Thoughts About HOA Governance

Recently, a friend was visiting, telling me with some excitement about a condominium that she and her daughter are having build for them. They are hoping to move in by December.

As I understand it, there will be 14 units and the developer intends—as one of their last acts—to set up a standard governance structure, with a board of directors and the typical array of officers: President, Vice-President, Secretary, and Treasurer. All households will have one vote and periodically there will be elections to see who is on the board. In turn, the board will determine who fills the officer roles. Among other duties, the President will set the agenda (perhaps in consultation with the other officers), and facilitate board meetings, at which binding decisions will be made. In all likelihood, board meetings will be run according to Roberts Rules of Order.

My guess is that the vast majority of HOA are governed in this way. Based on my 4+ decades of working with cooperative groups, however, I know this can be done better.

Don't Start with a Structure; Start with a Conversation

As my friend was open to hearing my ideas about how this might be done better, I put together this basic list of foundational recommendations:

First off, set aside the question of what governance structure residents want to use until everyone can gather and discuss what they want it to accomplish. (Don't place the cart ahead of the horse.)

I imagine that most (all?) residents may agree on the following features:

—That all residents will have a reasonable opportunity to be heard on any topic to be decided at the group level, before a decision is reached.

—That issues impacting the whole group will be discussed and decided at whole group meetings (plenaries) to which everyone will be notified ahead (two weeks?) about the timing of the meeting, its location, and the proposed agenda—so that there are no surprises, and everyone will have an adequate opportunity to share their input on topics of interest in the event that their household will miss the meeting.

—There should be a clear pathway by which topics get on the plenary agenda, which everyone has access to.

—The ideal in HOA decisions is discerning what, on balance will be best for all. This does not guarantee that others will agree with your thinking about an issue, or that your household’s preferences will prevail, no matter how strongly held.

—A reasonable effort will be made to find responses to issues that will work for all owners. However, if that does not seem possible, the group may make decisions by vote (one vote per household), with a majority prevailing.

—Clear written records will be maintained about the topics discussed in plenaries, the gist of what was considered, and any outcomes. A time will be set (one week?) for when meeting minutes are expected to be released for review and comment. Once accepted (or corrected) they will be kept in a file accessible to all residents. This may be physical, electronic, or both. In particular, this record should be made known to all prospective buyers, so they’ll have a better idea about they are getting into if they buy.

I further recommend:

• While the ideal is to have each household represented at every plenary, the reality is that people lead busy lives and that this will not always be possible, thus it needs to be possible to conduct business from time to time with one or more households absent. The keys to this working well are:

    ~Defining what constitutes a quorum (the minimum number of households present at a plenary to make binding decisions); and 

    ~An understanding that households who expect to miss a meeting are allowed to submit input about topics to be discussed to everyone ahead of time, which will be duly considered, but is not binding. 

    ~I suggest that you do not allow proxies, as someone not present will not be able to hear and be persuaded by what others have to say—they simply have to trust their neighbors to act in the best interests of the whole. (This prevents someone blocking consideration of a matter through non-attendance.)

• If proper process has been followed regarding advanced notification about when a topic will be discussed in plenary and a household chooses not to attend the meeting, they will have to trust the group to do good work without them, and will nonetheless be bound by the plenary’s decisions.

• When there is a turnover in ownership of a unit, the group will be responsibility to see that the new owner is made aware of: a) how the HOA functions; and b) the body of agreements in place, which they will be expected to abide by.

• Meetings, in the ideal, should be run (facilitated) by someone who is suitably disinterested in the outcome of the topics to be discussed. If there is no such person in your group available for a given topic, consider asking the member of a different HOA to facilitate that topic. Note: I am expressly recommending that you unlink the traditional role of president from the person who runs plenaries, as the skill set of someone who may be a suitable public face or point of contact for the group may have no overlap with the ability to run meetings well. The facilitator’s primary job is to see that the group follows its process agreements and that all voices have been heard and considered. Facilitators should not be taking sides.

• Just because there may be a legal requirement that the HOA has a designated President does not mean you are obliged to give them any power, and I suggest that you don’t. Keep that role titular.

• When it seems in the group’s interest to delegate, don’t start by asking for volunteers to fill slots (either for a manager position or for a committee). Rather, start by thoroughly delineating what you want that person (or persons) to accomplish and in what time frame—so that people who step forward have as clear a picture as possible of what they are signing up for and will be held accountable for. This should expressly include what they can decide on their own, and when they must consult—the limits of their power.

• Next, take time to discuss what qualities are desired in people filling the slot(s), so that everyone can reflect on whether they have them or not, before you ask for volunteers or nominations. This process will considerably reduce the level of frustration that arises with people not fulfilling assignments well. (Hint: if there are no available candidates within the group with the desired qualities, consider hiring outside the group.)

• Discuss how the HOA might productively respond if interpersonal tensions (conflict) arise among you that do not get resolved in a reasonable timeframe by the players involved. I guarantee you that this will occasionally happen—despite the best of intentions. It can be excruciating when tensions persist because the players are either unwilling or unable to work their way through it and this impacts everyone, seriously degrading the experience of living together, and the group's response has a significantly better chance of succeeding if you have an understanding about it ahead of need, rather than creating one in the moment.

• • •

As all of the above concepts are developed more fully elsewhere in this blog, you can consider this an outline of Cooperative Living Light.

Books That Have Touched Me Most

Last week, a friend asked me for a list of the books that have most impacted my life. As that seemed a compelling request, I am happy to share my response. As you'll see, I am an eclectic reader, and part of the fun is not knowing at the outset when a book will strike.a deep chord, or in what ways. It's such a joy to be surprised (which, I reckon, is why I'm still checking books out of the library, even as death draws near).

In no particular order:

Terror by Dan Simmons

This is a retelling of the tragedy of the Franklin Expedition to discover the Northwest Passage in 1945, as told from the perspective of Captain Crozier, second in command. Everyone perished and it chronicles the slow deaths of the crew as ice holds the ships fast (The Erebus and The Terror) and there is no escape in the frozen arctic. It’s both a story about the hubris of the British Admiralty and a powerful introduction to the very different worlds of the Inuit who were all around the British and whose offers to help the starving sailors was consistently spurned (what, after all, could heathens teach the British—sound familiar?) It powerfully introduces the reader into the alternate reality of animism and the culture of a people who had made peace with the cold.

How It Is by Viola Cordova

This book is a posthumously published work based on the collected writings of Viola Cordova, a Jicarilla Apache who had a foot in two cultures—both as a traditional indigenous woman and as a tenured university professor of philosophy who specialized in cosmology. Without being preachy or judgmental, she explains the broad differences between Indigenous origin stories and those of the dominating European settlers, illuminating how hard it was to understand each others’ perspective (It’s evocative of Ruth Benedict's classic anthropology study, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, which attempts to explain the profound cultural differences between Western Europe and that of Japan in the context of World War II). I was especially touched by this book because it help me understand and articulate how I related so viscerally to a sense of place after living at Sandhill for four decades. It turned out I was very drawn to a Native American spiritual view of place and right relationship to the Earth, even though I've—to my knowledge—no indigenous blood or training. It was (and is) a profound insight for me.

The Mists of Avalon by Marian Zimmer Bradley

I have always read a fair amount of science fiction/fantasy, and this retelling of the Arthurian legend from the pagan perspective was eye-opening for me, helping me understand how the winners author the histories (thereby controlling the narrative, and belittling the world of magic and Earth-based ritual). And throughout it all, it’s a cracking good love story. The initial sexual union of the young Arthur and Morgan le Fey is among the most erotic passages I've ever read.

Magister Ludi by Hermann Hesse

This my favorite Hesse book, telling the story of Joseph Knecht, who ascends to the pinnacle of excellence as a practitioner of the Glass Bead Game (the German title of this classic is Das Glasperlenspiel), an imaginary sport that involves the delicate and careful placement of glass beads on a board (a la Go, but different). Knecht rises from mundane roots to achieve his mastery and the story hinges on how little such notoriety is worth in the overall scheme of things once you have it. Right at the top of his game he resigns his position as master in favor of tutoring a difficult teen, with tragic results. For me this story illuminates questions about what truly has value in life, as well as uncertainties inherent in life's choices.

A Story Like the Wind and A Far-off Place by Laurens van der Post

This pair of fictional books by a Dutch author chronicles the adventures of two late teens who miraculously survive the violent overthrow of the boy's Boer family farm by Chinese insurrectionists, until they safely make their way to the southwest coast of Africa (across the Kalahari Desert) and find British relief. It’s a gripping story of courage, self-reliance, justice, and multicultural complexity.

People of the Deer by Farley Mowat

I read most of Mowat's works in my 20s, as I was obsessed with stories of the Canadian north. In this work of fictional anthropology, Mowat carefully describes the decline and ultimate collapse of a small Inuit tribal unit who had survived for centuries in symbiotic relationship with the herds of reindeer in the arctic north. These people lived inland and followed the deer as they migrated across Canada’s tundra. While fish were also part of their diet, they had created a stable subsistence life based mainly around deer protein and their deep knowledge of where the deer would be at a given time. On the one hand, contact with fur traders led to the introduction of guns, which enhanced the efficiency of their hunts, it also upset the balance of their delicate ecology, and Mowat gives readers a glimpse of the demise of these inland tribes.

On the one hand, this book gave me insights into how humans could adapt and even thrive in what most would consider a hostile environment. On the other, it opened my eyes to the possibility of viable culture based on cooperation (rather than competition) and the power of living with the land, rather than trying to subdue it (themes that were reinforced in both Dune, and The Chalice and the Blade).

The Entitled by Frank Deford

This is a work of fiction by one of America’s best sportswriter’s of the late 20th Century. It tells the story of a baseball lifer who gets an unexpected chance late in life to manage at the major league level and is determined to make the most of it. Among other things, this means doing his best to work sensitively with the culture and ego of his star player, a Latino slugger. The ride is bumpy but the manager's honesty and hard work pay off. He earns his players’ trust and the team has an excellent season, with prospects to make the playoffs. Then scandal erupts when the star player is accused of sexually assaulting a white woman who has a credible story and all hell breaks loose. Now what?

It happens that the manager's daughter is a lawyer and she decides to investigate, rather than see her father’s dream go up in smoke without a look. She ultimately saves the day (without dad knowing what she’s up to) and is able to prove that the woman made up the story and the ballplayer has been falsely accused. In addition to the drama of the story itself (Deford is an spellbinding raconteur) the author succeeds in illuminating the multicultural nuances of contemporary sports, and how baseball managing involves intuition, not just a reliance on percentages.

From Good to Great by Jim Collins

This work of nonfiction was written by a business professor at the University of Colorado, who gathered together a team of graduate students to investigate an anomaly: in poring over the stock history of thousands of publicly traded companies (which meant their financial records were in the public record), he found 11 companies that had a number of years of average performance, followed by a sudden surge of performance that was at least 3x better than the Dow Jones average and which they were able to sustain for 15+ years. His research question was: what happened to explain that?

His team was able to identify a handful of common themes about the corporate culture of those 11 companies that I found both inspirational and illuminating as the executive manager of the non-profit Fellowship for Intentional Community (1987-2015), and I have unhesitatingly recommended this title to anyone interested in establishing sound foundational management principles.

The Spirit of Intimacy by Sobonfu Somé

I stumbled onto this nonfiction gem more than 20 years ago, while staying in a client’s basement and perusing the bookshelf before going to bed. It’s a straightforward description of traditional West African village life and how the individual relates to the whole. It was, as you might suspect, a relative easy matter for me to substitute "intentional community" for “village” and see how well Somé’s wisdom was just as viable. This was both an affirmation that intentional community was onto something powerful, and also somewhat humbling in that what I had heretofore thought was groundbreaking and revolutionary was little more than rediscovering ancient wisdom that was largely lost in the impersonality of modern living.

The Bone People by Keri Hulme

This book is a very unique and challenging treatment of the complex interplay of three people interacting mainly in isolation on the South Island of New Zealand: a white woman artist, a Maori man, and his mute son, who has been beaten and abused by the man, though it takes a while for that to become clear. The woman painstakingly builds a relationship with the boy and tires to understand the cycle of violence and how to shift it rather than just condemn and interrupt it. It’s an agonizing, yet eye-opening read, opening doors you may not have known existed.

Dune by Frank Herbert

This, of course, is a well-known, classic science fiction work, with a number of sequels. I can think of no more powerful introduction into a possible future resulting from ineffective responses to climate change. While fiction, it paints a highly imaginative future that includes interplanetary travel and high intrigue (some things never change), with various groups vying for world dominance. There are both good and evil in abundance, as well as the universal challenge to wield power constructively. In particular, this book explores life on a planet where water—one of life’s absolute necessities—is extremely short and therefore all the more precious. What might that be like? Dune gave me a first peek behind that curtain.

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

This is a complex, tightly woven piece of historical fiction rooted in the Middle Ages, pivoting off the key role libraries and monasteries played in preserving much of the precious knowledge about the world that had been collected up until the fall of Rome and was precariously being maintained for the future (when the sun would come out again in the Renaissance). It is also a mystery, full of codes, intrigues, and secret passages. While you need to pay close attention to not lose your way—just like the characters—it was well worth the journey

Sitting in the Fire by Arnie Mindell

A friend recommended this book to me early in my career as a group process consultant and it opened up to me an understanding about how to work constructively with non-rational input (which abounds at every meeting if you’re paying attention), as well as the concepts of rank and privilege, which are in play constantly (the key here being attaining consciousness of what’s going on, not trying to eliminate rank and privilege as factors). I took three steps forward in my work as a cooperative group consultant after reading this book.

The Chalice and The Blade by Riane Eisler

As someone already committed to cooperative living and intentional community, it was a breath of fresh air to read Eisler's work of comparative anthropology, making the case that while competitive cultures have dominated the modern scene there have been a number of examples of successful cultures rooted in cooperation over the ages, affirming my deep suspicion that humans are not inherently competitive—they are conditioned that way. And what can be learned can be unlearned.

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

I came across this beauty only recently. Kimmerer writes from two perspectives (a la Cordova in How It Is): both as a Native American who is deeply familiar with native plants from her upbringing, and as a credentialed university botanist. Throughout the book she patiently explains how Native Americans view certain plants and contrasts that with how those same plants are valued (or not) by contemporary society—mainly for their commercial potential, making it clear—without rubbing the reader’s nose in it—how short-sighted it is to reduce a plant's worth to its commercial value, and how much there still remains to learn from the amazing symbiotic and complex relationships in the plant kingdom.

Elderhood by Louise Aronson

I picked up this book three years ago at a church garage sale, and it's the best single book I know that demystifies what it’s like to be a senior—in contrast to simply an older adult— and what it could be like, if we turned our attention to the possibilities. Aronson is a gerontologist—a doctor who specializes in aging and how people change as they age. In addition to plenty of statistics about the reality of aging, Elderhood explains how being a senior is a different phase of life than being an older adult and is best thought of in that light. Considerable emphasis is placed on having conversations about one’s fears and hopes with others who are in same phase of life, and then broadening those conversations to include younger folks who mean well but don’t yet have a feel for what you’re going through. Very inspirational.

Covered with Night by Nicole Eustace

I bought this book on whim at our local Indie bookstore, while shopping for a Xmas present for Susan two years ago, and was riveted by the impact of its main premise: that the Haudenosaunee Confederacy purposefully shifted their frame of reference when they reflected on the futility of war and violence to settle disputes. After who know how long they engaged in war with neighboring tribes, instead they shifted to an orientation of right relationship in the world. Thus, when someone committed an act of violence—even murder—they saw the perpetrators as out of alignment with the world and were mainly focused on retuning them to right relationship, rather on retribution or punishment. 

By carefully reading Quaker diaries of the time, the author unpacks a specific instance of an actual murder of a native fur trapper by a pair of traders that occurred around 1730, west of Philadelphia, explaining how difficult it was for whites and the Iroquois Confederacy to understand each other because they had such different goals in mind and it never occurred to the whites that the “more primitive” Native Americans could hold a perspective worth taking into account.

Hearing of a culture purposefully switching away from war to solve disputes was incredibly heartening to me. If it happened once, it could happen again, couldn’t it?

Remembering Ceilee

As I reported in my previous blog, my son, Ceilee, died Aug 5. He was 43. While many family and friends were impacted by his death, I have been thinking mostly about Annie (his mother), Taivyn (his 16-year-old daughter), Connor (his 13-year-old son), and myself.

Here is a photo of Annie, Connor, Taivyn, and Ceilee taken three years ago, during a vastly different, happier August, when all of us were together at a road house on Lake Chautauqua in western NY (where Annie's family shares rights to a lakeside cottage):

After the tide of life ebbed from Ceilee early this August, I have spent much of the month strolling somberly along the agate beach he left behind, randomly picking up and savoring some of the bright stones left there. This sharing highlights some of the mementos that caught my eye and that I hold dear.

Though it is by no means the sum of his life, these are nonetheless fragments of a father’s precious memories, the articulation of which has helped me process my grief.

• Holding his vernix-smeared warm body on my belly right after being born, while Annie continued to labor to deliver the placenta. All of us were exhausted from being up all night, having concentrated on the birth. It was a cold sunny day in January, and I was aglow in the miracle of new life. 

• At his second birthday, we had a party at Sandhill and some of our friends with young children (his peers) were in attendance and I wanted Ceilee to show off what he knew by asking him to identify body parts. With an unfamiliar audience, however, he got shy—and was unwilling to perform. At first I was frustrated, and then it dawned on me how ridiculous I was being. Children are not trained seals.

• As Ceilee was homeschooled until he went to public high school (mainly for social reasons), we were able to do a good deal of traveling together. The first time that just the two us hit the road, was right as he turned three. He and I journeyed by train to Duluth, to visit my good friends from college, Tony & Susan, and their daughter, Britta, who was about Ceilee’s age. I recall revealing to a stranger as we changed trains in St Paul that it was my son's birthday and he spontaneously gave Ceilee a quarter.

Susan and I (we got together in 2015, after Tony died in 2004, and Yana dropped me in 2015) recalled a particular moment of that visit, when Ceilee and Britta decided to set up a play farm. Ceilee suddenly stopped everything to first establish which way was north. While such a directional obsession is somewhat weird in a three-year-old, this turned out to be valuable later on when he rode shotgun on long car trips and I depended on him to read maps and help with directions. 

• Later that year, I took a solo vacation to Alaska for 17 days, to visit another college friend (Peg Kehrer) in Juneau. It was the longest I’d ever been away from my son up to that point, and I recall walking around the farm when I returned (in August) and he accompanied me, showing me the gardens (and all the ripening tomatoes). I have a particular image of his turning his head up to investigate the drooping seed head of a sunflower plant growing on the border of the garden, to see if it had a fragrance. It was such a joy to see his curiosity about Nature.

• When he was five, Ann took him into the county library for reading hour, to increase his contact with other young kids. The concept was that different businessmen and town officials would volunteer to read a story to the children, and that day it was the turn of a local bank president. He had selected a book about pandas, and began his session by asking any of the youngsters gathered around if they knew anything about pandas. One girl enthusiastically piped up, “Pandas are a kind of bear,” to which the bank president responded, “That’s right.”

Ceilee raised his hand at that point, and when called upon, informed the president, “Actually, scientists think pandas are more closely related to raccoons.” You could have heard a pin drop. Suddenly the president realized he was in over his head discussing evolution with a 5-year-old, and hastily ended the Q&A and retreated to the safety of reading the book. Parents sitting in the back of the room, aware of the president’s acute embarrassment, and were stuffing their hands in the mouths to keep from howling with laughter.

What the president was unaware of was that we had a subscription to National Geographic Zoo Books, a periodical devoted to acquainting children with exotic animals and we had just read about pandas. Oops. Bad luck for the president.

• Both of my kids (Ceilee and his younger sister, Jo) were born at Sandhill Farm, where the community had made a conscious decision to not have a television. As part of the deal, I taught both my kids to read, and spent an enormous amount of time reading aloud to both of them, to instill in them a love of books. I’m talking about tens of thousands of pages each, and those hours together were special.

• I recall coming home from a road trip when he was still quite young (maybe 6?) and his greeting me with a new word he’d learned, correctly guessing that I may not know it: crepuscular. He was so proud of reversing the flow of our interactive learning—which from that point forward, it was never again a one-way street.

• From age 7 onward he would often accompany me to community network meetings. We would have the travel time together—often going by car or train. He understood that he would have only limited access to me while I was working but all of me when we were en route, and it pleased me that he had a personal experience of what his father did—a connection I never had with my father.

One time, when he was 8, we were at an FIC board meeting at Shannon Farm in Afton VA. He often chose to sit in on the meetings, even though he never spoke, nor was he expected to. People found it a bit unnerving that an 8-year-old had the discipline and attention span to pull that off, but there we were.

At the closing circle (after three days of meetings), we did a round of appreciation where each person took a turn saying something they appreciated about the person in the spotlight, As it happened, our host, Dan Questenberry, was sitting to Ceilee’s left, and thus was the first speak when it was Ceilee’s turn to receive. Looking appreciatively at my son, Dan began, “Oh good, I get to start you off… “ 

Because of the rotation we used for this exercise, Dan wasn’t in the spotlight until an hour later, right at the end, and Ceilee was the last person to speak. Turning to him, Ceilee began, “Oh good, I get to finish you off.”

He’d been holding onto that rejoinder for an hour, waiting for the right moment. Dan’s partner, Jenny, came up to me afterwards and observed, “Ceilee’s a midget, right?” She couldn’t imagine an 8-year-old with that kind of presence and sense of timing. 

• A key feature of Ceilee’s early teen years was doing Taekwondo once weekly. It was eye-opening for Annie and me to see him accept a level of discipline from his instructors that he railed against with his parents. It has heartening to see him grow up in that way. The key, I suppose, was that he chose Taekwondo, rather than had it imposed upon him.

• I have many memories of being in Nature with Ceilee. Mostly canoeing, but there was a good deal of backpacking interspersed in there. Once, when we were canoeing in northern Manitoba I lost my only pair of glasses in an ill-advised attempt to shoot a rapids. While we survived the dunking just fine, Ceilee had to help me read the road signs on the drive home.

Another time we did a trip that traversed parts of the Nelson, Hayes, and Echimamish Rivers, one of the key features of which was a nasty 4-mile portage—the longest I ever did. Sorting all of our gear (canoe included) into five units for portaging, we had to cover 32 miles between us to schlep everything across (five trips forward when we were loaded, and three backwards, empty-handed). The rhythm of this was to carry one unit as far as you could, and then rest by walking backward until you reached the first unit you could handle, which you then picked up and started forward again. It took us about 5 hours all told and Ceilee never complained once.

Another time, we backpacked a segment and a half of the Pacific Crest Trail one June, from Castle Crags to Old Station in northern California. We got off the southbound Coast Starlight at the Dunsmuir stop, and hitched to Redding to rejoin the train at the end of our trek. We had shipped all our non-camping luggage to the Bay Area before boarding the train in Seattle (where I had been doing some community networking), and caught up with it again in Berkeley. Incredibly, we only encountered 10 people on the trail over the course of 11 days in June—peak hiking season.

One canoe trip we laid out an ambitious circle route in northern Saskatchewan, but realized one-third of the way into the trip that we had bitten off too much, and would need to cut it short. After arriving at the bottom of Reindeer Lake, I left Ceilee bivouacked in the village of Southend, and hitched back to our car. It took me 24 hours to get there and back, as I had to travel the equivalent of Chicago to Washington DC (because the roads that far north are not nearly as direct or numerous as the water routes). By the time I’d returned he’d made friends with a number of the indigenous children.

Hiking once in the Olympic National Park in Washington, I have a memory of urging Ceilee to resist the temptation to walk closer to a mama bear to get a better camera angle. Happily, he never got between mama and her cub. 

• Annie and I both struggled mightily when it came to buying Ceilee clothes. While Annie and I were never much into fashion, Ceilee, naturally enough for a teenager, often wanted something more stylish, and the battles were a strain on all of us. Finally, we hit on an elegant solution. We created an annual clothing allowance for Ceilee, and gave him free rein over managing it. If he wanted to blow one-fourth of his budget on a pair of Air Jordans, that was his call—just don’t come back to us asking for more money. And it worked!

• I visited Ceilee on campus seven times during his undergraduate days at Amherst College, where, among other things, he taught me beer pong (which, for some reason, was called “Beirut” at the time). All that practice paid off during graduation weekend, when he and I formed a Dad-and-Son team that went undefeated.

• In the spring of his senior year, we made it a point to attend a Yankee-Red Sox game at iconic Fenway Park. We both loved sports, and baseball was my first love. It was a proud papa moment for me when, years later, Ceilee confided that he enjoyed going to baseball games twice as much with me as with his friends, because I could illuminate subtleties of the game that most fans miss (like the third baseman dropping back to play deeper when there were two strikes on the batter).

• As an adult, Ceilee and I shared some political views, but not all. I was a liberal Democrat, and he was a libertarian. While we frequently disagreed about the proper role of government—sometimes with animation—we both worked hard to never let that shake the foundations of our love, something I failed to accomplish with my Republican father.

• When my good friend Geoph Kozeny was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2007, I traveled to the Bay Area to be with him toward the end, and to help him sort out his estate. While there, Ceilee visited to say good-bye to someone who was a regular feature of his growing up at Sandhill (Geoph would visit Sandhill the week between Christmas and New Year’s every year). It was a poignant connection. On the one hand, Geoph was dying. On the other, I recall rendezvousing with Ceilee at the Ashby BART stop after he landed at SFO, and then sitting at the bar at nearby Kirala—one of my favorite Japanese restaurants, where he revealed that he and Tosca were pregnant with Taivyn. The wheel of life.

• I first became aware that drugs were impacting Ceilee’s life when I visited him at his rental house in the suburbs of St Louis to watch the 2013 Super Bowl. Tosca (his wife) had struggled with drugs as a teenager and had recently relapsed. Less clear was how much Ceilee might have been doing drugs with her. He went into a depressive spiral after getting Tosca into rehab, and seeing his family falling apart. Once Tosca got out of rehab (in Los Angeles), she chose to stay there rather than return to Missouri, and Ceilee moved out there with the kids to bring everyone together and attempt to rebuild the family. While Tosca was clear she was happy to co-parent with Ceilee, she didn’t want to continue as intimate partners and that rejection was hard for him. 

For the next decade—right up until his death—Ceilee struggled to right the ship. Sometimes things went better and sometimes not. While I would visit him as much as I could, I never picked up on his doing drugs when I was with him. But it’s also true that I am not skilled at seeing the signs and he never admitted to having a drug habit—even though Annie and I explicitly asked.

During the past decade, Annie and I both anguished over how much to support our son—what was giving him chances to dig himself out of a hole, and what was enabling? Because of the exhaustion associated with being in that state of unknowing, and witnessing his constant state of struggle, there was part of me that felt relief when he died, because the struggle was over. To be clear, this in no way diminishes my overwhelming sense of loss, or the sadness I feel for Annie, Taivyn, and Connor—those of us he left behind.

• I last saw Ceilee in April, when he visited Susan and me in Duluth for 6 days. Among other things he tightened the handrails along the stairs to the basement and the second story. Today, I think of him every time I use the stairs, which is many times daily.

 

On Ceilee Dying at 43

This week I got a call I never wanted to receive, informing me that my son, Ceilee, had been found dead in his bathroom, apparently of a drug overdose. I can only conceive of this as every parent's nightmare.

Ceilee had been struggling to put his life together for years, which included some serious bouts of depression. At some point drugs entered the picture and his mother (Annie, my ex-partner and dear friend) and I were slow to read the signs that that was part of the equation, which significantly complicated his chances for recovery. (While I don't have details about what drugs he was taking, or in what concentrations or frequency, none of that matters now. Dead is dead.)

Ceilee leaves behind a daughter, Taivyn (16), and a son, Connor (13). My grandchildren. While it had been my hope (as well as my plea to him) that their need for a stable father would be sufficient incentive for him to right the ship, it was not to be. While I do not understand drug addiction, neither do I judge those who succumb. There is no question but that it can be an awful scourge—one that has touched me this week in the most personal of ways. Both his mother and I made attempts to talk with him about his drug use, but he never opened up with us about it. I reckon he always thought he could control it; rather than the reverse. Now, a light has been extinguished that will never shine again. 

Today, there is a hollow spot in my soul, and I am feeling profoundly sad. For me, for Annie, for Taivyn & Connor. There are no winners. 

I had hoped to never experience the demise of either of my children, but here I am. This week, I have been living under a brooding, endless cloud, wandering kaleidoscopically from one precious memory to another, knowing there will be no new ones coming. The book is closed. 

While it's hard to imagine that I'll ever laugh again—I know that, eventually, I will. I also know that it's important to be fully available for the grief, and that it's not something that can be hurried or scheduled. Further, I know that untold numbers of other parents have walked this lonely, shadowy road before, and that sustains me in my misery.

Writing about this helps. At least a little.

The Relative Fluidity of Community Values and the Permanence of Community Buildings

Looking back over my 50 years of personal experience with intentional community, I have some things to say about the role of common values in communities, about how to think about community buildings (as distinct from private dwellings), and about how the one relates to the other. Let me take them in turn.

I. Common Values

Intentional Communities are called that because residents have purposefully come together around explicit common values. That is, they've made the choice to seek out a life in association with others with whom they share key values. While there can be great variety in what those values are (spiritual, ecological, dietary, parenting philosophy, alignment with certain personal growth disciplines, political agenda, sexual orientation—you name it, and in any combination), the point is that group members agree on those that are the foundation for their life together, and they recruit new members on that basis.

What is often misunderstood about common values, is that they do not eliminate disagreement among members—both because there are any number of ways that members can (and often do) disagree about matters not addressed by the common values, and because different people interpret the same words differently, and those nuances are typically not exposed until you get into the nitty gritty of living together.

So why bother having common values? They are helpful in three main ways: 

a) They are the essence of your elevator speech when recruiting new members. You want all new residents to agree to be guided by reasonable interpretations of the group's common values. (If a prospective cannot agree to abide by that, tell them thanks, but no thanks.)

b) Communities do their best work when they regularly identify which common values are in play when wrestling with any given issue, for the purpose of figuring out how best to balance them when choosing how to respond. That's the heavy lifting of plenary considerations, and should generally be well-grounded on a foundation of common values.

c) They also help distinguish what groups are obliged to wrestle with, and what is a member's personal request, that groups are not obliged to honor. 

When groups relate to their values in this way—as living, dynamic concepts, rather than as stone tablets handed down by founding fathers & mothers—the community becomes a manifestation of its values, which evolve over time.

With this in mind, I advise groups not to belabor refining their common values at the outset, through a series of what-if thought experiments (how will we handle x, or situation y if either occurs?) Reality will be challenging enough, without worrying about how many angels can be accommodated on a pinhead.

A corollary is understanding that groups effectively refine what their common values mean through the decisions they make. To be sure, the weight that the group gives certain values can (and almost certainly will) change over time—both because there are inevitable shifts in community membership, and because 20-year-olds may value things differently as they become 40-year-olds, and then 60-year-olds, etc.

(Thus, when a long-term member responds to a request to reconsider (or reinterpret) a value with, That's not the way we do things here, it's not particularly helpful. Far better, in my view, is something like, In the past we made the decision to handle this issue as follows… What do you think is different about the current situation that justifies a new approach? See how this both honors what has been done before, yet leaves the door open to making adjustments, in light of new perspectives, or new circumstances?)

Looked at all together, the body of decisions and actions taken by the group over the course of its history becomes an increasingly nuanced statement of what exactly you stand for (or stood for in the past). What's more, you should know that prospective members will be more attracted to what you are, than what you say you intend to be.

II. Community Buildings

Now let's switch gears and consider buildings. While I'm not an architect, I have built some community buildings and been involved in any number of design charrettes. From that experience I want to share some principles about community structures meant to serve the whole. Some are peculiar to the dynamics of community; others are generic to construction in any circumstance.

• While buildings typically last a long time (40+ years), the functions that the community wants that building to serve are likely to change before the building's useful life has been exhausted. Thus, an important design criteria is how easily can you reconfigure how space is used if you change your mind about what you'd like. Example: when Sandhill Farm (my community for four decades) built a major building in 1981, we took this principle to heart by constructing a two-story 25'x48' earth-sheltered building that had no interior load-bearing walls on the lower story. Forty years later, the community has twice completely changed its mind about how to use the bottom half of the building, and it was no big deal to do so either time. Whew.

• Communities' ability to attract and retain members with high-level construction and maintenance skills is hit or miss. Great when you have it; expensive when you don't. Additional caution: while I don't think this is causative, it is relatively common that people who possess blue collar skills such as carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, HVAC expertise, and the like are not necessarily great at soft skills such as communication and relationship repair. Thus, be advised that when you sacrifice the latter to secure the former you are sowing the whirlwind.

• Be cautious about accepting a design for a community building that relies on novel technology or a complicated system to function well. Because membership turnover goes with the territory, what will you do when the "expert" leaves?

• Before signing off on a design feature, ask yourself the question, how will we repair it if it breaks or no longer functions as expected? If you don't have a good answer, think about it some more.

• For things with a relatively short lifespan, the original purchase price is often the most important financial consideration. With durable goods, however—generally defined as things expected to last more than three years—it is prudent to also have a close look at projected maintenance costs. In fact, the longer you expect an item to last, the more important it is to consider maintenance costs. Buildings, of course, are something you expect to be very durable. As such it's generally advisable to use the highest quality materials you can afford, and those which are expected to require the least maintenance, or need replacing least frequently. Example: metal roofing or tiles, rather than shingles.

•  Don't limit your thinking solely to indoor space when designing a building; it behooves you to also think outside the box—literally—to include the use of spaces immediately adjacent to the building's thermal envelope, which have the potential to have high utility at low-cost. 

Example 1: at Sandhill (in northeastern MO) we had hot humid summers and cold winters. In the winter we'd use our screened-in east-facing porch for firewood storage. For the other three seasons, it was prime social space. It would catch the morning sun when the day was cool—perfect for morning coffee—and be in the shade when the afternoon sun was bearing down, and any breeze was cherished. (As a bonus, it was the ideal spot for processing horseradish in the fall, when the noxious fumes would assault your mucous membranes if attempted indoors.)

Example 2: for minimal cost Sandhill built an unheated expansion to the back porch for the primary purpose of storing canning supplies (obviating the need to schlep boxes in and out of the attic all year). This was a big deal for a community that grew about 80% of its own food, and preserved things in quantity.

III. The Intersection of Common Values & Community Buildings

Years ago, we were having a discussion at Sandhill about the possibility of constructing a new building, when one relatively new member expressed disapproval of how past community buildings were designed, because they didn't adequately take into account permaculture principles. 

I recall vividly my response at the time. With a certain amount of irritation, I said the community made decisions about the design of past buildings in exactly the same way we'd approach future ones. To wit, we'd discuss it as a group and combine the best thinking of the current membership to determine the design parameters, giving extra weight to the preferences of the project honcho.

Thus, while I tried to assure the new member that the community would be happy to include his sense of permaculture principles when designing future buildings—so long as he stayed—I was unwilling to feel ashamed that we hadn't anticipated his perspective in the past. 

By and large there is nothing that communities do that is a longer lasting statement of how they interpret their values at a certain point in time than its buildings, which often have a lifespan that exceeds that of their constructors. You'll do well to keep that in mind (and remain humble). My advice? Do the best you can with what you have at the time, and expect to get smarter as you go. 

What was once a shiny, new state-of-the-art accomplishment can inadvertently slide into the ignominy of becoming a stodgy embarrassment over the course of its lifetime. Oops!

Happy 50th Sandhill Farm!

Today I'm offering a kaleidoscope of memories from my first five years at Sandhill Farm, on the occasion of its Golden Anniversary.

Exactly 50 years ago today, Ann Shrader and I arrived at the 63-acre property two miles west of Rutledge MO (that we had just purchased two weeks prior for the grand price of $13,500) that would be the start of Sandhill Farm. We rendezvoused there with fellow pioneers, Ed Pultz and Wendy Soderlund, who had driven up from their home in Memphis TN to live near Memphis MO (our county seat).

Both red and white spirea were in full bloom, framing the outside of the modest white clapboard, one-bedroom house that the two couples took turns occupying (while the other lived in a tent) until we completed a 16'x30' renovation on the south side that added two bedrooms and expanded the bathroom. Probably its most distinctive feature was the checkerboard pink & black linoleum tiles on the kitchen floor. (Hard to believe that could ever have been in fashion—excepting, perhaps, at a Good & Plenty factory.)

We were full of enthusiasm for our experiment in community living—which was a good thing, given the bottomless pit of our naiveté. As we had arrived just after the frost free date for northern MO, one of our first acts was getting the garden planted. I still recall Ann's and my excitement at seeing the first shoot emerge from our carefully planted rows of vegetable seeds, only to discover later that it was milkweed, not sweet corn. Talk about a rookie error.

While the house stood on the highest point of the property (in the southwest corner), there was a house located directly to our south that was higher still—the home of Edna & Earnest Childers. They were in their 80s and the only remaining residents of Sandhill after Charlie Gilmer died in 1972. Charlie was the last person to have have lived in our house, which we negotiated the purchase of from his surviving son and daughter-in-law, Bob & Lilian.

It's noteworthy that Earnest, our neighbor, was born in that house and had lived there his entire life. Amazingly, he was already two years old when the Santa Fe Railroad laid tracks nearby, in the late 1880s. The town of Rutledge sprang up at that point, as a service stop along the route from Chicago to Kansas City. Though Edna & Earnest both passed away a few years after we arrived, Sandhill has been continuously occupied since the 1850s. (Before that, we understand it was a seasonal camping spot for indigenous Native Americans.) In the years prior to the Show Me State being fully platted and the current county lines defined, Sandhill was something of a regional center, and the location from where a frontier circuit judge would periodically dispense justice in our corner of the state.

While Ann focused on gardening (something she still does today), Ed took charge of overseeing the house extension, working closely with Wendy's father, an experienced builder/architect. I bought a copy of H. P. Richter's Wiring Simplified (for $0.87) from the local Ace Hardware store and became the community's electrician—while we were doing the house extension, we rewired everything (switching from fuses to circuit breakers) and reroofed the entire house. Laying concrete blocks for the extension's foundation was my first foray into cementitious work, which also became a community niche for me. (Over the years I learned to do concrete work, as well as lay block, brick, tile, and tuck pointing—all flowing from that first summer.)

In the early years we tried all manner of homestead things, substituting labor for dollars. Example: raking leaves in the fall from the Childers' massive white oaks (that were sprouts before the arrival of white settlers) and then packing them into circular bins we fashioned from scrap woven wire fencing. After a couple years of rain and snow we had our own leaf mold, for use as a garden soil amendment.

Our first dog was Rochester, a medium-sized stray that showed up unannounced one day and never left. He was with us for nine years and was the only dog in my life that was closer to me than any other human. Our first cat was another stray, Seymour, an orange tabby. I took it as a good omen (for a cooperative community) that the two of them got along famously. Both were outdoor pets and they would huddle together for warmth on an old blanket inside a plywood kennel on the front porch during the winter months. 

Early on we acquired a Jersey milk cow, Rebecca. While we didn't get gobs of milk, it was high in butterfat and we were self-sufficient in butter in those days. (Cream is most readily churned to butter at 62 degrees, and I did it often enough that I could tell by feel when the gallon we had taken out of the fridge had warmed to the right temp.) 

Milking time was one of the highlights of the day for both Seymour and Rochester. Seymour would follow the milker down to the barn, where he could depend on getting some squirts of fresh milk for his trouble. While the distance from house to barn was only about 50 yards, as soon as Seymour headed down there, Rochester would make a game of overtaking the cat and putting his entire head in his mouth. Seymour would patiently wait until Rochester released him and then would travel several more yards until Rochester did it again. By the time Seymour made it to the barn, his head would be covered in dog slobber.

While the cost of living in our area was low (hence the bargain land prices), so were the opportunities for employment, and we scrambled to figure out a way to make ends meet. At one time or another, in the early years all of us took jobs off the farm. Some taught, some worked for the extension service, some did work for neighbors. As I recall, that first summer Ed drove a tractor for a neighbor, earning the not-so-handsome wage of $60 for a 40-hour week. After that we never worked for less than $2/hour (hard bargainers that we were).

For most of its existence, Sandhill's signature product was organic sorghum, a traditional sweetener in the Midwest and South. The seed for that was planted when Ann & I stopped by the homestead of Joe Pearl & Eva Grover (a mile or two south of Memphis) to buy some sorghum during the fall of 1975. We stayed long enough to watch it being made and were fascinated by the process. They were in their 70s and it was obvious the work was tiring for them. We offered to help, and before we knew it we were back every day, lending a hand. They would only make about 7 gallons a day, yet it impressed us that every drop was sold about as fast as it was made.

Thinking that this might be a specialty product for Sandhill, we planted some cane the next year and traded our labor in 1976 for the use of the Grover's equipment to process it. That went well enough that we took it another step in 1977 and had stainless steel cooking pans made for us at a metal fabrication shop in Quincy IL. We bought a sorghum mill to do our own pressing, and had labels made announcing the availability of Sandhill Sorghum. While we were somewhat concerned about being in competition with the Grovers (we didn't want to bite that hand), it happened that Joe Pearl had a stroke in 1977 and they never made sorghum again, and thus we became the sole sorghum producers in Scotland County. For a period of more than 40 years, sorghum was the flagship product of the community's agricultural portfolio.

Community was a tenuous concept the first five years, as Ann & I struggled to get beyond being one couple living with others who tried it out for a year or two and then moved on. Following Ed & Wendy, there was Pamela Johnston & Michael Almon. Then we had Jesse Evans, Lin McGee, and Linda Joseph (all from Texas, for some reason). It was something of a revolving door in the early years. After five years, it was down to just three of us: Ann, Tim Jost, and me.

Our breakthrough in stability came circa 1979, when Stan Hildebrand, Grady Holley, and Thea Page arrived. Over the ensuing five years the only change in personnel was Clarissa Gyorgy (who came to us from Twin Oaks in Virginia) while Thea moved to Twin Oaks, along with her 2-year old daughter, Shining. After that we were never fewer than 5, and it felt like we'd crossed the line into being a stable intentional community. Whew.

While losing members was always hard, those early years are largely happy memories, and I look back with amazement at what we were able to accomplish with sufficient pluck and luck.

Trusting Your Gut as a Facilitator

For the last two decades, the most complex and fun thing I do on a regular basis is train facilitators for working in cooperative culture.

Fundamental to my approach is teaching the necessity (and skill set) needed to work both rationally (with ideas) and emotionally (with energy). That said, humans are a good deal more complex than just those two components, and I want to focus today on working intuitively—knowing when to do something because it feels right, whether you can explain it or not.

To be fair, for most people this is not accessible when they first learn to facilitate, because they don't yet have sufficient body knowing in the role of facilitator to access subconscious inspirations, or sufficient grounding to trust such inspirations.

But you can get there, and I think I do some of my best work when I allow my gut to enter into an internal dialog with my head and heart about what to do. This shows up in a couple ways.

Planning

About 15 months ago I did 10 days of work in person with a longstanding group that was deeply divided over who they were now that the kids had grown up and started questioning the course that had been laid out by their elders. They were stuck and wanted outside facilitation to guide them through an attempt to figure out whether there was any hope of reconciliation or whether it was time to seek an amicable divorce.

The personal strain among members was so bad that there had been moments of near physical violence, which is not something I commonly encounter. Working with a dear friend and fellow facilitator, Sarah Ross, we were given a small suite of rooms in the basement of the common house, where we could meet with individuals when they wanted to confer with us, and where we could discuss between us what was happening in the group and how best to proceed. 

Each night Sarah and I would talk over where we were, and where we might go next, and I'd go to bed with an open mind about how to start the next day. By placing that question in the center of my attention as my last conscious thought, my subconscious would chew on it overnight, and every morning I awoke with clarity about how to proceed. I did this every day for nine days, and came to trust it.

While I love working this way, it's quite rare to get the chance to be with a group for that long a stretch. More commonly, the longest I have is from Friday evening until Sunday afternoon, which means only two overnights.

In the moment

In addition to dreaming into the future (described above), there is a more immediate version of intuition playing a key role in my facilitation. Often enough, someone will tell a story about how something has gone wrong for them, or they're afraid that it will, and I have learned in those moments to try to let myself feel into their reality and imagine what that might be like—to get what they're describing viscerally, not just rationally. For a few minutes, I try to be in their skin, and reflect back what I imagine them to have experienced, with explicit attention to the emotions.

When I get this right (practice helps), it builds a bridge to that person, who might otherwise feel isolated and is likely to not trust that they have been accurately heard or held. They are able to exhale, and they become more available to hear what others are saying. This step both deepens the conversation (legitimizing emotional experiences and impact) and deescalates tension—both of which can be highly beneficial. To be clear, I am not "taking their side"; I am becoming them, temporarily—a facility I make available to others in the room as well.

Sometimes new facilitators report that they are too empathic, by which they mean they can get so entangled in another's story that they lose track of who and where they are. For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, I don't have that problem. I know what I'm doing when I try on another's footwear. While I may or may not do a good job of reading the other's reality, I never lose sight of why I'm doing it, or who I am. I never worry about losing track of what's me, and what's astral projection. 

Taken another step, once you have a bead on an outlier's reality, you have invaluable clues about how to build a bridge to them when it comes to problem solving.

Getting in Touch with me Directly

A reader just posted this Comment on my blog:

Is there a good email or preferred way to reach you directly?

laird@ic.org

The Art of the Report

Early in my 35-year career as a group dynamics professional, I became aware that most people only digest and retain about 20% of what happens when I work with them. Ugh.

I believe there are many reasons for this:

—There's typically a lot going on, and it's easy to drop stitches. 

—The tendency to be so self-absorbed (how does this impact me?) that they miss the bigger picture. 

—A lot of folks aren't that good at listening. 

—Being too embarrassed to admit when you're confused, and thus failing to ask questions to better understand. 

—Not being open to new ideas (because you're so invested in the old ones—even when they're demonstrably not working).

As a consequence of this insight, I developed the habit of writing an after action report, in which I carefully go over what happened while I was with them, plus what I observed and what I recommend going forward. Even though there is often little that's new in these reports (from what the group was given orally while I was with them), a good report can significantly enhance what the group can make use of.

OK, so what constitutes a "good report"? Good question.

While not a court transcript, it should, I believe, cover the flow and sequence of the conversation, and succinctly identify the themes, conclusions, and next steps that emerge from each segment of the work. It should incorporate reflections about the energy in the room, not just the ideas. It should also capture unfinished business which either surfaced tangentially, or for which there wasn't time to address.

Writing a thorough report takes me about as much time as the meeting itself. Why so long? Partly because many people won't read a longer report and it can take me a while to boil down my comments to what I consider essential. (There is a quote attributable to Mark Twain that applies here: I apologize for such a long letter—I didn't have time to write a short one.)

In my experience, concision—making one's point clearly, yet with an economy of words—is often the last skill learned among speakers and writers.

All of that said, there are a few other things I try to include in group reports:

• Any insights into the dynamics of that particular group that went unnamed while I was present. This may mean looking more deeply into what I noticed happening, or illuminating the awkward interplay of multiple activities that are not in and of themselves problematic.

• An analysis of why certain practices can lead to deleterious consequences, and offering specific advice about how to accomplish the same result with a different approach that's less freighted with danger.

• When offering critical feedback I try hard to be specific and direct (notice when X said this and Y responded in this way, leading to this misunderstanding or that degree of reactivity).

• When groups are doing well, I make an effort to celebrate their strengths as well as the ways in which they might improve. (All sulphur and no molasses makes for a mean diet.)

The Essential Ingredients to Excellent Reportage

1. Careful observation. Hidden in this criterion is the need for a large degree of free attention, so that you don't miss subtleties.

2. Good notes (don't expect to hold everything in your head).

3. The capacity to shift perspectives and see what's happening through the eyes of the various players. Actual evil, by which I mean intentional mischief or harm, is much rarer than is supposed—in general, people intend well, and it's your job as reporter to frame your comments in such a way that good intentions are honored, while not neglecting to illuminate concerns. It's an art.

3. The ability to write clearly (which, sadly, is less common than one would hope). 

4. Timeliness (I have a personal standard of trying to complete reports within two weeks of finishing an in-person stint).

While not rocket science, neither is good reportage accidental. It's a discipline, and well worth cultivating if you want to be effective in the world.

A final word: please don't let my laundry list of how to author good reports overwhelm you from trying (since I can't imagine ever getting that good, why try?). Any reporting can be worthwhile, so long is it's an accurate reflection of what you observed, and delivered in a compassionate and even-handed voice.

The Dynamics When Someone Gets Upset and Walks Out of a Meeting

Working with a group of nascent facilitators last month, the question came up: What do you do when someone leaves a unfinished meeting in distress, triggered by something that happened inthe room (not because they suddenly remembered they have to pick up their kid from cello practice)?

While it's not something you want to have happen, most of us have experienced it—especially if you've been living in intentional community for any length of time, and it feels yucky. It feels like a failure.  

[One of my mentors, Caroline Estes, use to say that if you're not thinking about leaving the group at least once every three months, you're either ducking the hard stuff, or you're not paying attention. The idea is that reactivity is to be expected when you engage on issues that matter and about which people disagree, and this may cause you to be fed up with people's stubbornness (attachment to getting their way), or it may cause you to question whether you are in the right group.]

In any event, I want to tackle this apple in three bites:

Bite I: Missing or Ignoring the Signs

Version A: If someone goes from placid to postal in a matter of seconds, it almost certainly indicates that they came into the meeting already amped up about an unresolved dynamic, which or may not be related to the topic at hand (sometimes the tension is with an individual or with a committee, and just hearing them speak sets the person off). Or it may be that they have built-up frustration with how the group has handled the topic under discussion and they are now on a hair trigger. In any event, it's rare that no one is aware that this person (let's call them Person D) is churning about something. 

Version B: In this scenario, the reactivity builds over the course of the meeting until it boils over, and Person D leaves, usually in anger or in tears. Their circuits are overloaded, they are unable to take in any more information, and they may be afraid they'll say or do something from frustration that they'll regret later. Having no confidence in the group's willingness or ability to work with their upset, they depart the scene.

In both versions, I'm wondering about the group's commitment to working emotionally, or its ability to do so effectively. To be sure, this is not a minor deal—agreeing to work with emotions—nor is it a trivial skill to do with sensitivity and neutrality, yet I believe both elements are essential to creating high-functioning cooperative groups. And really, do we have a choice? People are not just thinking animals, we are feeling animals as well. It's a package deal. 

While some in the group are likely to be more emotionally (or relationally) oriented, while others are more rationally (or idea) oriented, it goes with the territory that both will be present whenever groups gather, and I've come to the view that it works much better if you acknowledge that, and learn to work both sides of the street—instead of holding onto the ridiculous notion that feelings have no place in meetings (which comes directly from a mainstream culture that tries to do just that, and pays an enormous price in terms of alienation, and dissipated energy)—as if using only one of your tools is better than using more of them.

(Please understand that I am not saying that strong feelings are in play with every topic, yet neither will they be rare.)

When there is no agreement to engage emotionally, people learn to try to quash their feelings (rather than suffer the group's disapproval over their "loss of control") or to not speak up when they notice that others seem to be struggling (due to lack of agency). Not only do you lose the attention of the person in distress, but those noticing the person going into distress will be distracted by their rising reactivity, wondering what it means, and whether there might be an eruption. Very distracting, and very messy.

For information about how effective emotional engagement might look, reference these blog entries:

Questions About Working with Emotions in Group

Key Facilitation Skills: Working Constructively with Emotions

Bite II: OK, So We Didn't Catch it Before it Happened—Now What?

Regardless of what opportunities to work with the tensions were missed before person D walks (or storms) out of the meeting, what are your options once they have?

It's been my experience that people in high distress generally feel isolated and don't trust that they have been understood, or even that others want to know what's going on for them. With that in mind, I believe that the first step in compassionate deescalation is to reach out to the disaffected person in an attempt to show them you care—both about them and their views.

How do you do that? By inviting Person D to tell you what happened for them, expressly including the feelings, and what the meaning is for them of their reaction. If some of that has already happened (perhaps before the walkout), then the person engaging with Person D can start with an attempted reflection of both their views and their feelings, staying with it until Person D reports that they feel heard. This should always be deescalating—because you are contradicting the isolation, and everyone likes to be understood and cared about.

Note that I am not saying you need to agree with them. Nor should you promise that Person D will get their way or have their views weighted more seriously by virtue of having gotten upset.

If you are facilitating alone, and there is no one suitable or willing to be the group's ambassador to Person D, you must decide whether to postpone reaching out to them until after the meeting, or call a break during which you attempt this in the moment. This can be a tough call.

If you decide to do it afterwards, you can handle this yourself. Be aware though, that in staying with the meeting, that it may well make more sense to suspend what you had been doing right before the walkout to hear people's reactions to Person D's departure, and perhaps what led up to it. In serious cases, this could be the remainder of the meeting. What's more, you should be prepared to offer Persom D a summary of what was said about them after they left the meeting.

If you decide Person D's departure is better addressed immediately, you have a number of options, including:

• If you are team facilitating, one of your number can seek out Person D while others continue the meeting.

• If that's not available, you might ask someone from your Conflict Resolution Team to step up—if such exists.

• Finally, you might ask for a volunteer to do so (while the meeting continues under your facilitation), if you think there are people in the group who have a sense of how to do this with compassion and sensitivity.

Bite III. Impact on the Group

—If you don't engage with Person D's emotions

In my view, attempting to pick up the meeting again at the point of interruption, and acting as if the eruption didn't happen, is a highly questionable choice. Not only will it be hard to do (at the very least, people will need a moment or two to stand and shake out the adrenaline), but some will almost certainly have their attention on processing what happened, rather than on the meeting agenda, which will significantly complicate doing good work.

By "engaging with Person D's emotions" I do not mean judging them for being upset, or even for walking out. I mean sharing reactions to what happened, what people understood about Person D's experience, and how the group might have handled it better.

—If you attempt to engage with Person D's feelings but they jump ship anyway

Even if you are persuaded by my argument for trying to understand what's going on for someone when they're triggered, there's no guarantee that the attempt will succeed in reestablishing a connection. Person D may remain upset, and leave the room in frustration. In fact, done poorly, you may make things worse. Which is undoubtedly why it's so popular to not attempt it. 

Going the other way, however, there's opportunity for making things much better. Knowing that, I encourage all facilitators to try to develop their capacity to work with feelings (as well as ideas), and to live in the place of hope, possibility, and courage.