When Values Collide

As a for-hire facilitator, I'm typically brought in to navigate one of two kinds of dynamics: something volatile, or something complicated. Of course, there are times when it's both. I encountered an excellent specimen of the combination plate special just last weekend, when my training class was facilitating quarterly meetings for the School of Living (SoL) in central Pennsylvania...

Two of the sessions we facilitated were meetings of the Land Committee. They had a proposal in front of them to execute long-term lease for a piece of property that SoL had owned for many years yet had experienced persistent trouble in finding a stable leaseholder for. The candidate was someone known to the organization who had been a caretaker on the property for the past half year and had already accomplished a considerable amount of clean-up and repair (to buildings that had been seriously degrading). Thus, the lease prospect had already established a good track record for herself as a motivated hard worker. On top of that, she is a permaculture teacher and wants to use the land as a demonstration site for sustainable land use practices.

As the School of Living wants long-term leaseholds for the property it holds in trust, they were happy to have a bona fide applicant, and in the afternoon we were able to establish to everyone's satisfaction that there was a sufficiently solid match with the woman's plans and the the school's mission around promoting education and community.

The trouble came in the evening when we discussed the financial details. The applicant has steady income as a working professional and was willing to commit tens of thousands of dollars in personal funds over the course of the next decade to renovating the dilapidated farmhouse. Understandably, she didn't want to embark on that ambitious program until terms had been negotiated with SoL.

In the SoL model, it's fine for the leaseholder to own the improvements on a piece of property while the school retains ownership of the land. Both because of the run-down condition of the buildings and because of the major commitment of personal funds that would be required to effect an overhaul (we're talking major leaks, rotten sills, multicolored mold, broken windows—you get the picture) the woman proposed that SoL sell her the buildings for $1. In exchange, she'd commit to the repairs mentioned above and provide the organization with a no-interest mortgage worth $80,000. (The amount was derived from a recent estimate given by a building inspector who thought that with $50,000 worth of repairs that the main farmhouse would be worth $130,000 in the current market.) On top of this deal for the buildings, the woman would pay a monthly lease fee for the land, over and above the cost of taxes and insurance.

As long as the woman held the lease, she would owe nothing on the mortgage. If the lease passed to someone else, the new leaseholder would be responsible for paying SoL $80k. This kept the woman's financial burden to acceptable levels and offered SoL the prospect of turning around the fortunes of the property. What it did not do was offer SoL a clear short-term path to recovering its substantial investment in the property.

While there was considerable support for this proposal (people were overjoyed at seeing any light at end of what had been a tortuous tunnel connecting acquisition and functionality), the proposal foundered over upset that emerged from a couple who had an SoL lease for a different piece of property on markedly less favorable terms. Why, they wondered, should this new woman get such a good deal when SoL made them cough up the money for all the improvements on their property? They demanded that either the woman pay the $80k (or something close to it) for the current value of the improvements, or give them the same deal for a no-interest mortgage. Fair is fair.

Now it was getting interesting. Even though this was all unfolding in a room where everyone was getting along and there was an atmosphere of deep respect for everyone's good intent and diligence on behalf of the school's values, we had now uncovered the Daily Double of high emotions and no clear pathway about how to proceed. Yikes! It's instructive to walk through how we tried to work with this.

As the facilitation team, we were the ones behind the wheel when we hit the bump, and the first thing we did was pull over, temporarily suspending our focus on the lease proposal.

1. We first checked with the upset couple about their emotional response, making sure they felt heard by us.

2. Next we gave all members of the Land Cmtee a chance to respond to what they heard. As often happens in such moments (especially with groups not used to working together emotionally during business meetings—which damn few are), the comments, while heartfelt and sincere, focused more on what to do than on what was heard.

3. When the Go Round was complete, we checked with the couple about whether they felt heard and they replied that they didn't think so. Oops. When I had connected with their upset I made a point to raise my energy to match theirs and the couple reported that they felt heard by me—they just weren't sure that anyone on the Land Committee had truly understood their anguish. (Hint: bridging effectively to people in distress is just as much about the affect as about the words.)

4. After establishing the primacy of making an emotional connection on a deeper level, we laid out the essential challenge the group was facing: how to balance three different values regarding money—all of which were legitimate, yet didn't play well together in this dynamic:

o Financial fairness (treating similar situations similarly)
o Financial accessibility (making deals that good people with good plans could afford)
o Financial replenishment for SoL (so that it would have adequate funds to make additional good deals in the future)

5. Next we put it back on the group: "Who had ideas about how to balance all three?" While it had taken us three hours to get to this point in the conversation, we'd finally hit bedrock. This was one of the richest moments of the weekend—where the organization needed to address how it would balance core values with sensitivity and care.

Even though the matter was not resolved on our watch, I was happy that we'd gotten to the heavy lifting and were able to unpack the tensions without losing anyone or pretending that strong feelings weren't present (those kinds of meetings drive me crazy).

As a trainer, it's deeply satisfying to give groups the tools needed to navigate road hazards, and not be afraid of the occasional blow out.

The Living School

Today was the wrap-up for a three-day facilitation training (Weekend V in the Mid-Atlantic States). Nine students facilitated 10 hours of meetings for the School of Living in the context of their Board's quarterly gathering. The class did seven hours of committee meetings, leading up to a three-hour Board meeting that served as a finale. In addition to getting our work in, it was fun getting more familiar with and assisting a venerable nonprofit dedicated to social change and sustainability.

Inspired by the writing and thinking of Ralph Borsodi, the School of Living (SoL) has been around since 1934 as "an educational organization dedicated to learning and teaching the philosophy, practices and principles of living that are self-empowering for individuals within the general aim of establishing decentralized, ecologically-sound, self-governed and humane communities. All its resources, but most specifically the land it holds in trust, are held in responsible stewardship for present and future generations." It holds property in trust in PA, MD, and VA—most of which have intentional communities sited on them.

When an organization is 77 years old, it means they have gone through a generational transition more than once. Thus, when we spent time in the final hour discussing the phenomenon of burnout and too few attempting to do too much, it not only had a familiar ring (who do you know who cannot relate to this issue on a personal level?), you knew that the organization had been in this conversation before. And yet, here they still were. Impressive.

• • •

The facilitation training is comprised of eight three-day weekends, spaced approximately three months apart. This pacing works in two ways: a) it's not easy for busy people to carve out three-day weekends more frequently that once every quarter; and b) the time between is fertile, allowing for percolation and digestion of the nutrient-rich weekends—when students have chances to apply what they've been learning they find out more precisely what they've integrated and where they need more practice.

There are two things that are special about this facilitation training and it occurred to me how these features are concordant with a school that is focused on living, or at least live learning. First, the teaching is rooted in community and the eight weekends are constructed with the purposeful idea of the class itself bonding as a community. That is, we expressly immerse ourselves—students and instructors together—into a milieu of intensity and complexity, where we are striving to get better and better at understanding accurately what is going on both around us and within us, for the purpose of being able to deliver energy, ideas, and focus that facilitate connection and problem solving.

I am convinced that the learning proceeds more deeply and enthusiastically when the class becomes a living organism, that holds and nurtures each individual on his or her journey of discovery and accomplishment.

Second, the pedagogical orientation is slanted heavily toward teaching the moment—where the bulk of each weekend is preparing for, delivering, and debriefing live meetings for the host group. On the one hand there isn't much preparation that the trainers can do for each weekend; on the other, we need to be "on" all the time, because we never know what will happen. We try to teach students how to sensitively and thoroughly prepare for a meeting, and then be willing to scrap the plan in light of developing dynamics as the meeting unfolds.

While there's no doubt that the trainers' experience comes into play (we acquire pattern recognition that's enormously helpful in quickly diagnosing what's happening and what responses or approaches are most apt to be beneficial—or at least benign), we're all in it together and the relationship of our careful preparations to the reality can be wildly divergent. Good facilitation often requires the ability to off road, and teaching moments pop up in the most unexpected places. This is simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. However you slice it though, it's education that's based on being alive.

• • •

Midway through the weekend, one SoL Board member came up to me during a break and asked for more information about the training. I explained how it was two-year program, and she was impressed with the dedication that took. When I further related that I had completed the course four times already and was midway through three others, she paused and looked at me with a confused expression and delicately inquired, "Is it so difficult to learn that you have to take the course that many times?"

After a pause to figure out what was going on, I replied, "I'm the trainer."

"Oh," she said, "I'd wondered why you were sitting in the back of the room and interrupting so much."

Sigh. Even when you've been thoroughly diligent about filling the trough with water, there's no guarantee that all of the horses will drink.