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).

Enraptured

Despite Harold Camping's prediction, the world did not end Saturday.

I'm not going to say I'm surprised by that, yet I did experience a surprisingly delightful five days in Chicago, that culminated in an up-tempo Christian rock crescendo Saturday evening, orchestrated by a band called The Crossing—roughly in the vicinity of when Camping predicted the Rapture was due. It was an interesting juxtaposition.

While the California evangelist was reported in the Sunday Chicago Tribune to have been "flabbergasted" by a decidedly Rapture-less Saturday (it was the second time Camping's calculations failed, having first misfired with a prediction that Jesus would return in 1994), today I want to write about my having found a less splashy, yet more profound (and hopeful) group inspired by the presence of Jesus. Instead of Camping's fire and brimstone, my attention was drawn to the hospitality and humility of our hosts: Jesus People USA—a 400-person income-sharing community on the north side of Chicago.

While this 39-year-old group is clearly grounded in evangelical Christian beliefs, that doesn't mean they aren't also dedicated to civility and kindness, and helping to make the here and now a better place. We FIC folks had chances over the course of our five days together to talk with dozens of members in a variety of settings. To a person, they were unfailingly warm and courteous. Often they were curious as well (wanting to hear our stories, and readily willing to share theirs whenever we expressed interest). The thing they were not was righteous or rigid.

As a community networker, I often encounter people (even whole groups) who are so excited about what they're doing (and so convinced that they have answers to the important questions of the day) that dialog with them is mostly about girding one's loin to withstand an encounter with heavy proselytizing. It's not seen as an opportunity for conversation so much as an opportunity for conversion. As someone who gets increasingly tired of being "saved" (without having put out an RFP), I went into last week's stay at JPUSA with some trepidation. While missionary zeal is by no means confined to religious groups (I've struggled every bit as much with the righteousness of eco-fascists), evangelical religious groups have a reputation for specializing in it (remember the insistent saffron-robed Hare Krishna's at airports in decades past?) and I was guarded—perhaps more than I knew. As it turned out, however, I needn't have worried.

JPUSA folks have an abiding commitment to doing good in the world. Mostly this shows up by running a homeless shelter and offering about 80-90 seniors (some of whom used to be homeless) a comfortable and affordable place to stay on the top three floors of their 10-story building at 620 W Wilson. They've bought and sold several pieces of property over the years; mostly for a gain, but sometimes for a loss. Not everything they've touched has turned to gold.

Since 1984 they've produced Cornerstone, a five-day Christian music festival, held each year the first week of July, on JPUSA property in western Illinois. Tens of thousands attend this gala event each year yet it's only made a profit three years out of 27. While an artistic and spiritual success, its been a financial quagmire. Oh well.

Over their nearly four decades together, they've learned to take people as they are, and to be open to the mystery of faith arriving in a wide variety of packages. There's everything from Goth to bikers; from push-up bras to push carts. Their members are both joyous and tolerant. While they take their mission and their faith seriously, they don't take themselves too seriously. In short, their approach to life was every bit as fresh as the May breezes off nearby Lake Michigan.

• • •

In addition to being inspirational (both for us FIC folks and for the 30+ people who were more attracted to community than Camping and happily attended the Saturday event) the weekend had its amusing moments. One event participant (who arrived from out of town midday) had to pass through a gauntlet of folks vigorously hawking Rapture t-shirts in downtown Chicago en route to our Art of Community Day. Walking to the beach Sunday morning for a bit of communing with Lake Michigan before heading back to Missouri, I pulled a 4-color Rapture postcard from underneath the windshield wiper on my car (if the prophesy had come true, I'd have gotten the memo too late). There's something quintessentially American about attempts to merchandize the End of the World (where the ushers come across more as profit raptors than as prophets for the Rapture).

Riding the elevator to the FIC's quarters Saturday morning after breakfast, one senior resident casually inquired of (FIC Board member) Marty Klaif and me if we had plans for the day ahead of Camping's 6 pm hard deadline. We asked in reply if the end varied by time zone, and were informed that it was a Rolling Rapture—6 pm wherever you were. This brief exchange put fresh zest into the normally casual admonition to "have a nice day." This jaunty exchange of elevator repartee put Marty and me in good spirits. What better way to go out than by mingling with people hungering for more community in their lives—and with people who can laugh!

As the JPUSA band The Crossing (one of several bands in the community) set up for their end of show gig (not to be confused with an End of the World performance) they joked easily among themselves—"Hey man, I know they're going to take you, so leave your wallet."

I figure there are far worse things that could happen to a person then being "left behind" at JPUSA—with or without a wallet.

Pulling Proposals out of a Hat (or Some Orifice)

This is the counterpart I promised to my May 4 posting on how to get the most out of plenary Discussions. After you've flushed out all the factors that the group agrees need to be taken into account (the main objective of the Discussion phase), then it's time to start crafting solutions. Often this step is begun by a cmtee, but sometimes the plenary is on a roll or there's time pressure encouraging the group to proceed with all deliberate speed. In any event, I will offer here four aids for efficient and energizing Proposal Generation:

An Atmosphere of Curiosity, not Embattlement
The key moment is when someone says something that differs substantially from what you're thinking. How do you respond? It will make an enormous difference if your initial reply is less like, "That won't work for me... " and more like "Wow, that's really different from what I was thinking. Tell me how you got there; maybe I'm missing something... "

In the former, you're assuming a fight. In the latter, you're wondering if your mind will be changed by new information or new insights. The trick is developing the mind set that different perspectives can be a strength—they let you see the problem more completely—rather than as an occasion for a battle.

In the mainstream culture, we learn to capitulate or fight in the face of differences; in cooperative culture we need to learn wonder in the presence of differences.

Stretching, not Pulling
As a practical matter, the initial responses to suggestions are crucial for setting the tone. If people can learn to begin with what they like about a suggestion (rather than with "But... ") there will be a lot more flexibility (and hence, creativity) with which to reach the finish line. The image I offer here is how can everyone stretch to reach what others are offering, rather than how can you pull everyone toward your position. [Remember, the object here is not how well your initial suggestions hold up; it's how efficiently the group finds the best solution.]

Bridging, not Advocacy
When facilitating Proposal Generation, insist (gently, yet firmly) that all suggestions be attempts to combine and balance what came out of the Discussion phase. Let's suppose that there are a list of factors labeled "x" and another list labeled "y," both of which need to be taken into account. What you don't want (now that you're in Proposal Generation) are statements in support of just "x" or just "y." Been there, done that.

So, when a person proposes something that appears to only address "x," a savvy facilitator will respond, "I get that your suggestion will satisfy "x"; help me understand how it also satisfies "y." Generating solid proposals is essentially about bridging all the factors; it is not about pushing until you get your way.

Build on Interests, don't Get Stuck on Positions
For many, their nightmare dynamic (short of fulminating anger) is where the group is more or less evenly divided on some non-trivial issue: one side favors doing "Z"; and the other side favors doing "not Z." That is, the positions are diametrically opposed and each side is fairly passionate about it. What to do?

There's generally a way out. Almost always, "Z" (or "not Z," if you prefer to look at this the other way around) is a conclusion, and not a fundamental value. The key to getting unstuck is peeling back the deadline positions to the underlying interests. Most times, each side is looking at the same problem through a different lens, each of which is a legitimate group value. So, for example, would it be that shocking if an analysis focused on affordability came to a completely different conclusion than one emphasizing environmental impact?

The good news is that affordability and environmental impact are not sworn enemies. By identifying these two as baseline interests you now have much more room to work with. Let go of Z and not-Z; focus instead on finding proposals that do a decent job of balancing these two interests. [Hint: in the end it may turn out that Z (or not-Z) is actually a good proposal; but the energy around it will be completely different because everyone has acknowledged and honored that both core interests need to be taken into account. People can be amazingly graceful about specifics if they feel that their core interests are fully understood and will be taken care of.]