Pushing Versus Inviting

There's a prevalent style of facilitation that's mostly passive—where the person running the meeting isn't doing much more than deciding who'll talk next, punctuated by the occasional need to blow the whistle, perhaps to signal that time has expired or to announce a restart, either to referee moments of fulminating tension or to cut through the fog of creeping chaos.

In the interest of safeguarding their neutrality—necessary to be an effective referee—facilitators will often adopt a style that scrupulously steers clear of offering suggestions about how to handle issues on the table. As a facilitation trainer, however, that's not what I teach. Rather, I prefer that facilitators be open to the possibility of their having insights into good solutions that can accelerate bringing the ship into a safe harbor.

This is my thinking:

o  Mostly facilitators are members of the groups they facilitate. As such they typically have in-depth knowledge of both the players and the circumstances surrounding the issue. Why shut down a potentially valuable voice when it comes to figuring out what's best? I'm not suggesting that the facilitator's input should carry any more weight than anyone else's, only that it not be discounted, or disqualified.

o  On a more subtle level, good facilitators have typically done a considerable amount of personal work to become aware of their competitive conditioning and the ways that we have inadvertently been trained to focus on differences more than similarities. Thus, facilitators can be particularly valuable when searching for common ground.

[It works like this: in mainstream Western culture there is an extreme emphasis on "I" (in contrast with a potential focus on"we"). A consequence of this is an obsession with how we are distinct in any situation—because the "I," a culturally driven imperative, can get lost when wallowing in similarities. Thus, when the glass if half full we learn to quickly hone in on the empty part ahead of the half-full part. Even though both are equally true and solutions are invariably built on common ground, most people have been conditioned to see disagreement ahead of agreement. As such, they can be slow to see potential solutions lying right in front of them. In that dynamic a facilitator who has worked to unlearn their competitive conditioning may see viable connections between positions that others miss—until the facilitator articulates the potential bridge. It's not so much that the facilitator is brilliant (though that's a possibility) as that people tend to find what they're looking for and facilitators often have trained themselves to see common ground. It can be like Magic Eye autostereograms: obvious when you see the underlying three-dimensional image yet totally mysterious when you don't.]

o  At the end of the day, it doesn't matter much where a good idea comes from so long as the energy behind it is solid. (I know that I'm articulating a cooperative ideal and that in reality ego enters the equation more than I'd prefer to admit—where it matters on a personal level if the germ of the prevailing proposal came from you—yet it still behooves us to move in the direction we intend to go.)

o  There are, I think, two keys to this working well. This first is that facilitators do their best to remain neutral about the outcome and restrict their suggestions to ways of putting together elements that have already been articulated by the group. The image I hold is that it's OK to mold the clay, but please only use clay provided by other group members; do not slip your own clay bodies into the mix. The litmus test is that it should be relatively easy for group members to connect the dots—to see how the threads of your proposal were derived from input given by others.

o  The second key is that facilitators present their offerings with grace and humility. Not with a large bow wave that makes it difficult to express reservations. If members of the group feel that the facilitator is pushing, selling, or arm twisting, there is considerable risk of sacrificing their neutrality, which can be very expensive. Keep in mind that this admonition obtains even if the idea is brilliant. What you need to track closely is not so much the quality of your thinking (about which there can easily be divergent views) as the quality of its landing. If there is hesitation in the reception, the facilitator needs to back out of there; not fight for their idea. You should think of your suggestion as a gift. Much as you'd like it to be embraced, if it is spurned, so be it.

o  To be clear, I am not suggesting that the facilitator hide their light under a bushel. It's OK to be excited and enthusiastic about your suggestion; just be sensitive to the response and not bowl anyone over. If the succeeding idea mainly comes from a different direction, try to be equally celebratory (hurray we solved the problem!) and not subdued because your idea didn't turn out to be the stairway to heaven.

The Facilitator's Magic Eye

When I first began
To cut up oxen
I would see before me
The whole ox
All in one mass.
After three years
I no longer saw this mass,
I saw the distinctions…

—excerpted from Cutting Up an Ox, an ancient Taoist poem

• • •

I am the Sandhill butcher.

While many others in my community share in the work of this quintessential homesteading task, I enjoy it. Though I am not a hunter, I approach cutting up carcasses and preserving meat with considerable care and respect for the animals whose lives have been taken to sustain mine. Butchering has become part of my sacred relationship to food.

It has taken me a while to embrace the identity of butcher, in part because one meaning of the term is to do a job badly, or clumsily. Another is to kill indiscriminately, or brutally. While not wanting to be associated with either of those flavors of the term, there is yet a third meaning, which is honorable—or at least has the chance to be. A good butcher is one who is thrifty and skilled in the craft of transforming animals into food. Better yet, a good butcher is one who wastes little, operates humanely, and works in right relationship with the universe.

I recall when I first encountered this more noble sense of "butcher" employed outside the confines of the abattoir…

About 30 years ago, when I was teaching myself how to make insulated glass windows (is there no end to the ways in which youth will carelessly throw labor at the fortified walls of a tight budget, in the hopes of saving pennies?) we bought supplies from a New England company called Wood Butchers. I was immediately struck by the name. Surely they weren't implying that that they sold the tools of wanton woodworking, were they?

Indeed, "wood butcher" is an old term for carpenter, and meant as a label of respect for a craft. The meaning here runs parallel to that of meat butcher, and thus began the rehabilitation of the term in my consciousness.

Today, I happily consider myself an amateur meat butcher, as well as an amateur wood butcher. Taking this one step further, I am also a meeting butcher. As a professional facilitator, I am fully skilled in the dissection of meeting dynamics. When I am at my best, there is little waste and I am able to transform logjams into flow, chaos into agreement, and disharmony into music. It is an art. While learnable, not everyone is willing to put in the effort.

As it was for the butcher referenced in the opening poem, one of my main challenges as a facilitation teacher is getting students to experience the unfolding of a meeting and seeing the underlying distinctions. What at first seems an overwhelming tangle of disparate viewpoints and discordant feelings, can instead be viewed as a montage of patterns, of which there are a limited number.

One of the main reasons that I am valuable as an outside facilitator is not inherent skill; rather, it's that I have spent many hours in the butcher shop and bring with me a wide pattern library. Today, it's hard to show me something I've never seen before. While the details are undoubtedly unique to the current manifestation, the applicable patterns are not. By breaking down the dynamic into its characteristic components, complex and/or volatile issues become more tractable, less daunting.

After conducting more than 40 facilitation training weekends over the last eight years, I've come to appreciate much better what it is I've learned to do as a professional facilitator (there is nothing quite like attempting to teach a thing to expose the gaps in how well you understand it). Over and over I am in the position of watching a live meeting with my students, detecting patterns, and then observing how long it takes for the students to see the same thing.

While a portion of the teaching is breaking things down into primary questions (what are the themes in the conversation; is the energy rising or falling; what questions remain to be addressed; how well are people hearing each other; to what extent are people feeling heard; are there underlying questions that haven't surfaced yet; where is this likely headed?), there is another portion for which an atomistic approach will not work.

It is the gestalt ability to absorb the whole of the meeting and have the essential patterns emerge when concentrating with a soft focus. Just as with Magic Eye graphics, the patterns can pop out of the fog in a blink. The trick is learning the art of the soft focus, where you let all of the data wash over you and resist the temptation to lock onto any one thing.

As a teacher, it's exciting to watch the students develop over the course of the two-year training, where there's a steady progression in relation to their ability to approach what I can do—all the way from awe to aw, shucks:

o Awe (I have no idea how you did that)
o Inkling (I knew something needed to happen but I had no clue what)
o Fuzzy (I had a general idea about what was needed but couldn't articulate it clearly)
o Slow (I got the same inspiration, but not as quickly)
o Aw, shucks (I could have done that!)

My dream is a world where my insights are aw, shucks all the time; where my eye is no more magic than anyone else's.