Observing the architecture of the held container

You might have been following along as I have been playing with this triangle over the past few weeks. This is a version that I think I am happier with for now and it’s already helping me and others to understand a few things. First, what is the influence of a facilitator into the complex system of a group of people. Second, what is a dialogic container thought about in terms of anthro-complexity. And third, what is the role of a facilitator, and what are some of the capacities and moves one can play.

I’ll introduce this in stages, and use language that speaks to facilitators, hosts, participatory leaders. Folks who read this blog, who practice the Art of Hosting, Liberating Structures or other forms facilitation that treats groups as complex. I want this framework to help us inquire into some of things we take for granted such as the role of the host, the helpfulness of methods. the belief in the collective capacity of the group, and in the notion and idea of what a container is and how to work with it.

The title of this post is a nod to Mark Downham’s long treatise The Architecture of Held Space, which is a very generous discussion of these questions too and which deserves a full response on it’s own. But his work and Snowden’s work previously pointed at in this series ask the questions that I am trying to answer here. Here’s a post that links to those writings.

Starting with basics.

Let’s start here. Groups of people are constantly meeting, working, talking and living their lives without the role of a facilitator. Most of human history, historically and in the present day has unfolded without facilitators and consultant working with groups of people to optimize processes, introduce new ways of working together or saving people from the everyday chaos of their lives. I say this in a tongue-in-cheek way, but it’s a serious observation. We – the consulting industry, the hosting world, the facilitation community – are a lot less necessary than we believe.

So we start with the above polarity. There are interactions and there is structure. Pause for a moment and think about where you live. It could be a village, and island, a neighbourhood, a building or a city. Think of ways that people have problems solved together, introduced new ideas, created new things. How neighbours are helped when a new child is born. Or how conflicts arise in the public conversation and how they are resolved or how they cage over time. Novelty in societies and groups springs from interactions between people. They come out of who knows whom, who is connected or not, what gets talked about. Communities and groups are bubbling cauldrons of connections and exchanges. You can never fully understand them, you can never fully see what they are capable of. But beautiful things emerge.

Interactions between people do not happen randomly however. Thing of the place you live and think of the built environment. Think of how folks get around, where they meet and where they don’t meet. Think about the “way we always do things” the traditions, languages, and implicit ways of being that are unique to each place. Think of what it feels like to visit a new place and know that you don’t completely belong there. There are structural elements that shape humans experiences. These structures are physical, psychological, social, and cultural. They are patterns that persist over time that makes some things more likely to happen than other things. These structures can change, but the do so slowly.

The structures and the interactions are continually in relationship. The structure influences what’s easy for people to do wan what is hard for them to do. In complexity, we call these affordances. People who are skilled at working within their own environments often have a good understanding of some of these structures and affordances are are able to work with them in a way that makes things happen. Others might have great ideas, but they always seem to get nowhere. Structures can provide resistance – “that’s not how we do things around here” – or they can provide hard boundaries – “you can’t walk from Bowen Island to the mainland, no matter how much you want to.”

SO the question to ask when learning about a group of people, or when a group of people is learning about themselves is “How do enduring structures shape interactions and how to repeated interactions become structural?”

If you are coming into a community or organization to do work and you don’t start here you are treating each group as a blank canvas upon which your influence can be exerted. This applies especially to consultants but it alos applies to leaders who “drop in” to their teams or departments without any understanding of what is really happening. The field of pre-existing interactions, the ways that people respond to change or generate it, and the pre-existing structures – physical and cultural, immutable and changeable – provide the landscape inside of which any intervention takes place.

Take a breath while I tell you why three is better than two.

Pause here. I’m going to tell you why I’m going to make the next move.

A favoured tool of many consultants is working with polarities. I use them all the time to look at things. Structure and Interaction is a classic polarity. Both exist at the same time, both are helpful, positive states. In the Art of Hosting work we use Chaos and Order. I’ve also used others like Individual and Team, and Organization and Stakeholders. Often conflicts in organizations are about contested ends of a polarity. That’s helpful to see.

But the problem with polarities is that it places a situation on a scale and asks us to maybe balance the upsides of both or do things that will slide the problem more towards on end or the other.

The bigger PROBLEM with pairs like this is that it tends to introduce either/or thinking. Even if we are using a tool like polarity management (which promotes Both/And thinking) we are still highly entrained to see the ends as more important than the middle. That can have the effect of embedding the conflict even deeper and make it feel like maximizing the upsides of one is a compromise or a value tradeoff for people that prefer the other.

And so, what about three?

Snowden has written recently on this, but for decades he has used triads in sense-making in a way that helps us see that a complex situation exists in a space that is influenced by multiple sources of constraints that make some things more possible than others. Triads are a feature of his software, SenseMaker and although they are sometimes hard to understand, I find them helpful for getting beyond simple dichotomies.

And so the next section of this essay will be about the third part of this system, the one that turns a group of people into a facilitated group, a led group, a team, an organization. It is the acknowledgement of an intention, backed with privileged power, that provides an important source of constraints.

The designer

In a recent LinkedIn post responding to an earlier blog post in this series, Natalia Treninya offers a gentle disagreement with my offering of this third source of constraints. She writes: “I find it hard to accept that the design of a dialogue, or of any other creative process, stands as an equal third vertex of the trialectic. Stability and emergence describe the state of the field, whereas design acts upon the field, so to me it belongs to a different level.” (translation from Ukrainian provided by LinkedIn).

I get that, but I don’t agree. The whole point of introducing this third corner is to be honest about the work that intention does when it is coupled with a position of privileged power in a pre-existing field of interactions and structure. Snowden’s constant challenge to the Art of Hosting community, let alone the broader facilitation community as a whole, is to get the facilitator out of the centre of the work. But the facilitator is never removed from the work. That is exactly another problem: cloaking the role of power in good intentions, or a wonderful design, or a set of brilliant exercises.

Even in “complex facilitation“, which is the approach to methods used by the Cynefin community, the role of the facilitator has to be accounted for. Methods are used, each with an intention. Interactions are shaped. Strutures and patterns appear and the facilitator manages the process.

But how and why is the facilitator able to “manage the process?” Because the position comes with the power to do so. That power is accorded by the consent of the group (or not, in which case something else takes over). “Yes, we will do the Future Backwards exercise or the Word Cafe or the Circle or the Paired Walk or the 1-2-4-All” is what the group says to the facilitator, but never completely.. There is always someone in the room who thinks this is bullshit, or who has to suspend their scepticism to go along with the group. We all carry memories of being told what to do that elicit responses ranging from compliance and approval seeking to outright rebellion.

So the unique position of the facilitator influences both the structure of the moment and the interactions. In complex facilitation approaches, the facilitator/host does not get involved in the content of the work, but only manages the interactions between people in the space. That is an important and influential role and so it has to be accounted for.

Time for a break

Let’s watch a video together. Let’s see what happens when the person with the power to shape the process comes into a room ignoring the structures and interactions that are already present in the group and imposes a his own ideas about what should happen. This is a scene from West Side Story where Glad Hand, the community social worker, embodies the bumbling leadership role we have probably all occupied at one time or another. You can read my commentary on this scene here.

Poor Glad Hand. He was convicted that this new method of his would break the group up, introduce new relationships and solve the gang problem. My favourite part of the scene happens after the group rebels and becomes even more entrenched. The police officer makes a bee line for Glad Hand and desperately points out to him how bad he has just made the situation.

Answering the challenge

There are groups interacting in the present moment. There are pre-existing structures that embed and embody the residue and habits of historical practice. And there is the p[ractitioner, the consultant, the teacher, the facilitator, the leader. The one who holds the design that is accompanied by an intention that speaks to a preferred future.

So let’s explore this third point in the triangle in relation to the other two.

Now we are looking at a dynamic space bounded by three sides inside of which dialogic containers exist and move. The Design point can be occupied by a facilitator who brings a method, or a leader, or an authority, or anyone else who has the power and ability to enter the space with intention that can shape the space. The introduction of this third point introduces two new tensions and space in which we can map what emerges from these three tensions.

From a facilitation perspective, the left hand side asks the question of how the method or intention being brought relates to the existing patterns at play. Anyone who has set the chairs up in a circle, while working with an organization used to sitting around a table, will be familiar with this questions. There are ways of doing things. If you are going to be introducing a new intention that results in a new structure, something interesting will happen in contact with the pre-existing structures.

On the other side, the tension is between the intention of the facilitator and what the group is attending to. The group holds the capability for designing and choosing change and a design and intention introduced on top of them runs the risk of being patronizing, disempowering or colonizing in its effect. In complexity, It is not methods or good facilitation or leadership that creates novelty or good responses to the problem at hand but rather the distributed knowledge, capability and capacity of the group itself to address its conditions. This has important implications for what we choose to do. As a facilitator when I am too in love with my method, I impose it in a way that disables the group’s capacity, even while I speak praises to the group’s collective intelligence and capacity.

The space

So this diagram is finally a space represented by three distinct source of constraint that affect and influence the dialogic container. The facilitator’s role then is to constantly attend to the work of the container within this space. In an expert driven process, where for example an engineer is directing a team to install a building system, the interactions of the team members are highly controlled. The engineer might need a detail or two from the front line, but in general, the design and implementation of a knowable system will proceed very close to the left hand edge of the triangle.

On the other hand, a group that is trying to design a new organizational structure for itself might not need any facilitation or design at all beyond an agreement to meet in a pub and kick around answers to the question “how should we make decisions together?” It doesn’t need facilitation, and the intention and design can be entirely co-owned by the group itself. The pub provides a structure, especially if said pub is a part of the ritual space in which the group often decamps to consider the bigger questions in life.

On yet another hand, a consulting intervention for a strategic plan might start with an intention from the Board and quickly move to a narrative capture of the staff, clients and partners of the organization, followed by collective sense-making. This immediately works with the capability of the group to sense opportunities, to name the structural affordances and blockages for development of change and to change the interactions from “working together” to “planning together” which wakes up the latent capacity to a group to make collective decisions and choose pathways forward into the unknown. The consultant becomes responsible for hosting the methods to do that, paying attention all the time to the preferred direction of travel introduced and held by the Board as an intention (“we need a plan to help us move into the future and we need everyone to be involved”). The consultant’s role is to constantly work to attend to and shape the interactions, with consent, with transparency and with accountability.

Dialogic containers arise all the time. As each of the points in the triangle take on great or lesser effect on that container, the container’s life can be mapped in this space. The lifecycle of a container is not linear, it’s not universal and it is context free. Each one appears from the interactions of these constraints and is shifted and influenced over time until it dissolves again. While it exists, the facilitator continually attends to the changing relationship between Design, Structure and Interactions. When the work is done, to put it in Taoist terms, the facilitator disappears along with the container and the people see that they did it themselves.

So play with this a little. Tell me what it evokes in you. I am especially interested in how this challenges your practice, rather than how it validates it? What question for yourself does this open up?