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.

Remembering Lina

My friend and mentor, Caroline Estes, died July 13, passing peacefully after four months in hospice. She was 94 and had lived a full and impactful life that touched me deeply.

We first met in the spring of 1987. I had taken Amtrak's Empire Builder from Chicago to Oregon, fresh from the first board meeting of the newly reconstituted Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC) at Stelle IL. I caught up with Caroline for a cup of coffee at Alpha-Bit, the magical bookstore/cafe/art gallery that her community, Alpha Farm, operated in Mapleton—a wide spot in the road between Eugene and Florence, on the sinuous banks of the Siuslaw River (of Once a Great Notion fame). 

I had set up the rendezvous both to put a face to the name, and to fill her in on what had happened at the seminal FIC gathering. She had a reputation as a tour de force as a community networker in the Pacific Northwest, and I aspired to strengthen connections with communities on the West Coast. As an added incentive, Alpha Farm was an income-sharing community—just like my community, Sandhill Farm—and there weren't many of us around with whom to talk shop.

We clicked immediately, nattering nonstop for a couple of hours, pausing only to inhale and to refill our coffee cups. (I knew right away that I was in the right place because Alpha-Bit served half-and-half in a small pitcher.)

She spent her early childhood in a privileged family in Texas, before moving to California at the age of 10. As an adult she became a Quaker, which was the grounding for her understanding of consensus. Her nickname as a child was Lina, and I am invoking that term of endearment in this remembrance.

Caroline as Grandmother of Secular Consensus

We didn't meet face-to-face until she was 57, and already well established at Alpha (15 years after she'd helped found the community in 1972). By then she'd already worked to adapt consensus as a religious practice to meet the needs of decision-making in community settings. In response to requests to share her methods, Caroline had developed a five-day consensus & facilitation training, and I eagerly signed up for the next round. It came at just the right time for me. I knew enough about cooperative group dynamics to have a slew of questions, but wasn't so settled in my ways that I couldn't shift my thinking or practice.

Together with her protégé, Lysbeth Borie (also a long-time Alpha member), the two comprised Alpha Institute, a subsidiary of the community that offered consensus training and professional facilitation. In addition to steady work in cooperative groups throughout Ecotopia, for a number of years they were the consensus trainers of choice among Waldorf schools across the breadth of North America.

The occasion of Caroline's passing weaves together a number of threads for me. Lysbeth was the person who broke the news to me, and I have a fond memory of my first gig as an outside facilitator in December, 1987, when Lysbeth and I partnered to assist Appletree, a fledgling income-sharing community on Cottage Grove OR. Caroline helped us plan the engagement—even pulling out a packet of precious frozen blueberries from Alpha's larder, so that we could offer Appletree members a memorable dessert as part of our time together. For Caroline, good food and good dynamics went hand in hand, and it was a signature element of her penchant for interweaving engagement and conviviality.

Caroline as Mentor

Caroline was both a friend and a Friend, who was able to retain the spirit of Quaker consensus without necessarily defining it as a pathway to knowing the divine. Under her deft touch, it was also developed as a pathway to divine what was best for the group, which was the field in which she and I walked together.

Among the lessons I absorbed from Caroline was the preciousness of facilitator neutrality, without lapsing into passivity. It is an art knowing when you've heard enough from the group to be able to float a proposal that might balance the whole, and facilitators need to be brave as well as disinterested.

Caroline taught me how to read a meeting—which is a subtle combination of listening deeply to statements, while at the same time tracking the energy that lay beneath and around the words. (Neither of which, BTW, is enhanced by today's increasing reliance on social media, which has significantly degraded both attention spans and the ability of people to hear accurately. Impatience and consensus don't play well together.)

As a master facilitator she was a rock. When managing large groups (100+), which she did on a number of occasions at the height of her career, she had legendary stamina (and erect posture), and was able to redirect obstreperous behavior simply through her presence, the judicious use of silence, and a raised eyebrow. When the number of participants exceeded her capacity to track each person, she learned to scan sections of the group for discordant energy, following that up with individual scrutiny as needed.

She taught me how to toggle one's attention when facilitating, alternately lightly between what was being said (and how that applied to the topic at hand), and where the energy was trending—two things that are not always aligned, yet need to be to reach the promised land.

Based on her genteel upbringing, it was hard for Caroline to express or to work directly with strong emotions—especially negative ones—which is something I've come to view as an essential skill as a consultant/facilitator working with cooperative groups. To be sure, she understood fully when feelings were in play, but considered it unpleasant, invasive, or ill-bred to expose them in group. Thus, she was never comfortable sailing close to the winds of distress.

Caroline's gifts were overwhelmingly offered orally and in person. She left behind a paucity of written material—very few articles or reports. If she wanted to communicate, she would dictate an email, pick up the phone, or write a letter (remember when people used to do that?). To my knowledge, she didn't participate in social media at all, which, as you might imagine, contributed significantly to her disappearing from the radar of folks in need of what she had to offer the last couple decades.

While it's my sense that there is every bit as much need today as there ever was for what Caroline could teach, in the 21st century she had essentially outlived the ability to attract clients, given the limitations of how she functioned. Contemporary marketing had left her behind—making it all the more important for me to honor my professional debt to her in this eulogy.

For two decades (1988-2008) Caroline was a regular participant in FIC, which met semi-annually for three-to-four days at a time to discuss strategies and reset the gyroscope. Caroline was at the center of the wheel and a significant voice in how the organization evolved. For many years, the two of us made a point of carving out one evening at each gathering to go out to a local restaurant for dinner. For three hours it would just be the two of us—catching up, musing, laughing, and strategizing about the road ahead.

Caroline as Communitarian

I consider Alpha to be one of the most beautifully sited communities I've ever seen, nestled into a finger valley of Oregon's Coast Range. Bordered on two sides by BLM land and Forest Service property, it even features a babbling stream that feeds into Deadwood Creek and is home to spawning salmon. 

Many years before the community landed there, Alpha was the site of an early post office, when European settlers first populated the Willamette Valley. Interestingly, operating a rural mail route has been a mainstay of Alpha's balance sheet, offering dependable income in an otherwise uncertain backwater economy. (While Alpha-Bit was a solid success when it came to local relations, it was never a profit center.)

Caroline was devoted to Jim, her husband of many years. He grew up in Mississippi and shared her sharp intellect, political savvy, progressive outlook, love of language, and the discipline of speaking with a civil tongue (a diminishing art these days). He worked as a newspaperman, and would recreationally edit menus while awaiting service at restaurants. When possible, they'd attend live theater and symphony concerts, especially the annual Oregon Bach Festival in Eugene. He predeceased her by nine years.

In 2008, while Jim was still with us, I took the train to Oregon following my niece's wedding in San Antonio to attend Lina's 80th birthday bash at Alpha Farm. It was a joy to witness firsthand the appreciation of so many people whose lives she had touched—both in the community and among the Deadwood neighborhood. (I don't believe I've ever cooked so much fresh asparagus in my life.)

Caroline was also stubborn—especially when it came to Alpha. She cared deeply about her vision that the community be a sanctuary of sanity and a beacon of light in times of darkness. She was loath to delegate significant authority without her oversight. She insisted on a complex olio of social justice, hospitality, environmental consciousness, and graciousness—all of which was both inspiring and exasperating for those who sometimes wanted to balance things differently… especially the budget. 

Impressively, Caroline lived to celebrate Alpha's golden anniversary. She was there for every one of the past 50 years, and it's a monumental testament to dedication and service that few can claim.

Goodbye Lina, my mentor and friend. Please know that I will continue my grieving by baking a cherry pie, with Montmorencies harvested from a neighbor's backyard, topped with locally churned vanilla ice cream (nothing low fat about it)—all of which I know would make you smile.

How I Place Myself as a Professional Facilitator

The other morning I lay in bed wondering how I'd describe myself as a process professional. In what ways am I distinctive? Here's my answer.

I. My Strengths as a Professional
There are aspects of what I bring to the table where I believe I stand out, independent of what I know about group dynamics.

—Reports
Excepting where I'm giving a workshop or an a la carte training (in which case there will be handouts), I commit to delivering a written report within two weeks. While the report basically recapitulates what happened live and what I said when I was in the room, I discovered early in my career that clients typically absorb only about 20% of what happens, so the written report gives them a second bite of the apple that they can refer to in their leisure. I have high standards for my reports.

—Founder
Some small, but significant portion of the time there are tensions in the client group that relate to a key player feeling isolated or misunderstood as a founder of the group. It is unquestionably a special thing being a founder, and it helps me bridge to those folks that I also have been a founder—of an intentional community, of a national profit, of a community business, of a consulting career.

—Large RAM
For reasons that are unknown to me, I can hold an unusually large number of balls in the air without dropping them. This is an enormously useful skill: taking in a large volume of information and being able to call upon it at will.

—Fast Thinker
There is considerable range in how quickly people process information and are able to separate signal from noise. While I'm not a prodigy, I operate at the quick end of that spectrum, which means I'm at the head of the pack when it comes to figuring out where we are and where we want to go.

—Parent
Some of the group issues I'm asked to facilitate involve parenting. On those occasions it helps tremendously that I have raised two kids in community—not because there is one right way to do it, but because I have personal familiarity with the range of what to expect (and non-parents seldom have street cred with parents).

—Cancer Survivor
This is a new label for me, and I'm not sure yet how it will play out. But if I've learned anything about group dynamics, all experiences come into play at one point or another. I've been a survivor for only a year, yet there have been moments in the past when I was working with individuals who were approaching mortality and it was a challenge to bridge to what they were going through. Now I'm better equipped. ("Did you almost die? So did I.")

II. My Flavor as a Professional  
There are a number of ways that I do things that are distinctive. In some circumstances they are an advantage… other times not so much.

—Compensation
As someone who has lived most of his adult life in an income-sharing community, I've never needed a lot of income in order to make ends meet. That's given me flexibility when it comes to what I charge for my time, which I use to bridge between my services being accessible to clients (affordable) and my work being aligned with my values (if I'm not being asked to build a more cooperative world I'm not interested in the work). On the one hand, I do not want money to stand in the way of helping groups in need; on the other I want this skill to be taken seriously and compensated fairly—both for myself and for the profession.

Over the course of 30 years in the field I've gradually worked myself up the ladder to where I rate my services as worth $1500/day, plus expenses (travel, room, and board). While this may be a bargain in the corporate context, my clients are almost wholly in the nonprofit sector and that's high enough. (If you think that's pricey, consider what lawyers and architects charge: my skill set is far rarer and my work is typically more pivotal to a community's success.)

While I don't offer discounts up front, and I insist that clients discuss among themselves what they can afford and the value of my work (a conversation I don't need to be part of), I tell them I will accept without question whatever amount of money they put on the table—so long as my expenses are covered (my inviolable line is that I never lose money working for others). Sometimes I get full boat; sometimes I work pro bono. On average though, I come out fine.

This is handled differently by some of my peers. Some simply suppress their prices as a nod to affordability (I have a dear friend who refers to this strategy as the pride of poverty movement, where social change workers compete to see who can work for the least). Others embrace the gift economy where no prices are set and groups pay what they think right.

I've come to prefer my approach for four reasons:
a) I've seen how much clients anguish over price; not giving them a number to work from is hard on folks. They want to be fair, yet they don't want to be foolish. If I give them no frame of reference it can be highly uncomfortable.

b) I am a market maker in the arcane field of cooperative group process consulting and I think strategically about those who will follow me. This is a field that barely existed when I first hung out a shingle in 1987. Though my income-sharing lifestyle means I don't need as much, there are plenty of good facilitators who live in single family urban dwellings and they need to make a living, too. By gradually doing what I can to raise the water level, all boats rise.

c) While I wish it weren't so, people pay more attention when they pay more money. And while money isn't much of a motivator for me, I purely hate it when clients don't pay attention. Thus, it helps to establish a healthy bench mark.

d) Since adopting this approach I've never had a client complain about price.

—Casualties
Sad though it is, not everyone likes me, or the way I work. I am very direct, and that can be more octane than some can handle. While I also try to be sensitive and compassionate, I am typically working complex dynamics under severe time constraints. As I do not get hired to play it safe (I get hired to be effective) it often means going into the lion's den. Inevitably, a certain fraction of the time (maybe 3%) what I attempt does not go well (perhaps I didn't have a full enough picture; perhaps my analysis was faulty, perhaps my technique was poor, perhaps the people I most needed to reach had their drawbridge up and there was no way to cross the moat). Most push back comes from people who are embedded in a stuck dynamic and are simply unwilling to have the light shined on their part. For them I am the disrespectful, outside agitator and there is no way I will ever be invited back—never mind that 97% thought what I attempted was brilliant, brave, or at least constructive. In my line of work if you don't hit a home run in your first couple at bats, you'll be on the trading block by morning. (Professional firefighting is not for the faint of heart or the thin-skinned.)

—Quality Control
Most groups have never seen anyone do what I can do and thus are hard pressed when it comes to evaluating whether it's a good value to lay out major resources (both time and money) to hire me. As I've come to appreciate that phenomenon, it has underlined the standard advice I give groups considering professional help: check references.

This field is so young and so thin that there are no standards for accreditation, and I have been so busy doing the work (and the rest of my life) that I have not gotten around much to seeing my peers in action—so I want no part of passing judgment on others. I'd rather let the marketplace handle that. At the same time, I think this work is too important for amateur hour. So it puts me in a tricky position: I want groups to get assistance yet am concerned that more people are putting themselves forward as professionals than who know what they're doing.

(What I can do, upon request, is offer a list of my coaching tree, professional-grade students of mine whose quality of work I can vouch for.)

—Experiential
My approach is overwhelmingly based on what works in the trenches—in real meetings. That's in contrast with work that's grounded in exposure to the literature, or from absorbing instruction from others. In my case the exceptions are:

o  Arnie Mindell's Sitting in the Fire, which does a terrific job of laying out the non-rational aspects of group dynamics, and the concepts of rank and privilege.

o  Caroline Estes, a lifelong Quaker who taught me to understand consensus deeply.

o  Mildred Gordon, who taught me the potential of interweaving the emotional and the rational.

Otherwise my thinking and my practice have been distilled from hundreds and hundreds of meetings, including 200+ professional gigs over a span of three decades.

Taken all together, I have an enormous pattern library to draw on (to the point where it's hard to show me something I haven't seen before). Thus, when you hire me you get a library card.

—Auditory Learner
It happens that my primary intake channel is through my ears. While I've worked hard to be competent with both visuals and kinesthetics, my main medium of exchange matches well with the way meetings are conducted: by voice.

—Writer
I write a lot. It got to the point a few years ago (while I was still the FIC administrator) that I was authoring something heavy duty—an article, a report, a major proposal, or a blog entry—every day. Never mind the three hours I devote to treading water with email every time the sun comes up.

At this stage in my life I've generated:
   over 1000 blog posts
   over 50 articles in Communities magazine
   over 100 reports to clients

The vast majority of this output has been focused on one aspect or another of cooperative group dynamics. When people ask if I'm going to write a book, I tell them, "I've already written several. They just aren't organized yet."

As a writer, I strive to be concise, cohesive, comprehensive, and colloquial. I rely heavily on metaphors (and alliteration).

—Facilitation Teacher
As I've gotten older, and therefore closer to the end of my career, I've become increasingly focused on passing along what I've learned. In addition to writing (see above) I've became much more active as a teacher. 

In 2003 I launched a two-year intensive training program for people who want to learn high-end facilitation. I've now delivered this program in its entirety eight times with three other courses currently under way (in New England, the Pacific Northwest, and North Carolina). Since recovering from cancer, I've been working to assemble the materials for a masters course, which I hope to offer in the next year or two. 

To the extent possible, I prefer to teach from live dynamics (where the lessons emerge from the what's in the room rather than from a script or a lesson plan). For the two years I'm together with students, I offer myself as a mentor—both in class and out. After completing the course, if the student is interested in going further and shows sufficient talent, I offer to let them accompany me on jobs as an apprentice, offering both advanced guidance (1:1 time with the teacher) and valuable exposure as a wannabe professional. Though I didn't have that kind of help when I broke into the field (why would you hire someone you'd never heard of and who has no track record?) now I have a chance to turn it around. And paying it forward is good juju.

—Major Philosophical Positions 
Over the course of my career my thinking about group dynamics has continuously evolved (in fact, it still is). And, as you'd expect, my peers have a variety of styles, different aspects they emphasize, and unique ways they approach their work. Here is an enumeration of ways in which I believe I am distinctive as a professional facilitator, and ways in which hold a particular orientation to cooperative culture.

o  I emphasize working with the whole person. That means the emotional, intuitive, kinesthetic, and spiritual; not just the rational (which is overwhelmingly the only way that most secular groups function in North America—though I suspect this is more by default than the consequence of conscious choice).

o  A professional facilitator needs to be able to work with content as proficiently as with energy. Doing one well is not enough. I cut my meeting teeth in an income-sharing intentional community with no designated leader. As far as I'm concerned that's the toughest nut there is (by which I mean the dynamics there are the most complex and intertwined). It's my view that if you can function well in that setting you can do it anywhere.

o  I've come to the position that you cannot fully bloom as a facilitator without developing and trusting your intuition; your thinking is not enough. Facilitation is more an art than a craft.

o  There is a bewildering array of tools available these days to assist with meetings—with bright, shiny new ones being invented and touted all the time. While I think that robust experimentation with new tools is good, and it's fine to add to your toolkit anything that works well for you, I have two words of caution:

a) You don't need a large tool bag to be a great facilitator; you just need a basic set of tools (formats and the like) that you know when to employ and how to use well. The heavy lifting in facilitation does not come from clever structure; it comes from a deep understanding of where people are at, what they need, and how to reach them.

b)  Beware of practitioners who are in love with a single tool, for as sure as they love their hammer, everything will start looking like a nail and the world is far more diverse than that.

o  The bottom line for facilitation is consistently delivering meetings that people want to come to because problems are solved and relationships are built and strengthened. It shouldn't be just one or the other. When exciting things are consistently happening no one wants to miss the bus.

o  Many groups that are avowedly committed to cooperative principles have not digested the foundational lesson that individuals raised in Western culture have been deeply conditioned to be competitive and you cannot expect cooperative behavior out of those people (which is just about all of us) when they encounter disagreement and the stakes are high. Competitive behaviors can be unlearned (thank god) but that requires personal work to achieve and you are not going to like the results if well-intentioned people attempt to effect cooperative culture while opting out of the personal work. 

o  Facilitation is a lot like midwifery. The point in a group's life cycle where skilled facilitation is most crucial is when the group is in its infancy and still trying to make the transition to cooperative culture. Good facilitators are able to remind the group of its good intentions and redirect inadvertent slides back into the abyss of competitive squabbling. Without good facilitation young groups often founder, get discouraged, and lose heart. As groups become more mature and cooperative behaviors become more ingrained, the need for strong facilitation lessens. Over time the group will develop a strong gyroscope and self correct without facilitator intervention.

o  As a social change agent, when I contemplate how badly we need a viable alternative to competitive dynamics (is anyone inspired by the model Trump is offering?), I figure I can't train good facilitators fast enough—the need is that urgent. So that's mainly what I do (along with articulating the theory). I've retired from everything else (though I still do some for-hire facilitation, both because it keeps me on my toes and it helps recruit students), but I'll die with an intriguing idea for my next blog ready to be fleshed out.

o  Though living in intentional community will never be that popular a lifestyle choice (it's too radical), there is a broad-based hunger for a greater sense of community in one's life—by which I mean more connection, civility, safety, control of one's time, and security. Intentional communities are pioneers in developing cooperative culture and they are important to the wider culture because our society is on the cusp of desperately needing to know how to get along better with one another, and how to equitably share a diminishing supply of resources without sacrificing quality of life.

My Strengths in Group Dynamics
Here are the aspects of cooperative group dynamics where I have developed my strongest reputation; it's what I'm best known for.

—Conflict
I define this as the condition where there are at least two viewpoints and at least one person in non-trivial distress. Conflict naturally occurs when groups deal with real issues and people are paying attention; the question is not so much how frequently conflict occurs, but how constructively you work with it. Most groups are scared to death of conflict and have nothing in place for engaging with it. It's jungle ball and they just hope to survive it.

I've thought a lot about the dynamics of emotional distress and I've learned that I don't freeze or get overloaded circuits in the presence of distress in others. As a consequence I'm frequently hired to help groups work through a conflict, to set up group agreements for self-managing conflict, or to train their personnel in conflict skills. It's also a key component of my two-year facilitation training.

The object of the training is not so much to reduce the incidence of conflict as it is to help groups not freak out when one or more of their members freak out. If we can stop the chain reaction there will be much less collateral damage and we'll be able to address derailments more expeditiously.

Today, if a group finds itself in the midst of a raging five-alarm fire, I'm one of a short list of people who gets called to put the fire out. 

By way of framing, my approach to conflict is unique to me. While I have familiarity with NVC (Nonviolent Communication) and there is common ground between how I approach conflict and the teachings of Marshall Rosenberg, we developed our thinking independently and I have some nuances that I prefer.

There is also a more recent entrant in the field of conflict work: Restorative Circles, whose main articulator is Dominic Barter. I have been introduced to this approach by a professional and have experienced it as a participant three times. While I have peers who are quite drawn to it, I was not that impressed (what I saw was too slow to get to the point, the conversation was not that productively focused on the dynamics between antagonists, the facilitation was too passive, and major issues went untouched). That said, this is an evolving body of work and worth keeping an eye on.

—Interweaving Energy and Content
While many systems for working with groups do not incorporate conflict as part of the theory (for example, sociocracy) I believe there is a growing understanding among process professionals that groups must address conflict in order to offer a coherent system (that is, you can't just duck it or pretend that sound structure and practice will eliminate its occurrence). 

I have worked extensively on what happens in plenaries (meetings of the whole) and the boundary between conflict and regular group business. Under what circumstances should you suspend regular business to attend to conflict, and when (and how) do you return to regular business after you have paused to address conflict? I am not aware of anyone who has more comprehensive thinking about managing this edge with sensitivity and effectiveness.

—Courage
Years ago I had just arrived on site for work with a first-time client when a long-term group member approached me with a question: "I hear you're fearless. Is that right?" Because no one had ever asked me that before and I had never described myself that way, I paused. Then I smiled, looked her right in the eye, and replied, "That's right."

As someone who has been hired to put the fire out, I am not going to stand by while the building goes up. I will give it my best shot every time and I invariably approach work with the attitude that I can effectively cope with whatever comes along—even though that's patently not true. (Thus, there are embarrassing moments when I am the poster child for Alexander Pope's famous line "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.") 

While I may fail for jumbled thinking, or for poor technique; I will never fail for being faint of heart. 

—Secular Consensus
There was important work done in the '70s by the Philadelphia-based Movement for a New Society to adapt the 300-year-old meeting practices of the Religious Society of Friends (which Quakers styled a "sense of the meeting," and was a distinctive and integral feature of how they worshipped) to secular political actions groups—anti-nuclear protest groups in particular.

From that beachhead, consensus blossomed to become the most common way that cooperative groups attempt to make decisions. The intentional community that I helped form in 1974 (Sandhill Farm) blithely adopted consensus right at the start and never looked back. However, that did not mean we knew what we were doing, and there were all manner of growing pains encountered on the road to maturity.

By the time I tentatively ventured into the nascent field of cooperative group consulting in 1987, I had become something of an expert on secular consensus, and there has been a steady call for advice in that capacity right that continues to this day (next week I'll be conducting an introductory consensus training for a forming group in New England for the third time—bringing all their latest members up to speed).

To be sure, my experience in working with consensus has been limited to groups with 100 members or fewer, yet it remains my hands-down favorite choice for how smaller groups can make decisions and organize themselves. While I have ideas about how some version of representative consensus might work well for groups with more than 100 members, I haven't had much chance to test drive my thinking.

Though my advocacy for consensus is solid, it comes with a caveat: to get good results requires an understanding of the personal work needed to unlearn competitive conditioning, and a commitment to training. The skills needed to do consensus elegantly are eminently learnable, yet purposeful effort is required. Don't adopt consensus unless you're willing to put in the effort.

—Depth of Familiarity with the Topic
Finally, I want to reflect on a natural progression that people go through if they persist in applying time and thought to their field. Starting as a professional practitioner, I gradually started teaching how to be a practitioner, which led to my thinking about and articulating why we facilitators do things the way we do. 

Today I am an active theoretician about cooperative group dynamics, which makes me much more valuable than "just" a practitioner. This translates to my being able to accurately place a specific experience in the context of trends, quickly sorting breakthrough from novelty, and extracting the essence of a new thing. It also leads to "seeing around the curve," anticipating what's coming and whether that's a good thing or something to be alarmed about.

• • •

Thus, the danger of Trump is not so much that he's emotionally immature (though, to be fair, if he launches a nuclear attack in a fit of pique, it will render moot a lot more than this paragraph) or anti-progressive in his policies. The real danger is that those of us who know better will be sucked into the vortex of his divisive us/them politics. The danger is that we will start to see Trump and his gleeful de-constructors as less than human. If we succumb to that temptation, it will eviscerate cooperative culture and close out the possibility of a future where we learn to share equitably and are able to get off the materialistic merry-go-round. It is up to us who have done the work to develop the long view, to keep the candles lit in the dark.

I cannot see the future, but I'm far enough down the road to see the trends, and the broad steps we must take to keep alive the possibility of a future worth having. I know how to keep my eyes on the prize and not be deflected by the drama of Trump's everyday dysfunction.

Consensus Ritual at the Point of Decision

I've been working seriously with secular consensus since Sandhill started in 1974. Although the bulk of my learning has been distilled from living it (on the job training), I participated in a five-day consensus and facilitation training taught by Caroline Estes at her home community (Alpha Farm) in 1987, and I started my career as a group dynamics consultant later that same year.

As consensus—in one or another of its many guises—is by far the most common form of decision-making in intentional communities, and communities are the foundation of my consultancy, I have necessarily been hip deep in consensus for the last four decades, the last three as a professional.

As someone who believes firmly that meetings should be enjoyable as well as productive, I look for occasions where whimsy can seamlessly be inserted into the flow without sacrificing continuity or efficiency. One such place—and the subject of today's essay—is the specific moment when a group is poised to make a decision.

Much of what happens in a meeting is informal (thank god)—things like where to focus the conversation, what topic to address next, whether a summary is good enough, or when to take a break and for how long. While these questions may have gravitas in the moment, they are procedural matters with a short lifespan and will promptly be covered over by the sands of time. This class of decisions stand in sharp contrast with binding decisions about budget or policy—things you want carefully captured in the minutes and the agreement log, ad which may impact the community for years.

While it's generally not that big deal if you're loosey goosey about procedural decisions, you don't want any sloppiness when it comes to policy agreements. Thus, it tends to be a good idea to have some kind of ritual by which group members indicate whether they're in agreement (green light), standing aside (yellow light) or blocking (red light).

A number of groups employ colored cards for this purpose, both to indicate the nature of their comments during discussion, and to indicate their position when testing for consensus. Essentially, each member raises a card at the key moment instead of their hand. Other groups use thumbs (up=yes; sideways=stand aside; down=block). Some are more nuanced, such as relying on the number of fingers held aloft to indicate their degree of support:
0=Over my dead body
1=Stand aside
2=I can swallow
3=No problem
4=I'm liking it strong
5=Best thing since pockets on shirts

Some more adventurous groups really go for the gusto—I once encountered an art collective where people gave a hearty pirate Argh! to signify affirmation. Opa! (At least in my presence rum was not involved and no planks were walked.)

Really, anything can be done so long as the meaning is clear.

Is Silence Golden… or Iron Pyrite)?
A word of caution. It's not such a great idea relying on silence=assent. While it's tempting to reach for this time-tested Quaker standby (after all, the strongest roots of secular consensus are traceable to the worship practices of the Religious Society of Friends, and they like silence=assent) don't be seduced! I counsel against mum's the word, since silence is so easily misunderstood. It can mean any of the following:
o  I heard you and have no problem
o  I'm confused and don't know what you want
o  I'm thinking and not yet ready
o  I didn't hear you; I'm oblivious
o  I'm so angry that I can't speak 

Yikes! Since guessing is a poor strategy, it's better to rely on something proactive and unambiguous. Best is using a symbol that is not used for anything else—so that its employment is crystal clear. (Arghing, for example, is unlikely to be confused with anything else—unless your group is reprising Peter Pan or rehearsing for The Pirates of Penzance).

I figure this is just the kind of opportunity I like: bring out the clowns and the dancing bears! Maybe it could be a perk of facilitating (or a bonus for volunteering to take minutes)—you get to be queen for a day and announce the consensus ritual de jour. It's OK to have fun; just make sure that it's also obvious.

40 Years in the Wilderness

Tomorrow, Sandhill will celebrate it's 40th anniversary. While not quite a feat of biblical proportions, it's still a big deal. 

The phrase "40 years in the wilderness" comes from the book of Numbers (while that seems an odd name for a chapter in the Good Book, think of it as a precursor to Sesame Street, "Today's religious story, boys and girls, is brought to you by the number 40… "), and recounts the wanderings of the Israelites after Charlton Heston led them in their just-in-time escape from Egypt (remember the cool trick with the Red Sea where he washed away pharaoh's army?). 

 

After peregrinating at length (enough to conduct the Olympics 10 times) and surviving a series of single elimination competitions with unhappy landowners whose property they'd drifted onto, the wandering Jews* finally settled in Canaan, the Promised Land. Now that's taking the long view.

* [Not to be confused with ornamental spiderworts, or the apocryphal dude who is reputed to have taunted Jesus en route to the cross and was cursed to traverse the world without respite until the Second Coming.]

Sandhill's story is a little different. We've actually been on the same piece of land the entire time, and our work has been to transform it into our version of Canaan—something we promised ourselves we'd attempt to do. The wilderness in our case has been mainstream society, with its competitive, hierarchic, and adversarial dynamics. Most Sandhillians had been wandering through that desert for decades before accreting in little regarded northeast Missouri to terraform cooperative culture.

Against long odds, we've pretty much succeeded. And that's what we're celebrating tomorrow (along with Beltane), cheered on by 75-100 of our closest friends. 

It's been an incredible journey, and is more a testament to pluck and luck than planning or clarity of vision. Trying to center our lives around "who we were with" ahead of "what we would do," we discovered along the way that we needed to learn the nuts and bolts of cooperative living from a cold start, with the result that we spent an embarrassing amount of time in the ditch (or mired axle-deep in potholes, choose your metaphor) instead of on the golden path. But every time we got stuck in the mud, we levered ourselves back onto the road and kept going.

Today—on anniversary eve—it seems appropriate to pause and reflect on some of Sandhill's major markers along the way. While the selections are somewhat arbitrary, bear with me.

1975—We lost two of the original four members, and it dawned on Annie and me that we'd have to open up our group to people we didn't already know if we were going to survive. Though that seems normal today, that was a disillusioning shock at the time. In fact, no one we knew from outside of Sandhill ever joined the community. All of our growth came from visitors attracted by the dream and our description in Communities Directory.

1977—We started making sorghum. After two year's of apprenticing with Jo Pearl & Eva Grover (septuagenarians who lived about 10 miles north of us), we bought our own mill, had stainless steel pans custom made, and started cooking Sandhill sorghum—something we're still doing 37 years later. That first year we sold a quart for $2.50 and a gallon for $9. Today we offer quarts of unadulterated sweetness at the bargain price of $12 (and you can order it online).

Even though we've never been able to balance our budget relying solely on agricultural sales, sorghum was our first community business and it became the flagship product for our deep commitment to growing (for ourselves) and selling (for the public) quality organic food. Over the years we've change sorghum cooking systems three times, but we've stayed the course. Along the way we've experienced the normal vicissitudes of farming: everything from basking in the largesse of bumper crops, to suffering through belt-tightening stinkers, where the cane was stunted by drought and the harvest was harried by an early frost.

1979 —In December we completed the paperwork to become officially recognized by the state of Missouri as Sandhill Farm, Inc. Even though we were only three people at the time (Ann Shrader, Tim Jost, and me) it became apparent that we needed the group to own the land instead of Laird & Ann.

1980 —Stan Hildebrand joined us, marking the first time we had a bona fide farmer in our number, and we gelled into a group of five that was stable for five years. During that stretch the only turnover we experienced was one person leaving for Twin Oaks (Thea Page), and another from Twin Oaks joining us (Clarissa Gyorgy). Reaching this level of grounded coherence was crucial for us a fledgling group. Up until then it was never quite clear if we were going to last.

Also that year, Sandhill joined the Federation of Egalitarian Communities, a network of secular, income-sharing communities that we're still associated with today.

1981—Ceilee was born to Annie and me. He was the first child at Sandhill, and I caught him myself in the middle of our bedroom floor on a cold, sunny morning in late January. He became the first kid born at an FEC community that was raised there until he left for college.

1986—Laird attended meetings to incorporate the Fellowship for Intentional Community, resurrecting the name from the Fellowship of Intentional Communities, a dormant network of World War II conscientious objectors who started getting together in the late '40s (after they got out of jail) to hold annual gatherings of communities in the Ohio Valley and Mid-Atlantic States. This represented a natural progression from the small pond of FEC communities to the much larger pool of all intentional communities.

1987—Laird traveled to Alpha Farm to take Caroline Estes' five-day consensus and facilitation training, which became the foundational piece I parlayed into a career as a group process consultant and trainer—something I continue to do and love today.

1990—We invited Geoph Kozeny to stay at Sandhill for six months while he worked on the first edition of FIC's Communities Directory. Perhaps the most notable thing about that visit was that Geoph brought with him a portable computer—an Apple Mac Plus—which represented the first slim wedge in the door that we had shut against the burgeoning electronic age. Laptops soon followed, and now we'll never get the genie back in the bottle.

1991—Sandhill representatives went on local radio to speak against the first Gulf War. This was a highly unpopular thing to do and tested our local relations (would we get a brick through the window?) even though we were being true to our pacifist ideals. Fortunately our 17 years of careful spadework building personal connections in the local community proved strong enough to withstand the strain, and no bad thing happened. Whew.

1994—The community started bringing in outside facilitators for our annual winter retreat. It was a major milestone admitting that we could benefit from outside assistance. Our first guest facilitator was Mildred Gordon from Ganas in Staten Island, who brought along her deft touch at navigating emotional distress and interpersonal tensions


1995—Stan became trained as an organic inspector, starting down a path that has defined much of his last two decades and created an income stream that developed into the linchpin of the community's finances. It has turned out that inspecting farms pays much better than farming.

1996—FIC acquired an old 12x60 house trailer and set it up on Sandhill's property to become the Fellowship's continental headquarters. Though the trailer hasn't gotten any younger (or better looking), we're still using it today.
1997—Dancing Rabbit bought land three miles away. Attracted by affordable property values, minimal zoning, and neighbors who wanted them, the founding group took over the old Petitjean place. Today Dancing Rabbit is by far the larger and better-known group, strengthening immeasurably the foundation for our beachhead of cooperative culture. Today our combined population (counting Sandhill, Dancing Rabbit, Red Earth, and the outliers living in Rutledge who want to be near us) approaches 100 and we almost certainly have the largest number of communitarians as a percentage of registered voters of any county in the US—somewhere in the vicinity of three percent.

1998—We began experimenting with having summer interns. Lindsey Jones was our first (affectionately knows as Miss Lindsey or ML), and she later became a member. Today it's automatic that we interview interns to join us during the growing season (April-October), and they are a well-integrated part of our life, but it all started with ML.

1999—In September of that year, Ceilee went to college (Amherst), my daughter, Jo, went to Quaker boarding school (The Arthur Morgan School in Celo NC) for 7th grade, and Ann departed for Virginia. I suffered the dispersal of all of my immediate family at once and it took me months to recover.

2001—This was the year of too many interns. After a few years of stellar results, we figured if a little was good then perhaps a lot would be great. We were wrong. After being inundated by the dynamics of trying to manage eight at once, we learned to keep the number of interns lower than that of the members. Today our rule of thumb is no more than three at a time, which is far easier to integrate into the flow of life on the farm.

2005—Red Earth Farms was launched on 76 acres adjoining Dancing Rabbit. Now we were the tri-communities. Today REF has close to 20 members and Sandhill, while still the oldest community, is now the smallest of the three.

2007—Laird & Ma'ikwe got married at Sky Island, 2000 feet above Albuquerque in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains, overlooking New Mexico's capital. Stan came from Sandhill, Tony came from Dancing Rabbit, and Alyson came from Red Earth. Ceilee was best man and in charge of the bar; Jo was in charge of the wedding feast. We had originally hoped to have the wedding at Sandhill but the community was concerned that managing the crowd for a multi-day wedding might be overwhelming, so we switched to Plan B. In the end, the wedding lasted for four days and we had 175 guests, so maybe the community's caution was justified.

Later that year I started this blog. While the primary goal was to bang the drum for FIC, it morphed into being more of a journal written by a community networker, and some significant fraction of my entries have been reflections on my experiences as a homesteader and the member of agricultural income-sharing community.

2013—We started construction on a high tunnel greenhouse to expand our growing season on a commercial scale. This represented a deepening of our agricultural commitment, and was an initiative of the younger generation of members—the folks who are taking over from Stan and me.

Let My Person Go
Poignantly, this will probably be my last time celebrating Sandhill's anniversary as a member. This past year I needed to make a choice between my marriage to Ma'ikwe and my marriage to Sandhill and I've been on a leave of absence from Sandhill since Thanksgiving, living with my wife on a trial basis. (I know it's a bit odd that I haven't attempted that sooner than seven years into my vows, but I was really wanting to avoid facing the fork in the road in front of me, and Ma'ikwe and I got married with no agreement in place about where we'd live, or even if we'd live in the same time zone.) 

I love Ma'ikwe and I love my community and it sucks that I can't have both. But life goes on. The future for Sandhill was always going to be without me (eventually), and I've worked hard over the last 10 years to make sure that there was nothing that the community needed that only I could do. Just last month I passed along the last of those duties: filing Sandhill's taxes. I've done it every year since we incorporated in 1979, and this year I coached while Joe filled out the forms. Next year he's on his own.

Ma'ikwe and I are doing well (living together at Moon Lodge, the house she built at Dancing Rabbit) and unless our dynamics go down the rabbit hole (so to speak), I expect to give up my membership at Sandhill before the end of the year. While there is deep sadness in me about this, it is the right choice. No place can replace Sandhill in my heart, yet neither do I want to start over looking for a partner. 

I am thinking of it as retiring from active life in community to focus more on relationship, writing, and teaching. I still have plenty of work to do; I'm just going to divide it among fewer spheres of activity, hopefully with the outcome that I'll do all of the remaining things more thoroughly.

Taking the above all together, tomorrow is going to be pretty special.

Tuesday with Caroline

This morning I woke up at Alpha Farm, a 38-year-old income-sharing community tucked into a finger valley of the Coast Range of western Oregon, just off the road from Eugene to Florence. After dancing between the rain drops (it is, after all, November and they say the rain will stop sometime in March... probably) from my guest accommodations in the old farm house to the New House (it was "new" about three decades ago, but the name stuck), I spent the next four hours communing over coffee and conversation with my dear friend Caroline Estes. It had been 18 months since I'd last seen her and we had a lot of catching up to do...

The Community
Alpha seems to be doing well. Although membership is low, the resident population (the pool from which members come) is high. There are about 16 adults living here now, with modest room for more. (It was sobering to realize that only three of the current folks were here 32 months ago, when I was last at Alpha, to help celebrate Caroline's 80th birthday. See my blog of March 19, 2008 for more about that.) A lot of the new energy is young and the community gardens are thriving.
One of the things I love about Alpha as an exemplar of a group committed to social change work is that they reserve a spot among their residents for "sanctuary." Under this program, the community accepts up to one person at a time who needs a safe home, yet may not be in a position in their life to give back in proportion to what they receive. It's just one way of the ways that Alpha tires to be an inspiring alternative to a mainstream culture that's fragmented and broken.
In addition to more long-term members, the community needs additional sources of income. Caroline has slowed down her career as a process consultant (see more below) and that income has not yet been replaced. They have a major deal in the works where they hope to get a large one-time cash payment from the federal government in exchange for conservation easements for portions of their 280 acres. on their property they have spotted owl habitat as well as some very old Douglas firs. The easements will protect forested areas from development and timbering. The money will be used to retire debt and capitalize a retirement fund.

The Work
Caroline is one of my mentors as a facilitator and a consensus trainer (I took courses from her in 1987 and 1991), and thus we talk shop when we have the chance. Sadly, Caroline's hearing has deteriorated to the point where she no longer thinks she can deliver solid work in large groups. As such, these days she's turning down invitations to work with groups larger than a dozen.

That said, she's thinking about reviving her 5-day introduction to consensus & facilitation workshops, where the size of each class is manageable. If she can get logistical support from the current batch of residents, she hopes to schedule three such trainings in 2011. As someone who was touched deeply by her teaching, I hope this happens. The world could definitely benefit from having more of Caroline's teaching in it.

The Community Network
Caroline and I also go back a long ways as community networkers. The first FIC organizational meeting was held in May 1987, and the first thing I did afterward was board a train for the West Coast. Not three days after that first meeting in Illinois, I was sitting down with Caroline for the first time, for coffee and conversation (just like today) at Alpha-Bit, her community's bookstore/cafe in Mapleton. A year later, Caroline joined the Fellowship Board—a position she still holds today.

Because she didn't make it to our recent FIC meetings in Massachusetts [see my blog of Nov 15 for more about that meeting] I filled her in on Board business and caught her up on all our mutual acquaintances. After 23 years of being allies in the change-the-world-for-the-better business, it takes a while to run through the list and tell all the stories.

It was my pleasure that I had a leisurely four hours today to devote to cultivating the garden of our friendship.