The Facilitator's Magic Eye

When I first began
To cut up oxen
I would see before me
The whole ox
All in one mass.
After three years
I no longer saw this mass,
I saw the distinctions…

—excerpted from Cutting Up an Ox, an ancient Taoist poem

• • •

I am the Sandhill butcher.

While many others in my community share in the work of this quintessential homesteading task, I enjoy it. Though I am not a hunter, I approach cutting up carcasses and preserving meat with considerable care and respect for the animals whose lives have been taken to sustain mine. Butchering has become part of my sacred relationship to food.

It has taken me a while to embrace the identity of butcher, in part because one meaning of the term is to do a job badly, or clumsily. Another is to kill indiscriminately, or brutally. While not wanting to be associated with either of those flavors of the term, there is yet a third meaning, which is honorable—or at least has the chance to be. A good butcher is one who is thrifty and skilled in the craft of transforming animals into food. Better yet, a good butcher is one who wastes little, operates humanely, and works in right relationship with the universe.

I recall when I first encountered this more noble sense of "butcher" employed outside the confines of the abattoir…

About 30 years ago, when I was teaching myself how to make insulated glass windows (is there no end to the ways in which youth will carelessly throw labor at the fortified walls of a tight budget, in the hopes of saving pennies?) we bought supplies from a New England company called Wood Butchers. I was immediately struck by the name. Surely they weren't implying that that they sold the tools of wanton woodworking, were they?

Indeed, "wood butcher" is an old term for carpenter, and meant as a label of respect for a craft. The meaning here runs parallel to that of meat butcher, and thus began the rehabilitation of the term in my consciousness.

Today, I happily consider myself an amateur meat butcher, as well as an amateur wood butcher. Taking this one step further, I am also a meeting butcher. As a professional facilitator, I am fully skilled in the dissection of meeting dynamics. When I am at my best, there is little waste and I am able to transform logjams into flow, chaos into agreement, and disharmony into music. It is an art. While learnable, not everyone is willing to put in the effort.

As it was for the butcher referenced in the opening poem, one of my main challenges as a facilitation teacher is getting students to experience the unfolding of a meeting and seeing the underlying distinctions. What at first seems an overwhelming tangle of disparate viewpoints and discordant feelings, can instead be viewed as a montage of patterns, of which there are a limited number.

One of the main reasons that I am valuable as an outside facilitator is not inherent skill; rather, it's that I have spent many hours in the butcher shop and bring with me a wide pattern library. Today, it's hard to show me something I've never seen before. While the details are undoubtedly unique to the current manifestation, the applicable patterns are not. By breaking down the dynamic into its characteristic components, complex and/or volatile issues become more tractable, less daunting.

After conducting more than 40 facilitation training weekends over the last eight years, I've come to appreciate much better what it is I've learned to do as a professional facilitator (there is nothing quite like attempting to teach a thing to expose the gaps in how well you understand it). Over and over I am in the position of watching a live meeting with my students, detecting patterns, and then observing how long it takes for the students to see the same thing.

While a portion of the teaching is breaking things down into primary questions (what are the themes in the conversation; is the energy rising or falling; what questions remain to be addressed; how well are people hearing each other; to what extent are people feeling heard; are there underlying questions that haven't surfaced yet; where is this likely headed?), there is another portion for which an atomistic approach will not work.

It is the gestalt ability to absorb the whole of the meeting and have the essential patterns emerge when concentrating with a soft focus. Just as with Magic Eye graphics, the patterns can pop out of the fog in a blink. The trick is learning the art of the soft focus, where you let all of the data wash over you and resist the temptation to lock onto any one thing.

As a teacher, it's exciting to watch the students develop over the course of the two-year training, where there's a steady progression in relation to their ability to approach what I can do—all the way from awe to aw, shucks:

o Awe (I have no idea how you did that)
o Inkling (I knew something needed to happen but I had no clue what)
o Fuzzy (I had a general idea about what was needed but couldn't articulate it clearly)
o Slow (I got the same inspiration, but not as quickly)
o Aw, shucks (I could have done that!)

My dream is a world where my insights are aw, shucks all the time; where my eye is no more magic than anyone else's.

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.

Paint by the Numbers Facilitation

After 23 years as a group process consultant I'm getting ready (slowly) to write a book about facilitating cooperative groups. It's a big topic—and doesn't get any smaller by virtue of my going deliberately. In fact, one of the trickiest parts is knowing when to ease off of doing in order to write about doing. It's a little crazy-making.

One the themes I stress as a trainer is that a good facilitator needs to be able to work both with content and with energy. I call this "riding two horses," and it's no small feat. The skill to do one well is completely unrelated to doing the other well, and it's not unusual to encounter students who are fairly accomplished equestrians with one horse, yet total greenhorns on the other.

One of my motivations to author a book about facilitation is that most of the existing literature on this subject is slanted toward the content horse—how to manage the conversation effectively and efficiently. I'm convinced though that you also need the second horse, to be able to read the the subtle undercurrents and handle volatility (pretending that upset doesn't occur, or making a rule against its expression, simply doesn't work).

My attitude about this is rooted in 36 years of community living, where there's a clearer understanding that relationships are primary to quality of life, and that you haven't solved a problem if there isn't a high level of buy-in from the individuals in the group. While I think this is essentially true for all cooperative groups, it's more apparent in intentional communities, where discord and disgruntlement have more immediate deleterious consequences.

One of the spurs (riding the equine metaphor for all it's worth) for my writing about facilitation is that most authors offer up a recipe for good meetings with an "if A, then B" approach—suggesting that if you could get good enough at it (that is, learn all the rules), then you would always know what to do. If you could only get a large enough set of colored pencils, then you would always have the one you wanted for filling in the dragon's eye.

Some authors focus principally on expanding one's tool kit (the person who has mastered the most techniques wins). See Holman & Devane's The Change Handbook for an example of this approach, offering up their sense of the best of whole systems practices.

Others have a favorite technique that they view as a golden compass, always pointing you in the right direction. Or perhaps I should say a golden hammer, where every group challenge appears as a nail. Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication comes across this way, where the key is learning how to speak as a giraffe instead of as a jackal. The sociocracy craze is founded on the notion that the right organizational structure will see you to the promised land. The Institute for Cultural Affair's Technology of Participation offers an up-tempo formulaic approach to problem solving.

While I definitely think it's worthwhile learning patterns, and I believe that many of the above approaches have merit, meetings are not like pantyhose, where one size fits all. [Ma'ikwe just proofread this and informed me that even pantyhose does not come all in one size fits all—who knew? Probably I should confine my metaphors to lingering on topics about which I have more knowledge, and stretch less to offer metaphors about confining lingerie.] In my view, there is no single approach that always works or is always best in any situation. While you want to learn principles, you need to stay fluid about their application.

I see facilitation more as an art form than a craft, and this is a crucial distinction. While I'm all in favor of facilitators doing their homework and coming to a meeting prepared, they also have to be light on their toes and willing to alter the plan to follow the energy, adapting to what presents in the moment. This does not mean that facilitation is all about contact improv, yet it does mean that you will be too brittle if you're adamant about following a script.

For my money the facilitator's mantra is: What does the group most need right now? It could be a summary; it could be a graphic laying out where you are in the conversation; it could be a pause in the action to give attention to someone in tears; it could be a potty break. It's way more than just deciding whose turn it is to speak next. While the baseline skill is accurately hearing what people are saying, a great facilitator needs to also hear what's not being said, and the deeper meaning that underlies what's happening on the surface. A top-notch facilitator needs to be able to look around the curve, see what's coming, and decide whether to keep the herd moving in that direction or pick another path.

In short, facilitators need to be able to develop their horse sense and come to meetings with a fully stocked saddle bag; they need to know when to trust their instinct and when to haul out a technique. In the end, it's all about what works—by which I mean what moves the group productively and authentically through the agenda and builds relationships in the process.

While it's no doubt an easier pedagogy to teach brush strokes and how to mix pigments, I don't think that's really good enough. Sometimes, to get the full beauty of the moment, you have to color outside the lines. And that's the kind of facilitation I teach.