About Face

I'm on my way to New Hampshire, chugging north from Maryland on the Vermonter (train #56 if you're scoring at home). This train is part of Amtrak's northeast regional fleet that has recently been upgraded to onboard satellite wi-fi. That means I'll have connectivity all day. Woohoo! (Among other things, that means I'll be able to track all the opening day action of March madness, as 16 first round basketball games will be contested today—it'll be a blizzard of hoops frenzy.)

I finished my reports from last weekend's facilitation training at Liberty Village about 1 am this morning, clearing my In Box before arriving today in Peterborough, where I'll be immersed in weekend consulting with Nubanusit, a relatively new cohousing community that's asked me to do some focused work with their facilitation team. Chugging north through Philly, New York, and Springfield today, I'll observe the novelty of a vernal reversal, as blossoms regress to swollen buds, followed by buds shriveling back into dormancy. It's springtime in the northeast!

• • •

Last night I had a bizarre experience in the course of my final dinner at Liberty Village, which was a community potluck. About 30 minutes into the normal exchange of people sharing the minor ebbs and flows of their diurnal experience, Vince casually mentioned that Ma'ikwe sure seemed to have enjoyed her echocardiogram. What?!

Ma'ikwe is going through health struggles right now as she suffers through a recurring bout with Lyme disease. While the main symptoms have been been achy joints (her arms and legs have been in pain nearly constantly the past month) and low energy, there is concern that she may have sustained heart damage (a relatively common occurrence with chronic Lyme patients) and she's wearing a monitor for 30 days to collect data about the electrical signals to her heart when she suffers an episode of dizziness or tachycardia. In recent days her pain and nausea have increased to the point where she was unable to accompany me on my current East Coast business trip [see my March 8 entry, Wife Down, for more on that].

Yesterday she was scheduled to have an echocardiogram done, as part of the testing sequence recommended by the heart specialist she's working with. Naturally, I'm concerned about her health—all the more so as she's struggling and not yet getting better—and we had talked briefly in the morning, via Skype. I caught her just as she was getting up (she had opened her laptop before making her first cup of tea) and we didn't talk long, but I could tell she'd not had a good night and I was worried about her.

Working on reports throughout the day, I had been regularly monitoring email to see if there was word from Ma'ikwe about how the testing had gone. Though nothing had come in by 4 pm (at which point I left my laptop to help my host prepare a dish for the community meal), I wasn't that concerned. There are many things that can delay communication and it's common for Ma'ikwe to be exhausted by a trip to town and need to simply rest afterwards. I figured I'd hear in due course and wasn't dwelling on it when I went to dinner.

Imagine my surprise then when I accidentally learned about Ma'ikwe's echocardiogram from someone who happened to be sitting at the same table with me. I had casually been explaining to Betsy, sitting next to me, that my partner had intended to come to Liberty Village as well, but had to cancel at the last minute due to ill health. Overhearing that, Vince (sitting at the end of the table) chimed in with news about how much Ma'ikwe had enjoyed her test today.

At first I thought I had misheard (how could Vince, who had only met her twice, possibly know more about what was happening with her than I did?). But then Facebook occurred to me. My wife participates in that alternate reality and I don't. [See my entry, Massaging the Medium, for more about that.] It only took me about 10 seconds to imagine what must have happened. Ma'ikwe had posted something about her experience on Facebook shortly after getting home and Vince had picked it up.

Simultaneous with my confusion (how could he know that?) I was eager for the news. The posting was brief, and I got to see it on Vince's smart phone:
OK, I know I'm not supposed to be enjoying this, but I have to say getting an echocardiagram done is one of the most frickin' cool things I've done in a while.

Reading between the lines, Ma'ikwe's upbeat tone meant that the news couldn't have been bad. Whew. So far, so good. Reflecting further though, she didn't actually say anything about the test results. Maybe they hadn't been interpreted yet (racking my brains, it seemed to me that the heart specialist only visits our county on Thursdays and the test had been done on Wednesday).

After savoring the news that she was in good spirits, I started to have a reaction to my getting a health update about my wife from a casual dinner companion. But then I paused. Maybe there was an email waiting for me that I hadn't seen yet. At that point it had been perhaps three hours since I'd last checked email, so I hit the pause button on the storm brewing in my stomach. In fact, I started chiding myself for being so reactive. It's a good thing that Ma'ikwe is willing to share her story and there was no reason to think I had been left out. Relax, I told myself.

Then I went back to my room.

When I checked email, there was no message from Ma'ikwe. Ufda. Rather than pout, I tried reaching her via Skype. No answer. Hmm.

I figure the phenomenon I was going through is the observe of the German term, freudenschade, which means pleasure derived from other people's misery. In my case, it was latent misery that emerged in the context of receiving good news. What did it mean that my wife had energy to share information about her echocardiogram with 900 of her "closest friends" on Facebook but didn't have the energy to tell her husband about it? I wasn't doing well with this line of thinking.

This morning, however, I'm doing better. I wrote Ma'ikwe about my confusion and frustration as the last thing before going to bed and there was a good response waiting for me when I boarded the train at BWI Airport. She'd been up at 4:40 am (not good) and we've started a dialog about how she protects herself from letting people in too close (even me) and about how it's far easier to jot off a breezy one-sentence Facebook post than it is to unpack the complex anxieties and despair that she must navigate as she attempts to face her health challenges.

Ma'ikwe is a brave woman, and I'm am both amazed and profoundly appreciative of her willingness to tackle the hard questions whenever one of us raises them. The last thing she needs to attend to right now is her husband's bruised ego.

Hitting the Curveball

As I write today’s entry, I’m jostling along on the Illinois Zephyr en route to Chicago, rumbling through the foggy morning air enveloping the soggy fields of the Land of Lincoln after yesterday’s cold, all-day drizzle. Ma’ikwe’s reading in the seat next to me, and in a couple hours we’ll arrive at Union Station, where we’ll change trains for the Capitol Limited and our overnight journey east.

We’ll be met around noon tomorrow in Harpers Ferry, and then driven to Liberty Village, a cohousing community just east of Frederick MD. Tomorrow night starts an intensive three-day weekend (fourth in a series of eight) with our Mid-Atlantic facilitation class. By Sunday, this course will be half completed, and I’m reflecting this morning, as I journey by train to the training, about the journey that our journeymen facilitators are on. (Wheels within wheels.)

A significant chunk of class time is devoted to getting ready to do live meetings for our host (in this case, Liberty Village). Friday afternoon we’ll get briefed about the topics the community wants to tackle, and we’ll get a concentrated download about three questions:

—What are the objectives or desired outcomes from focusing on the selected topics? How will the topic be introduced?

—What is the relevant background (what was the output of any prior discussions on each topic; are there any existing agreements that bear on these topics; is there anything we need to know that’s special about how the community makes decisions)?

—Are there any tensions points or pitfalls that we need to know about subject (we’d rather know about the stumbling blocks ahead of time, rather than accidentally trip over them)?

While proper preparation is a core element of facilitation, we also have to teach the students to not be overly attached to their plan. Expectations, no matter how insightfully developed, are only casually related to reality (as opposed to causally related to reality—but that’s a subject for a different essay), and you have to be flexible in the dynamic moment.

Three weeks ago, during a facilitation training weekend in Missouri, we had a first-time student who was cautioned that the topic projected for his slot was likely to evince some strong feelings. As he came into the training with the explicit hope of strengthening his ability to handle emotional volatility, he was psyched about his assignment and devoted most of his prep time to thinking about how he would ride the storm-tossed seas. When the time came and he invited people to voice their unresolved tensions, nothing happened. Now what? Once the script failed, he lost his way.

While there was no doubt that the tensions still existed, the group was not inclined to go there and it didn’t unfold as the best way to use the time. While it might have been the right thing to do, and it was appropriate to be ready for the possibility, the student had trouble adjusting to the anti-climax of needing to facilitate a plain, old vanilla discussion. While this more commonly happens the other way around (where you’ve prepared for you thought was going to be a simple conversation and a fight breaks out), handling the unexpected can be a challenge however it occurs.

The student struggled to let go of his plan and adapt to what the group needed in the moment. In baseball parlance, he was thrown a curveball and couldn’t hit it. The good news is that this was only his first time at bat, and he has several more weekends ahead in which he’ll get the chance to see curveballs again (under our watchful eyes in the batting cage) and we can coach him how to better see the rotation of the ball. For the students in our Mid-Atlantic class, it’s already time (at Weekend IV) for them to be seeing fewer fastballs and more curves.

Because groups of human beings are devilishly creative at manifesting unexpected and complex dynamics, we try to train facilitators to be adaptive rather than directive. Instead of trying to bend the will of the group to what the facilitator thinks is best, we try to develop the facilitator’s capacity to recognize what the will and the mood of the group are, so that the facilitator can work with what’s possible. While we want the facilitator’s ideas about how to structure the meeting to be firmly rooted in objectives that have been developed by the group (rather than by the facilitator), great facilitators know when and how to improvise on the spot, changing formats or the sequence of engagement based on what’s happening in the room—they develop a knack for making a bad thing good, or a good thing better.

This is at the heart of why facilitation is an art. While it’s a terrific advantage to have a large pattern library and familiarity with multiple modalities, skilled facilitation calls for the practitioner to do much more than just follow an endless cascade of if-then choices and decide who's turn it is to speak next. You have to be able to feel what’s happening and what’s possible; you have to develop an instinct for the right direction, such that it unerringly guides your hand when you reach into your toolkit.

In short, you have to be able to hit the curveball.