I facilitated the annual retreat for Heartwood, a cohousing community in Bayfield CO this past weekend, and Saturday night they had a no-talent show after dinner. In listening to some of the ideas for skits, I was inspired to write today's essay, as a take-off of the current box office hit, 50 Shades of Grey—only I'm going to focus on the dysfunctional nuances of consensus instead of the hidden eroticism of a successful businessman. (If you think this is amusing, you should have seen the group play Cards Against Community.)
I'm presenting this in two chunks of 25. Here is Part I.
1. Decisions Made by the Clock
It's late and everyone is tired and ready to go home. Out of exhaustion, you agree to the last proposal.
2. The Person with the Strongest Bladder Wins
With time running out and a decision needed, sometimes the views of the person most able to maintain focus (read least distracted by the need for a bio-break) prevails.
3. Conversations Derailed by Reactivity
When a group is unclear or lacks confidence in its ability to work constructively with strong feelings, they learn to steer clear of them—effectively allowing the person in reaction to control what gets considered.
4. Lukewarm Decisions
When groups are unsure of their footing in working with passion, or bridging between strongly held disparate views, the resulting agreements may lack pizzazz, decisiveness, or unifying energy. This is often the result when the overriding strategy is to minimize reactivity rather than maximizing excitement.
5. Arm Twisting Outliers
Sometimes groups put considerable social pressure on reluctant minorities to allow what the majority favors to prevail. Rather than trying to find a workable bridge between the majority and outliers, the majority gets impatient and starts leaning on the minority to cave in. While this may get you across the finish line, the cost in trust and indifferent implementation may be high.
6. Paint by Numbers Process
In any group there is a normal spectrum of those favoring less structure and those favoring more. If the high structure folks are ascendent, the process can be very formulaic. While this can provide a known pathway (read reduced confusion about what to do in any given moment), it can come at the expense of nuance and or the flexibility to adapt to emerging energetic needs. At its worst, the primacy of adherence to the process can become the enemy of the product—even though no one had that in mind.
7. Competitive Behavior Poisoning the Well
You don't tend to get good results from consensus unless you grok that it's based on a commitment to cooperative culture and that that's a fundamental shift from the way most of us have been raised. If people inadvertently bring competitive dynamics to the process, they'll battle over differences instead of being curious. Not only will the magic be lost, but the engagement can be draining and discouraging.
8. All Decisions Made in Plenary
When groups fail to delegate authority to committees and managers, all work has to come back to the plenary for review and approval. In addition to bloated plenary agendas, this often leads to the committee's work being second-guessed, which is very demoralizing. Subsequently, it's hard to get members to serve on committees (why bother?).
9. Separating Heart Work from Business Meetings
When groups are uncomfortable working with feelings, there can be an impulse to shunt emotions into special meetings (heart circles?) that are distinct from business meetings—where members are expected to participate rationally. This practice doesn't help the group navigate business topics that trigger strong feelings.
10. Hobbling Progress through Strategic Absence—Version I
If the group is not clear how to work a topic while still protecting the rights of members who miss the meeting to have input, it can lead to postponing engagement when key members are absent. Worse, members who miss early meetings on a topic may be allowed to monkey wrench progress with 11th hour objections. These disagreeable dynamics are fallout from the group not being clear about the rights and responsibilities of members who miss meetings.
11. Hobbling Progress through Strategic Absence—Version II
Sometimes a person who gets crosswise with the group will purposefully miss a meeting at which the challenging dynamics involving them are scheduled to be discussed, hoping to avoid the hot seat. While not easy to do well, it's important that there's a way to have that conversation even when the person in the spotlight tries to duck it. You don't want agendas held hostage to individual attendance.
12. Skipping the Opening
When groups are not in alignment about how to work with energy, it's not unusual for some portion of the membership to be uncomfortable with ritual or openings that are an attempt to align energy and provide a clear marker between informal social space and meeting space—where there are different standards of behavior. Voting with their feet, those ill at ease may develop the habit of arriving late to meetings, to purposefully avoid the woo-woo part. In consequence, the energy of the group is not aligned and there can frustration all around.
13. No Clarity about the Facilitator's Authority
When groups are vague about defining the facilitator's role, it's much harder for that person to interrupt repetition or to redirect people speaking off topic. The facilitator needs explicit license from the group to hold participants to its operating agreements. Absent clear authority, the facilitator's role tends to devolve into the impoverished position of simply deciding who will speak next.
14. Weak Minutes
Groups that do not do a decent job of capturing and archiving decisions regularly get in trouble recalling accurately what their agreements are. However, even if agreements are well-recorded, if the minutes do not also include a sense of what factors went into the decision, it can be hard knowing when requests to revisit a decision are warranted.
15. Block Paralysis, Version I
There are three essential process agreements for a consensus group to be able to work with blocks effectively: a) defining the grounds for a legitimate block; b) defining the process by which the block can be validated (does it meet the standard for legitimacy?); and c) defining the process by which the group will try to resolve blocking concerns, and being clear about the rights and responsibilities of all members in that process. When any of these three are absent and the group is unsure of its footing, there can be high anxiety about how to work with a block, resulting in a heavy overlay of fear when it appears that might be where the group is headed.
16. Block Paralysis, Version II
A different version occurs when members take advantage of the group's uncertainty and anxiety about blocks to threaten one when they don't like someone's proposed initiative or viewpoint. This can derail a conversation at the front end, long before it gets to the proposal phase and is a misuse of the concept. When you have a negative response to a suggestion or an approach it means there's something to work out—it indicates a need for more talking, not less.
17. Tyranny of Time
Meetings can take up a fair amount of a person's vital life energy, and it makes sense that people want that time used effectively. They want meetings to be efficient and productive. So far, so good. Unfortunately, some topics don't fit easily into the boxes into which they've been placed. Despite the best efforts of agenda planners to estimate the time a topic will take, sometimes they get it wrong and you have to choose between running long, tabling the topic as unfinished, or trying to push for a conclusion before its fully ripe. These are not necessarily great choices, and there are times when people will demand a decision based on the clock rather than because you've reached a unifying conclusion.
18. Starting with Proposals
Some groups ask that items come to the plenary in the form of a proposal (at once identifying an issue and offering a solution). The motivation for this is to save time (in case the proposal works) and to force the people bringing the issue forward to have thought it through. The problem is that it asks presenters to invest in a solution before the group has had a chance to identify everything that the solution needs to address, and this can be a train wreck.
19. Commingling Discussion with Proposal Generation
In general, the two most important phases of tackling an issue in plenary are Discussion (where you identify and prioritize what factors a good response to the issue needs to take into account) and Proposal Generation (where you do your best to manifest a response that balances that factors that have emerged from the Discussion phase). They need to be done in the that order, and groups tend to be more productive if they're diligent about completing Discussion phase (which is expansive and can invite advocacy and passion) before moving into Proposal Generation (which is contractive, and features bridging and compassion). If groups are sloppy about this, the identification of a factor can be immediately followed by someone's well-intentioned offer of a solution. This often leads to considerable confusion about where the group is at in the conversation—not only are you jumping between phases, but it's damn hard to be expansive and contractive simultaneously (try it).
20. Facilitator Roulette
Some groups assign plenary facilitators well ahead of time, which helps settle people's individual calendars (think vacation planning, for instance). The problem is that it's crucial that the facilitator have sufficient neutrality and appropriate skill to be able to handle the proposed agenda and you can't assess that ahead of knowing the agenda.
21. Consensus Versus Unanimous Voting
When groups get it that consensus only thrives in cooperative culture they will nurture an attitude of collaboration (looking for ways ideas can work for everyone) and curiosity (in the face of different viewpoints on non-trivial matters). People are oriented toward saying "yes." This is completely different from problem solving in competitive culture where the model is that the best idea will be the one that emerges after being tested through vigorous debate. If you try to use consensus in competitive culture, you're really talking about unanimous voting, which is a very high bar.
22. Not Screening for What's Plenary Worthy
When groups fail to be clear about what kinds of topics are appropriate for whole group attention (with the assumption that lesser matters can be handled on the committee level) there tends to be quite a bit of topic material that wanders into plenary that doesn't belong there, which contributes significantly to the phenomenon of meeting fatigue. If you haven't clearly defined the boundary of what's appropriate it's damn hard for the facilitator (or anyone else) to know when you've crossed it and are working on a level of minutia that should be handed over to a manager or committee.
23. Working Complex Topics as a Whole
Some portion of the topics that plenaries address are multifaceted. Not only can it be hard to figure out where to start, but you can end up chasing your tail when a member is reluctant to agree to a proposal about one facet until they know what the group is going to do with another. Groups need a protocol for how to handle hair ball topics in a piecemeal approach. Lacking that there's a tendency for the plenary's energy to be exhausted on the shoals of complexity (because it's too hard to find a unified field theory with everything on the table at once).
24. Blowing by Distress to Get to Problem Solving
When groups are paralyzed (or at least lack confidence) in their ability to work constructively with emotions and reactivity, there's a tendency to try working around it and hope for the best. While you can sympathize with where that comes from, it may be a false economy. If the emotions are directly related to the topic at hand, you're better off getting those out in the open and worked with at the start, rather than trying to cope with their leaking into the considerations, distorting and distracting how information and viewpoints are being understood.
25. The Identified Problem
It's not unusual for groups to struggle in a patterned way with particular members. Perhaps the person in question has an aggressive style, a fearful nature, or a victim attitude. Maybe they rarely follow through on commitments, yet have a self-image of being under-appreciated. Whatever it is, if the group does not meet with early success in laboring with the person about their challenging behavior(s), there's a marked tendency for the group to label the person as an Official Problem, which leads to marginalizing them as a member of the group. The ugly side of this is the potential that the group can then get smug in its analysis and stop looking at how it's actively contributing to trapping the outlier with a pejorative label. By failing to see the aspects of the dynamic that are a system failure—where everyone is playing a role in sustaining the dysfunctional dynamic—no movement is possible yet the group blithely lays full responsibility at the feet of the Identified Problem.
Monday, March 2, 2015
50 Shades of Consensus, Part I
del.icio.usWednesday, February 4, 2015
Long Distance Intimacy
When Ma'ikwe and I first got together in October 2005, she was living in Albuquerque, where she was trying to form an intentional community, and I was living in Rutledge MO, where I had been living in community (Sandhill Farm) for 31 years. While it took us less than a month to decide to get married (which happened in April 2007), we didn't agree to live in the same time zone until 2008, when Ma'ikwe let go of trying to build community in Albuquerque (after five years in the attempt) and joined Dancing Rabbit.
Suddenly, our commute between bedrooms shrunk from 900 miles to three. Much better. We continued that way for five years, until I left Sandhill in November 2013 and we tried the novel idea of living in the same house.
While this overview presents as a rather deliberate courtship, where we've been circling around intimacy in an ever tightening spiral more evocative of Chekhov than People magazine, it's more complicated than that.
When Ma'ikwe and I first moved into the gravitational field of one another, I was already established as a community networker and national process consultant, and she was on the front edges of moving into a similar career (though more slanted toward sustainability education). It quickly got to the point where a significant fraction of our time together was spent at neither of our homes, attending community functions or collaborating as trainer/consultants.
Thus, while we've gradually come to live together, I'm still on the road about 40-50% of the time, and I don't see that changing any time soon (as long as my health holds out). So there are two patterns here that don't particular nest together easily. On the domestic scene our lives have become ever more intertwined over the course of the last decade. Concurrent with that, my travel patterns—both what I'm doing and who I'm doing it with—haven't changed much at all over the same interval.
All of which brings us to the reality that I'm typing this blog from the first leg of a month-long sojourn that will ultimately add up to Ma'ikwe and I not being in our Moon Lodge bed together from now until mid-April—a whopping 10 weeks. I'm scheduled to get back home circa March 3, four days after Ma'ikwe starts a six-week speaking tour, where she visits university campuses across the country offering an array of workshops and an expanded version of her popular TEDx talk Sustainable Is Possible (from October 2013).
Both of us will be doing work we love, but mostly not together. While we just completed a winter stretch where we were at Moon Lodge every night for 70 days (hooray!), we're turning right around and spending the next 70 days apart (ugh!)—excepting a 5-day island in the middle where we'll be teaching together in Portland OR (yippee!).
While there's a yin and yang symmetry about this, it's an odd mix, and contributes to strain on the relationship. When one or both of us are on the road (which will now be the case until after federal taxes are due), it's not easy making connections when we have to factor in time zone differences and a wealth of client commitments. While the phone has not been a great medium for Ma'ikwe and me connecting, it turns out that Skype is much more satisfying, where we can see facial expressions.
We'll see what Kyre and Leo (our two Maine Coon cats) think of all this, where Ma'ikwe's and my extensive travels will interrupt the all-night cat valet service they've become accustomed to—where all they have to do to is scratch on the door or the mattress in order to get one of us out of bed at all hours to let them out or in. I'll keep you posted.
Fortunately, I needn't stray far from Union Station today and can mostly appreciate the prowess of Father Borealis from the comfort of the train windows. And after today I'll mostly be in the southern latitudes (taking, I hope, and early leave from icy roads and pathways).
I have a lot to look forward to on this trip:
o Gathering with old friends in the context of FIC's Oversight Committee meetings Feb 6-7 at Dunmire Hollow, to effect mid-course corrections for organizational affairs between Board meetings.
o An overnight stop in New Orleans this Sunday as I switch trains from the City of New Orleans to the Sunset Limited. I believe it will mark the first time I've traveled on Amtrak's train #1 end for end. This train operates just three days/week and is the only way to cross the Mississippi River other than via Chicago—of which I see plenty. I'm looking forward to 46 hours en route, fully half of which is crossing Texas east to west.
o I'll spend six days each in Los Angeles and Las Vegas visiting my kids, Ceilee and Jo, respectively. I haven't seen them since last March, which is the longest I've ever gone between visits and I miss them a lot—along with Taivyn & Connor, my two grandkids; and Zeus, Yoshi, and Zelda, my three granddogs. It should be 12 days full of social time with my kids and their charges.
o The relaxed time in granddad mode will allow me plenty of opportunity to read and work on my book (which is has not been easy to manifest amidst the various distractions of home).
o The last weekend of Feb I'll be working in Bayfield CO, facilitating the annual retreat for Heartwood, a well-established cohousing community working on revitalizing itself. While it's possible I'll catch some ice there (at 6900 feet in southwest Colorado that's certainly a possibility), I'm confident that all the meetings will be indoors. In addition to the excitement of the work itself, one of the more promising of my facilitation students, Brent Levin, will be traveling from northern California to apprentice with me and I'm looking forward to that as well.
o At the tail end of this trip I'll get in a visit with good friends, Peggy & Earl Loftfield. It's been convenient to stay at their house in Albuquerque ever since Ma'ikwe left in '08, but that era is coming to an end as they sell their house in the coming months and move to Hawaii—where I have yet to figure out how to connect with via Amtrak.
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Facilitating Conflict
I recently worked with Heartwood, a cohousing community in Bayfield CO, where I was asked to reach them skills for working with conflict. In addition to presenting theory and a demonstration, they were keenly interested in learning how to facilitate conflict (after all, I was leaving on Monday). Liking what they saw me do Saturday, they asked me to break it down for them Sunday morning—which was a perfectly reasonable request. Here are a dozen concepts to keep in mind:
1. Contact Statements
This is the ability to offer a Cliff's Notes version of what the person just said, to establish that you have understood the essence of it. Repetition is mostly motivated by people not being sure they've been heard, and effective contact statements can drastically reduce repetition. That said, they're not needed all the time. Here are four reasons it might be the thing to do:
a) The speaker has an unusual way of putting information together or expressing themselves and either you are unsure that you got the meaning right, or that others are. A contact statement can nip misunderstandings in the bud.
b) The speaker went on at length and people may have trouble holding all the points that were made or distilling them from a rambling presentation.
c) The speaker is in distress. To the extent that they feel isolated, a contact statement helps establish that you heard them accurately, thereby contradicting the isolation and helping the person deescalate.
d) The speaker is known to be prone to repetition. A contact statement can be a preemptive strike, undercutting the basis for repletion before it occurs.
2. Free Attention
For most of us it's hard to keep one's focus on what others are saying. There is a tendency to space out, or to have your attention drift to something else, which might be tangentially related to the conversation (but not the current topic) or something of interest to you yet not necessarily related to anyone or anything else in the room. The concept of free attention is being able to discipline yourself to track well what's happening in current conversation. This includes the meaning of the spoken words, the tone of the words, the body language, how the communication is landing with others, what the undercurrents are that have not yet been named, where this conversation seems to be headed and whether you're going to want to go there, etc. There's a lot going on, and you need as much free attention as possible track well.
The bad news is that most of us are weak at this. The good news is that you can train yourself to get better at it.
3. Walk in the Speaker's Moccasins
To the extent possible, when working conflict try to be the speaker and experience what they experienced. This is not parroting or mimicking so much as dreaming into their experience; picturing yourself as them and what that feels like. This is particularly helpful when trying to Get the affect right [see #5 below].
Caution: Are you at risk of losing your sense of self when you empathize? While I don't have this issue, Ma'ikwe (my wife and process partner) does, and is therefore cautious about taking this step very far.
4. Concise Summaries
When giving contact statements or summaries of where we are in the conversation, it's important that you be accurate, yet spare of words. The less air time taken up by the facilitator the better (it is, after all, not about you). The danger is losing momentum or the tenderness of the moment. Even though no one is particularly inspired by long-winded facilitators, concision is often the last skill learned (if learned at all).
5. Get the Affect Right
When trying to connect to people in distress it's essential that your reflection capture the feeling of their experience, not just get the "facts" right. Even when facilitators understand the importance of this step, there is a common tendency to be cautious about leaning into the feelings for fear of: a) triggering escalation in a person already upset; or b) coming across as taking one person's side over another. With respect to the first point, the reverse is true: if you get the affect right—showing up fully in expressing the emotional experience—distressed people feel less isolated and start to deescalate. On the second point, you will not get in trouble (by which I mean compromise your neutrality) if you extend the same strength of connection to other players as well.
Note #1: In the interest of concision and getting the affect right, don't be afraid to use different words than the speaker to get to the essence. If you're off the mark, they'll tell you.
Note #2: In order to reach people accurately on the emotional plane you need to develop sufficient range of expression. In broad terms you have to get big to meet rage, and need to get tender and soft to hold tears. Typically one end of the range is easier for people to access than the other, so you may need to work at developing your weaker end.
6. Be Curious
In general, when dynamics get stuck it follows a sequence something like this:
a) Person X did (or did not) or said (or didn't say) something and Person Y had a negative reaction.
b) Person Y lets Person X know about their reaction and Person X has a reaction to that.
c) Neither felt heard by the other, and feeling heard is a precondition for deescalating.
d) Since each has a story about being aggrieved, each is waiting for the other to make the first conciliatory gesture; when that doesn't happen the dynamic is stalemated (with each convinced it's mainly the other person's fault).
Curiosity is the way out. Thus, in the example above, you can go back to the moment when Person Y had their initial reaction and walk them through it ("OK, you noticed you had a bad reaction to what Person X did, and you couldn't understand why they made that choice. Rather than assuming it was because they were out to get you or didn't give a shit about you, let's find out how they saw it." That is, you can showcase how to get more information before dumping a reaction on someone.
Going the other way, you can walk Person X through their options when Person Y gives them critical feedback. Instead of defending their action, they could start by making sure that they understand why their action landed poorly for Person Y.
7. Be Willing to Follow a Vein
When you're in productive territory it's a good idea to mine all the ore. Here are the things that characterize such moments:
o People are sharing crucial things they haven't shared before (at least not with that person)
o People are getting softer rather than more rigid
o People are reporting insight, or accepting responsibility for what didn't work
o People are expressing genuine caring for others
o The emergence of tears
The flip side of this is knowing when you have a dry hole and it's time to shift the focus elsewhere.
8. Go Where Needed
That may mean staying on topic, or shifting the focus to something more profound. This guidance is about following the juice, and does not mean exploring every instance of awkwardness. Your object is turning a corner, not resolving all instances of unresolved difficult moments.
9. Develop One's Intuition
In addition to developing free attention, good facilitators develop an instinct for where the conversation should go, or what should be named. While instincts are not always insightful or productive (any more than thoughts are), you need courage to facilitate conflict and to be willing to trust your instinct.
Caution: That said, don't fight for your viewpoints. No matter how brilliant you believe your analysis or summary to be, if there isn't buy in from the protagonists, you should back out gracefully.
10. Look for Parallels
In conflict the protagonists almost always feel poorly understood by the other protagonists. If you find ways that the players had similar experiences, similar stories, or care about similar things, then pointing this out is often helpful in deescalating the dynamics—it has the potential to establish a bridge between them that was not visible before.
Hint: Parallels are actually common, and if you're alert to the possibility of their existence you'll be more likely to see them.
11. Keep the Examination Specific and Contained
Quite often, the relationship history between protagonists is complicated, especially if things have been allowed to fester for a while. The examination can easily snowball into something unworkable if you allow the protagonists to expand the consideration to include every incident that has ever gone badly between them.
With this in mind you want to invite the protagonists to select a single dynamic that is representative of what hasn't been working well, with the idea that if we can resolve tensions in conjunction with one incident, then we can subsequently do another and another until no more need to be addressed. Thus, you generally want to keep the players focused on the selected incident and not diffuse the focus by allowing them to introduce the complications of other hurts from other situations.
The one caveat here is that sometimes the protagonists select the wrong incident and the examination makes clear that there is another, deeper incident that is a better focus. In that case it may be wiser to switch to that (a la the point made above in Go Where Needed).
12. Deflect Analysis of Others
While you want a full statement of each person's story and their feelings, you are not interested in their analysis of why the other person did what they did, which is highly likely to be inflammatory and unhelpful. Often, when working conflict your strategy is to honor completely each protagonist's story and their emotional experience, while offering a plausible, alternative explanation that is not damning of the other person(s).
