.
And yes, it is different from what most people understand as “facilitation,” which is that person standing at the front of the room managing the conversation ad scrawling away on flip charts. Years ago I wrote a blog post that sought to make a clear distinction between the two terms but it was really too stark a distinction. These days I’m not so precious about this and I use the terms interchangeably. The essence of the art of hosting for me though is attending to the properties of the container so that the group itself can do the work. I see the host as a part o the system but a part with a very specific role of managing constraints. Most often in my work, this is done as a consultant, with the power and responsibility to do this, but there are times when I am a part of a group that needs hosting and I turn my attention from the work at hand and focus on the quality of the container instead. It is, as my friend Tenneson Woolf often says, a gift to host and a gift to be hosted.
Being hosted well is indeed a gift, and is not that common. Think of how many meetings you have been to where your irritation with the facilitator has gotten in the way of the work you came to do. Some of those times may even have been with me as your host! Alos, think of the times when you were acutely aware that the LACK of hosting was a real problem, impeding the ability of the work to get done. Reflect on these experiences and contrast them with the experiences you had of the most meaningful work in your life. It is an almost certainty that these experiences were hosted – that is they happened inside a container that was built around mutual purpose,a common challenge, a relationship, or an opportunity to do something relevant. The hosting may have been extremely light, or it may have involved a tightly scripted flow. It may have been held by another person, or the group itself may have played the role of the host. Regardless, I am willing to be that the most meaningful conversations humans are involved in – and the most meaningful work – comes inside just the right enabling constraints. It is hosted.
Sometimes when I am talking about the four-fold practice I will say that this pattern is about enabling contribution, and I truly think that a well-hosted meeting sets up a kind of gift economy, where participants are offering and receiving in the best way. This doesn’t mean that folks are always getting along well, but it does mean that difference, dissent and conflict can be offered and received in the service of something bigger and not as a back and forth tennis match of accusation and closing down. Hosting is not something that happens without intention and a commitment to the role and so in spaces where hosting will benefit, to step up and do the work is to contribute to the emergence of this pattern.
Co-creating
The fourth pattern of meaningful conversation acknowledges that the best dialogues leave the participants with the knowledge and evidence that they have been creating something together. When things are truly participatory, participants can point concretely to the way that they contributed to the outcome. This is a rare feeling these days where both organization and community life is dominated by accountabilities that are more often than not pointed towards people in power or responsibility and not towards oneself or to the group of folks to which one belongs. There is of course some truth to this, but complex challenges require the participation and ongoing ownership of all in order to be sustainable. The feeling of having co-created something brings tremendous meaningfulness to a task and ongoing commitment to the relationship that will extend and sustain the effort.
Co-creation for me is a key piece of design in every way. I recently hosted a meeting with drug users, community members, service providers and non-profit leaders where we were looking at the stories collected about opioid use in a sensemaker project. It was obvious to me that the meeting needed to be co-created with people from all of these groups in order for it to be something that had some real efficacy. In the end, a network of peers offered the four main tasks for the day (review the stories to find patterns, discuss them with others, come up with bigger solutions, and leave with something concrete) and they also took responsibility for setting up safe space where people could use drugs or be supported if the stories triggered trauma. This was something I couldn’t do at all, and so I stuck to hosting the process and the peer network hosted the space. That is co-creation.
Likewise, when I am hosting, the group itself will be largely responsible for its own harvest of the gathering. That means data written or recorded in their own hands and voices, and it means that they make sense of the conversations they have had and even create the substance of the report of the proceedings. My basic principle is “never touch the data” and if there is ever a time I have to move post-it notes or write words about the event, I think very carefully about whether or not it is my place to do so. It is tempting for facilitators to show their prowess by synthesizing data, writing reflections and telling the group what happened in their reports. All of that, useful as it may appear to be, has a cost. It is your job to find that cost and determine whether it is a price you are willing you to pay!
So these patterns translate into a useful set of design and planning guidelines. They help us practice the art of hosting and keep meetings as participatory as possible. They also often guideposts for the development of practice of both facilitation and, at bigger scales, leadership.
Part of a series.
Part two: Where did this come from?
Something Harrison Owen said to me somewhere along the line drove me to understand that facilitating Open Space Technology meetings required a tremendous amount of personal practice. He talked about rising at 4am the day of his Open Space meetings and meditating for an hour. The work of actively letting go takes a tremendous amount of energy, especially if, like most of us, you have control instincts to overcome. When one is facilitating an Open Space meeting the desire to control things, even the little things, burns throughout the day. It takes active and constant personal work to deal with that instinct and to continually and kindly return responsibility for the quality of the day to the participants.
In seeking to learn more about this intersection between personal practice and facilitation I connected to Birgitt Williams during the years when she was beginning to develop the Genuine Contact program. I brought her to Vancouver a number of times in the early 2000s and also co-hosted the World Gathering of Open Space Technology facilitators in 2001 at the University of British Columbia. I found myself more and more in care of a simple method that nevertheless had profound effects on the groups with which I was working. Birgitt’s work very explicitly extended facilitation and leadership practice into spiritual practice and it was she who drove home the point that Harrison had made earlier, that one needed a strong personal practice in order to hold space well. Michael Herman, whom I met in person at the OSonOS in 2001, influenced me to begin to think about facilitation as practice, rooted as it was in his own meditation practice. He also was the one who helped me to draw the lines out from methods to context, concentrating on supporting the core mechanic of self-organization: the invitation. In 1998 he had already mapped out where all of this was going with his profound little e-book “The Inviting Organization Emerges.” Suddenly my own practice lit up. I understood that in order to be good at this stuff I was going to need to develop both a personal practice and get good at using maps and frameworks to help the clients I was now working with as a consultant.
By the time I met Toke in 2003, and he uttered those words, I was keen to find the next level of my facilitation practice.
Years later I learned that my friend Maria Scordialou had uttered the phrase “the river beneath the river” to name what many of us were feeling at that time in the late 1990s. The phrase referred to the sense that there was something happening beneath the surface of the organizational change initiatives methods that had sprung into the world in the 1980s and 1990s. Although already well known in many community development contexts, participatory work was coming into its own as organizations became more and more interested in the complex parts of their operations: the people and networks and markets and environments in which they existed and to which they could exert no explicit control. Chaos theory was beginning to come into organizational life and influence leadership and management and the rise of the internet was holding great promise for enabling horizontal and self-organizing networks. Many of us began to experience the powerful results of well hosted participatory meetings and we began to see that the ability to facilitate these
The origins of the Art of Hosting as a field of practice, as a framework and as a workshop are not completely clear. Back in 2007 an online discussion sought to discover the origins of the Art of Hosting and indeed it had multiple tributaries that flowed together at a few specific gatherings. A small group of people primarily based in Europe who had been working with participatory methods in the 1990s began to meet and discuss the question of “What could the Art of Hosting also be?” Although Toke, Monica Nissen, and Jan Hein were the first to offer an Art of Hosting workshop in San Jose in 1999, many of the people that have now become close friends and colleagues over the years were a part of these initial discussions. These folks include Tim Merry, Tatiana Glad, Maria Scordialou, Christina Baldwin, Ann Linnea, Bob Stilger, Teresa Posakony, Juanita Brown, David Isaacs, Tenneson Woolf, and Meg Wheatley.
As befits a practice that was beginning to emerge from a variety of streams, the Art of Hosting took shape at a number of gatherings at which like-minded practitioners were meeting. These happened primarily in Europe, at Castle Borl in Slovenia, Hazelwood House in the UK and a little later at the Shambhala Institute on Authentic Leadership in Halifax, Canada. The conversations at these places were deeply influenced by the sense that leadership was practice and that “hosting” was a form of facilitation that was radically participatory in its nature. The Art of Hosting, as a collective inquiry, was finding a home in some influential networks including the Pioneers of Change, the Kaos Pilots, The Berkana Institute and the World Cafe community, all of whom were seeking to develop dialogue, conversation and participation as a key skill to make sense of the complexity of the world’s 21st-century problems. These networks were responsible for the rapid global spread of the Art of Hosting, especially amongst young leaders and social entrepreneurs who were taking on a massive piece of work in which community building and collective co-creation were essential.
None of this history explains exactly what the Art of Hosting is, but it does explain why the simple generative framework contains four practices: hosting oneself, hosting others, participating, and co-creating. It is a framework that is widely adaptable to spiritual practice, entrepreneurship, leadership, citizenship and governance, development work of all kinds, and facilitation for complex challenges. Its simplicity combined with its adaptability has mean that the “Art of Hosting” has found a home in all kinds of diverse contexts from the European Union to a 20-year experiment in intentional living in Zimbabwe, to decolonization efforts in Canada, enterprise development in the USA, the regeneration of faith communities, land and local economies. It shows up in equity and justice work, academic leadership contexts, governments and parliaments. Anywhere human beings need to work together, make sense together, and act together around complex challenges where traditional command and control leadership is not appropriate has been a context in which the Art of Hosting as a practice has shown to be useful.
So what the heck is it? That’s the next part.
Part seven of a seven part series on the seven little helpers for dialogue and action
- Part 1: Presence
- Part 2: Have a good question
- Part 3: Use a talking piece
- Part 4: Harvest
- Part 5: Make a wise decision
- Part 6; Act
7. Stay together.
Our final little helper in this series is maybe the most important and it perhaps brings us back to the beginning again. Quite simply, if you have taken the time to do good work, the best way to ensure that it is sustainable over time is to stay together. Important work requires a strong relationship between people that can hold the work as it moves, grows, changes, and sometimes fails. As my colleague Tuesday Ryan-Hart says, “relationship is the result.” Good work done in the absence of good relationship rarely fulfills its potential.
I remember watching an American sports broadcast of the FIFA World Cup in 2010, with German legend Jürgen Klinsmann reporting as a correspondant for ESPN from the French team’s training camp. The French team imploded that summer, a team that had squeaked into the Finals on a poor refereeing decision to begin with. The team scored only one goal in the group stages and lost all three of its games. The players revolted and brawled with coaches and administrators. It was horrible.
When asked why the team was performing so badly on the pitch by the American sports anchors, Klinsmann stared incredulously into the camera and said “because they don’t like each other; they are not friends.” The Americans blinked dumbfoundedly at an answer that seemed to come from a kindergarten teacher. But to anyone that has played a game like football, (or hockey or basketball and other “flow” sports) you will know EXACTLY what Klinsmann was saying: without good relationships, it is impossible for talent to perform at its potential. Staying together is everything.
So here are a few principles to keep that going.
Give equal attention to action and relationship. Relationship is sustainability. Developing and practicing good working relationships is essential. The fruits of good relations are borne when times get tough and if you haven’t been actively practicing as you go, it will be too late to draw on those resources when you’re in a hole. Find ways, in all of your strategic work, to also do the work of maintaining trust, respect, generosity, and honesty. Have string enough relationships that there is no fear to call each other to account, because you all know that it is for the greater good. Every planning session, every update meeting, every community consultation is a chance to generate good results and good relationship. Make sure you build in co-responsibility to care for the quality of relationship as well as the quality of results.
Check in with one another to maintain healthy relationship last based on openness, trust and support. There is a personal aspect to this, and team members should be doing their work to create productive and healthy relationships. Take time to celebrate and to socialize. Build in depth to your relationships. The best teams I have ever been on are with people who become trusted friends, and even if our work goes sideways or our working relationships crumble, we can walk away still holding each other in high esteem. It isn’t easy and that is what makes it worthy.
Whenever possible create and work with conditions for reciprocity, gifting and mutual support. The biggest lessons I have learned from healthy indigenous communities and organizations focus on this. Reciprocity, gifting, and mutual support are practically essential features of every indigenous group I have ever worked with. You simply cannot show up in these spaces self-centred, single-mindedly focused on transactional work, or unwilling to offer mutuality and support. Organizations and communities who hold a high ethic around these issues tend to be resilient and generative over time. So accept the invitation to decolonize your approach to relationships, especially when you walk into a place holding power and privilege.
I hope this series has been useful and inspiring. It’s been fun reading the comments and the additional insights. If you have more to add later but find the comments closed, please contact me and let me know.
Part six of a seven part series on the Seven little helpers for dialogue and action
- Part 1: Presence
- Part 2: Have a good question
- Part 3: Use a talking piece
- Part 4: Harvest
- Part 5: Make a wise decision
6. Act
The sixth of our seven little helpers is simple: Act. If you have taken the time to plan, talk, and harvest, you owe it to yourself and your group to honourably act on what you’ve learned.
Now it’s easy to get consumed by the cult of action, and to assume that every encounter needs to have a week defined action plan at the end of it. While that is simply not true – not every water cooler conversation results in action, but many are critically important in organizational life – when action is called for, be sure to act well. For whatever reason I find that many people have trouble with action. Perhaps it relates to the aversion and anxiety associated with decision making, but to act with clarity and commitment is kind. Here are some principles to guide your action. But be warned, these principles can take you down the road of planning to act, so be sure to keep it as simple as possible and get on with it.
Don’t confuse action planning with action. You would be surprised how many people confuse action planning with action. Often when I am contracting with a client and I ask for outputs, they will specify a document or an artifact, all the while emphasizing that they want to see action. Artifacts are pretty straightforward, and that is certainly something your consulting team can produce for you. But if you’re my client, I need you to understand that action is on you. That means thinking through how you are going to support action coming out of the work we do together. Recently I had a client place huge expectations on an off-site retreat. It needed to produce change in the organization’s culture designed over a three day gathering. I asked how the leadership was supporting people to make change (and to fail at it) and the client said “we have a really fear based culture here.” I warned her that without support from those in power to accept and even incentivize failure while people tried to change behaviours, meaningful action would be highly unlikely. She promised to go back to her Vice President for clarity and I never heard back from them. “We’re going in a different direction” is often the response I get from organizations not ready to put their money where their mouths are. That’s fine by me; I never want to be in a place of creating the conditions for merely performative action, when the people or the situations are calling for real change.
Action requires resources of time, money and attention. Don’t over promise commitments to resource action. In chaordic design, I call this work supporting the Architecture of Implementation. It seems to me that anything arising out of a participatory strategic initiative will require specific commitments of time, money, and attention to sustain it. If there is new work coming then new resources need to be in place to support it. I always caution leaders not to promise to “support all good ideas” that come out of a meeting if they can’t back that commitment with commensurate resources. How much time will your staff get to work on issues? What money do they have available to them? Who has the capacity for oversight and connection? If you fail to prepare a good architecture for implementation, you will burn out your people with added demands on their time and energy and no support. That’s cruel, and its a waste of time and resources. If you are committed to change you need to support change.
Distribute action plan and responsibility as much as possible. Use power to support self-organization and agency. It should be obvious, but participatory change should include participatory leadership. Sustained efforts to address sticky problems in organizations will often benefit from having many agents working on the project together. Use good organizational practices like the ones my friend Samantha Slate has shared in her book Going Horizontal to support leadership and action throughout the organization: share accountability, support personal leadership, give people space to work, ensure people have good conditions for collaboration, and practice good principles of equity and care
Be be mindful of PRICE. Because we love our five letter acronyms, use PRICE to design and check in with your architecture of implementation. Ask:
- How is POWER operating in this situation? Do we need more? Does is need to be more centralized or more distributed? Where is informal power and influence at work and how can we use it or mitigate it?
- What are the RESOURCES we need in order to act well? Who is in charge of these resources, and how to we get them onside to support our work early? What do they need to continue sending resources our way?
- How will we ITERATE our action? AS we try new things, what is the process for failing and trying again and improving as we go? How can we maximize support from those with power to allow for experimentation? Without thinking this through beforehand, people with power in a system are very likely to pull the plug on new initiatives the moment something goes wrong. Iteration is a crucial aspect to make things resilient.
- What CAPACITY do we need to develop? Where do people in the system need to undertake learning to work with the changes they are facing? What new skills and perspectives do we need to change the way we are working? Building organizational and community capacity is critical to sustaining creative and engaged work.
- How will we EVALUATE our work? Is our evaluation strategy in line with the kind of work we are doing? If we are working in complexity do we have good developmental evaluation and learning frameworks? If we are working with more predictable systems, do we have the right experts evaluating our work? How will we tell the story of what we are up to and communicate it well to those who need to hear about it? Evaluation is not something done in isolation at the end of a project but something done throughout. It’s how you document and share the story of what’s happening.
Taken together, these five things can support ongoing and sustained action beyond the report from the meeting or the project planning grant charts or the budget. True action needs support.
And then, when you are ready. Act.
Part five of a seven part series on the Seven little helpers for dialogue and action
5. Make a wise decision
I’ve always thought that the essence of good leadership is the ability to make a decision. It requires a certain kind of courage, especially when it seems that there is a zero sum game at stake. It also requires a high degree of emotional intelligence and compassion and empathy, especially when the decision you have to make could result in harm for others. Discernment, care, ethics, courage, and detachment all wrestle for attention in the mind of a decision maker.
As much as possible, in the world of complexity, I try to help groups make decisions together. Participatory decision making gets a bad rap for being time consuming and mired in interminable and endless conversation as groups turn over every little pebble, looking for an answer. Many complex problems produce enough data to support multiple competing ways forward, but complex problems never present predictability. You can take an informed guess, but where groups and decision makers get bogged down is in the waiting for absolute clarity. Decision makers in complexity need to be able to act with incomplete information and carefully watch the results of their decisions as they unfold, being prepared to adjust as they go.
For facilitators, hosting decision making can sometimes be a trap, especially for people who are conflict averse. Important decisions often involve making choices that pit conflicting views against each other. Where you can explore these options with small experiments, that’s a wise thing to do, like probing a couple of different paths in a dark forest to see which one looks more promising. But sometimes it comes down to one group’s preference getting chosen over the objections of others. To stay in that process and work well, you need good practice.
A strong personal practice is important, so that you don’t get triggered into making rash decisions as you are hosting a process. It is also important that the group you are working with has a clear process for making decisions. It’s even better if they are familiar with the emotional territory that leads to good decisions.
For me, Sam Kaner, Lenny Lind et. al. set the standard for this clarity with their book The Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision Making. That book gives us the well known “diamond of participation” – pictured above -which to me is the single most useful diagram to explain decision making from a group and personal process perspective. It features three zones: the zone of divergence where ideas are presented and explored; the zone of convergence where options are whittled down and decisions are made, and the zone in the middle, which I call the zone of emergence and which the authors call “the groan zone.”
The Groan Zone is the place where the group’s engagement with the content of their work gets stressful. Individuals experience cognitive overload, and they are stressed by the need to let go of ideas to which they are attached and to incorporate ideas which they find irreconcilable. Groups who get stuck in the groan zone experience conflict, impatience, and a waning sense of purpose. Facilitators who know the groan zone understand it to be the place that is necessary if a group is to discover something new and make a decision that is bigger than the decision any one person can make.
Over the years, conflict averse as I am, I have garnered many lessons and principles for practice from applying Kaner’s work and aligning it with complexity theory. Here are some key principles for hosting a group to a wise decision.
Don’t converge too early. When we are working in complexity, there is a tendency for groups to throw out lots of ideas, pick one and move on. That is a good approach when we can be certain about the right answer, but cases where real complexity is at play, prematurely converging can create more problems than it resolves. While it prevents a group from going through the groan zone it can reinforce established patterns of power and control as the loudest voice get its way. Decisions made before really considering options are almost certainly rooted in patterns of entrainment, bias, and habit. This is a good way to prolong the underlying patterns that have created the complex problem in the first place. If the decision is easy, don’t trust it.
There will be pain; build shared perspectives and relationships there. One of the best contributions of Kaner et. al. was to name the groan zone and provide a number of practices for facilitators to help the group navigate this territory. Working in the groan zone requires us to work with relationships. That can seem counter intuitive because groups get there largely because they are struggling to engage with the complexity of the content. Building shared perspectives makes sure that the infrastructure for emgernece – connection, attention, discernment, and a willingness to explore – is in place. Without this, toxic power and control patterns can have their way with the discussion and things can get “shut down.” A group that struggles together will usually make a better decision together and will usually be closer together as a team at the end.
As much as possible, try to build consensus using clear proposals, testing agreement and refining. I love working with consensus processes – and my friend Tree Bressen is a master at these – for building shared ownership over decisions. Consensus building is not a matter of opening everything up and letting the conversation drift in a thousand different directions. On the contrary, it’s about providing a high level of constraints to the process which lets the group focus on its work while holding a strong container for dissent. I’ve written elsewhere about large group processes for creating broad consensus, but it comes down to a few simple elements:
- Create a clear proposal
- Have a method for testing levels agreement and expressing specific concerns
- Deal with specific concerns with an eye to developing a more robust proposal
- Test again, refine again as necessary, and decide
If you have to vote be careful to understand what a yes and a no means. The worst decisions we can make are yes/no decisions on complex topics. This is why referenda are generally counter productive for setting large scale public policy direction. Brexit is the primary example. In Canada we have had referenda on electoral reform, transit funding and Constitutional amendments that produce results that are clear, but produce ongoing civic consternation about what they mean, because it was not possible to reduce the topic into a binary resolution. The advantage of using a gradients of agreement process in advance of a yes/no vote is that you at least know what people’s concerns are. If you can’t explore agreement before hand, conduct a yes/no vote but then have everyone write down why they voted the way they did. You’ll get lots of information pertaining to implementing your decision.
Pay attention to dissent and to patterns of dissent and have a process for understanding these. That leads me to the last point which is to acknowledge and understand dissent in a decision making process. Good leaders and well functioning groups will make a space for dissent because it can provide important weak signals for the state of the system, Dissent can hep a group escape inattention unawareness by raising “I told you so” issues early in the process. It also helps to sustain relationships when people who are on the losing side of a decision nevertheless feel included In it. Fear of dissent creates nasty power plays and exclusion that immediately renders any tricky decision unwise.