Control, facilitation, and the Golden Rule

We are just about to begin Day Two of our bi-annual Art of Hosting here in Vancouver. Yesterday, we introduced participants to the four-fold practice of the art of hosting (presence, participation, hosting and co-creation) as a generative framework for designing participatory meeting and supporting participatory leadership, and we also taught the Chaordic Path, as a way into confronting the dynamics of self-organization in meetings.

This teaching in particular is a bit of a gateway into complexity theory, as it is intended to help participants confront issues of control and self-organization in facilitation and leadership. For many people coming to the practice of hosting, where we place an emphasis on working with constraints rather than intervening in events, the idea that groups of people can be self-organizing within constraints is sometimes a challenging notion. The idea that we might design dialogic containers thoughtfully to encourage work that is useful, rich, affirming, novel, and full of diversity, difference and novelty is desired, but is tricky in practice.

For me, the dance of chaos and order and the confrontation with the potential of self-organization I found in Open Space in 1995 was mind blowing. It transformed my facilitation practice from being a person whose job was to control conversations, make sure that they “stayed on track” and “dealt with” conflict. My job had been to reframe people’s words and help people listen to each other and write longs lists of things on flip charts. That’s okay I suppose in a communications workshop, but in meetings? Hmm.

At the same time as I had been facilitating groups that way I hated being facilitated in this way. I didn’t want someone reframing things I was saying. I didn’t want differences mediated between myself and another person; I wanted to work those out together. I didn’t need someone else to tell me to listen to another person with curiosity. And if something was to go up on a flip chart, I needed it to be in my own words, especially if the facilitator working with us didn’t know anything about the context they were working in.

After 30 years of hosting conversations very differently, I still get clients calling me to facilitate conversations by, essentially, inserting myself into a set of human dynamics that they are unable or unwilling to participate in. It is not the folks that are excluded or unheard in organizational or community dynamics that are calling me. It is often folks whose agendas are not finding a fast enough route to implementation because there is resistance in the field.

My work is often to help those folks discover what is actually happening. This resistance is information and it tells us a lot about what is possible and what isn’t. Running roughshod over resistance is possible, but unethical. Exploring the nature of the field of relations is a pre-requisite to discovering the affordances for action.

(I once had an employer group contact me to see if I could facilitate the employers’ agenda regarding labour relations issues becasue the unions they worked with were always being unreasonable. When I asked to call the union reps to talk about the issue they told me that wasn’t part of the work and they simply needed me to find a way to get the union to back off their demands and grievances and forward to employers’ agenda. Of course I declined the offer to work with them).

Perhaps it goes without saying, but I think there are a lot of implicit actions of control built into the unexamined role of the facilitator. When folks ask me to deal with difficult people as if I have some magic wand, I’ll often ask them “how would you like to be treated if someone didn’t like what you had to say?” I think in general, most folks are not in favour of being controlled by others, but there is some residual idea out there that facilitation or leadership comes with permission to control conversations, conflict, and dissent. It can be a useful practice for those of us who lead or work with groups to reflect on these questions.

Enabling self-organization and co-creation of a container that can hold conflict is the better – and harder – way. But a group that learns to work with difference and hold conflict generatively while also dealing with harm in a relational way is a resilient group. It becomes a group that can host itself and that doesn’t require a facilitator at all.

To paraphrase Derrida, “the moment of facilitation is a moment of madness.”