Giving Good Weight

The title of today's blog comes from the lead essay in a collection written by John McPhee that was published in 1979. The story deals with greengrocers in New York City. When vendors give good quality produce in full measure, they are said to be "giving good weight."

Giving Good Eight
As a facilitation trainer, my teachings depend both on students eager to learn the craft, and on hosts who are willing to provide live meetings as opportunities for students to learn (in exchange for room and board for the students during the training weekend). I offer a facilitation training program that runs for two years and is comprised of eight weekends. Naturally, it's important that I deliver materials and guidance that build synergistically over all eight weekends, so that the students steadily improve and are able to deliver an increasingly superior product as the training progresses.

A weak spot in all this is the challenge to give good weight during the first weekend or two, when the students are especially green. During those opening weekends it's rare that the host group is receiving anything special in the way of outside facilitation. It helps balance the scale that I offer a professional report on what I've observed of the host's process and that I typically facilitate at least one session as a demonstration. Mostly though, we depend on hosts that are willing to believe in the long haul, in the hopes that their early generosity will be repaid down the road when their members in the training blossom into more skilled facilitators.

Giving Good Weight (this week)
We just completed Weekend II of my Integrative Facilitation Training in the Mid-Atlantic States (that I'm conducting with my wife, Ma'ikwe), where we were hosted by Heathcote Community in Freeland MD. While there was some frustration with our fairly deliberate start on Friday and Saturday, we picked up enough steam—and delivered enough valuable product—that by Sunday Heathcoters felt well rewarded for having the class facilitate their weekend retreat. Whew! It's always a relief when we cross into the black.

Everyone in the class who attended both of the first two weekends has now gotten up front to facilitate for at least an hour of live meetings, and this gives us a much better read on everyone's capacity (helping us trainers assess better who can handle what, and who to pair up with whom to make an effective partnership). After only two weekends, students can already see improvements in their facilitating and in their ability to discern what's happening in a meeting. It's thrilling to watch the students grow right before our eyes.

Giving Good Wait
Part of the program format is that Ma'ikwe and I, as trainers, reserve the right to step in and redirect or clarify in the moment if a student facilitator is straying or otherwise being ineffective in their offerings. While we do this rather freely in the early weekends (both to help guide the student and to safeguard the quality of work being given the host), by Sunday we were starting to get push back from the students who assured us that they could handle what was happening. Hah! We usually don't start seeing that kind of spunk and confidence until Weekend V! Already, they're starting to ask Ma'ikwe and me to wait a little longer before stepping in.

All in all, it's been an auspicious start.

Questions Groups Should Ask (But Probably Haven’t)

I just finished doing a weekend Introduction to Facilitation Workshop at Heathcote Community in Freeland MD. Friday evening through Sunday afternoon I worked and laughed with 16 participants as we explored a wide range of group situations and typical challenges that facilitators face. As a student of group dynamics and a teacher of facilitation, I am frequently in the position of describing the pitfalls that groups fall into by virtue of not having discussed and made explicit agreements about how they want to view to handle certain things.

By Sunday afternoon the workshop participants were all over me to give them a list of these questions, so here goes.

The main thing to understand about this is not there is one right way to address all of the questions (indeed, different groups come up with all manner of good answers). Rather, it’s to understand that having no answer is guaranteed to be a problem. Sooner or later, the ambiguity will to bite you in the butt, and it’s much worse to attempt to sort many of these things out when you’re in the midst of tension resulting from members proceeding from different assumptions—or guesses—about the group’s position.

Almost all groups have some basic agreements: for example, about common values, how one becomes a member, and how the group will make decisions. While that’s a good start, it isn’t nearly enough. Here’s a much longer list of things that groups should discuss—preferably before the water gets hot: Note that none of these questions is limited to residential communities: they are meant to apply to any group trying to function cooperatively.

Meeting Culture
1. What is the purpose of meetings? To what extent is it to solve problems, and to what extent is it to build relationships among members?

2. What topics are worthy of plenary attention? Absent clarity about this, groups tend to drift into working at a level of detail that is beneath them rather than effectively delegating. This is directly related to the phenomenon of meeting fatigue.

3. How do you want to work with emotions that surface in meetings? Hint #1: Ignoring them doesn’t work. Hint #2: You can allow expression of feelings while at the same time object to aggression.

4. How do you want to work with conflict? (This is the most volatile subset of working with emotions.) While asking conflicted people to “take it outside” can work some of the time, it won’t always. What’s more, at least some of the time progress on the topic that triggered the distress may be held hostage to resolution of the upset. It can be very expensive to not have an agreement about how to work conflict.

5. Under what conditions, if any, is it OK to speak critically of a member who is not in the room? Caution: Be careful here. You don’t want people to be able to control by their absence what gets examined.

6. How do you protect the rights of members to have an opportunity to have input on issues examined at meetings they missed? Conversely, how do you protect the right of the group to move forward on issues when members miss meetings? This is a balancing act, and a good answer here probably involves clear agreements about advance notification of draft agendas, advance circulation of proposals, and standards for minutes.

7. What authority do you give facilitators to run meetings? Hint: If they’re not explicitly allowed to interrupt people repeating themselves or speaking off topic, you’re in trouble.

Communication
8. What are your standards for minutes? What should minutes include? Where will they be posted? Are they indexed? Are they archived? Do the same standards apply to committees that apply to the plenary?

9. Do you have protocols for how email is used? Hint: Email is great for posting announcements and reports; OK for discussions; dangerous for expressing upset; and downright thermonuclear for trying to process upset.

Membership
10. What are the rights & responsibilities of membership? While groups tend to be pretty good at being clear about financial aspects, they tend to be less good at spelling out labor, governance, or social expectations. Hint: It generally works better if you think of these two questions as being paired.

11. What does membership imply about how much you want to be in each other’s lives? How much does membership imply a social connection beyond a business connection? Big gaps in answers (or assumptions) here can really hurt.

12. What are the expectations around giving one another critical feedback about their behavior as a member of the group? Caution: Is a member allowed to refuse another member a request to discuss their behavior?

13. What are the conditions under which a member may involuntarily lose rights, and by what process will that be examined? Caution: While it’s hard to get excited about tackling this delicate topic before there’s a need, it’s a nightmare to attempt to clear it up once the need has arisen.

14. How much diversity can you tolerate? While most groups aspire to embrace diversity (in fact—given that human cloning is illegal—some degree is unavoidable), there is always a limit to how much a group can tolerate and it’s important to have a way to talk about it.

Governance
15. How do you select managers and fill committees? Caution: Simply asking for volunteers can work fine for some positions, yet can be downright foolish in others, where a definite balance or skill set is critically needed.

16. How do you evaluate the performance of managers and committees? This includes how, how frequently, and overseen by whom? Hint #1: Have people self-evaluate before the group takes a crack at them. Hint #2: This will tend to work much better if it includes both a chance to identify what’s not been working well and a chance to celebrate what is.

17. What is the group’s model for healthy leadership? Absent an agreement, cooperative groups tend to be much more critical of leaders than supportive, suppressing members’ willingness to take on leadership.

18. Do you regularly discuss how power is distributed in the group? Do you have an understanding about how to discuss the perception that people are using power less cooperatively than the users think they are? Caution: Tackle the first question before the second. Absent a clear sense of the need to talk about power, and an understanding about how to go about it in a constructive manner, this topic can be explosive (think Krakatoa).