The Presenter/Facilitator Two Step

I'm in the midst of Weekend I of the Midwest Integrative Facilitation training (being hosted by my neighbors, Dancing Rabbit), and I ran into a dynamic that surprised me the very first day involving the relationship between the facilitator and the presenter. Ordinarily it is no big deal to sort this out, but Friday I ran into a buzz saw.

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In most groups this is handled fairly loosely. The person(s) who put a particular item on the agenda introduces it and the group goes from there. The facilitator, if there is one, tries to help the conversation go productively. In some groups, roles are handled fairly loosely, even to the point of allowing the facilitator to be the presenter. (Hint: This is a bad idea. If anyone reacts to the presentation or the direction that the presenter wants to go in, it can seriously undermine the neutrality of the facilitator and the group's in trouble.)

In most groups, the role of presenter is not clearly defined. I think it should look something like the following:

o Provides a concise introduction to the topic, including a statement of the issue(s) to be addressed, any relevant prior group work or agreements impacting this issue, identification of the known stakeholders and known hot spots (points of tension or disagreement).

o Develops any helpful visual aids (charts, drawings, tables, outlines, handouts, etc.) so that they are available during the presentation and discussion.

o Serves as a resource for providing additional background upon request, or to interpret the presentation if anyone is confused.

Note that this does not include responsibilities for how the topic will be addressed, though it may well include a recommendation for how to sequence considerations.

Unfortunately, most groups also don't define what's wanted from the facilitator very well. With sufficient fog around what's wanted from the presenter and the facilitator it's not to hard to understand why there can be either: a) both trying to cover the same ground (about how the conversation will be focused) and battling over control of the tiller; or b) neither covering it (a drifting ship with no one is at the tiller to steer the meeting into productive waters). Obviously, neither of these potential outcomes is desirable.

Of these two potentialities, the second is far more common, mainly because there's a natural tendency to be cautious in the presence of ambiguity (better to be chastised for being a wimp than accused of being a power monger) and tension around the facilitator/presenter dynamic rarely manifests as a tussle for control of the meeting. Rarely, however, does not mean never, as I'm about to personally attest to.

Irritation over presenter/facilitator dynamics most often plays out this way: the presenter lingers in front of the group after introducing the issue, in order to field clarifying questions. Then, if clarifying questions (did you understand what was presented?) slides seamlessly into discussion (what should we take into account in addressing this issue?), the presenter might still be up front, calling on people and effectively running the meeting. Left unchecked, the facilitator may never get out of their seat.

This is most likely to happen when there's a strong presenter and a passive facilitator, or when there's no clarity about what's wanted from the role of facilitator. In some ways this is the anarchistic if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it model, where the bottom line is a productive meeting and solid decisions and there's a distaste for creating an orthodoxy about adherence to a bushelful of process agreements. If the work is getting done and problems are getting solved, why create process agreements?

While I find this thinking persuasive when groups are small (six or less), it's been my experience that the presence of a savvy facilitator gets to be enormously beneficial as group size increases. (Which is essentially why I focus on training facilitators—because they can make a huge difference in cooperative group's having cooperative experiences, rather than divisive ones, when addressing tough issues. Good intentions are not enough.)

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At Dancing Rabbit they've developed a meeting culture where presenters are encouraged to play an active role in shaping the portion of the meeting at which their topic will be discussed. Facilitators are typically assigned about a week ahead of the meeting, which allows ample time to meet with the presenter and perhaps other key stakeholders to discuss possible ways the meeting might go. If the facilitator is perceived to be experienced and the presenter not, then it's likely that the facilitator will essentially shape the conversation. However, if it's the other way around, then the presenter may be developing the meeting strategy and the facilitator's role may shrink to that of traffic cop (managing the order in which people speak).

The beauty of this arrangement is that the group gets to harness strength in either the facilitator or the presenter to ensure a good meeting. The pitfalls with this arrangement are the ones mentioned earlier: a) the presenter may not be neutral at all (which the facilitator should be) and thus their preference on how to sequence topics and explore the issue may slant things toward the conclusion they want, which can result in a significantly unlevel playing field; and b) things needed for a good meeting may be missed because of uncertainty between the presenter and facilitator about who's responsible for what (see my earlier paragraph on the dangers of operating in the fog).

I ran into a firestorm this past weekend when we started with the assumption that the facilitators would be responsible for all aspects of running the meeting and we got push back from presenters who felt like we were stepping on their toes. I was not accustomed to presenters assuming such a strong role in how the meeting would flow, and when I was trying to model how a facilitator should generically prepare for a meeting, the presenters experienced as meddling my attempts to probe for background information and to explore possible sequences for engaging on the issues—why was I taking apart work they'd already done? It didn't go well. They felt disrespected and my attempt to showcase a sequence of prep question landed like an inquisition.

While Dancing Rabbit's take on the presenter/facilitator relationship is a bit unusual and I didn't expect it, it's not untenable and it was my fault as the trainer that I hadn't done my homework ahead of time. More, I can see now that I should have made an explicit request to the host community that we wanted the facilitators to have responsibility for running the meetings and that we wanted the presenter role to be confined to the definition I offered earlier in this blog. Even if that was a stretch for Dancing Rabbit, it's what we needed to conduct the training.

Sigh. For some reason, it seems I always need to step in the shit before I can learn to avoid it.

Stubbing My Toe on the Landing

One of the risks in opening up a conflict for the purpose of making things better is that sometimes it makes things worse.

That happened to me recently while I was working with a group that was focusing on the topic of work participation—defining what kinds of labor satisfy the expectation that every member will contribution to the development and well being of the community. This is a complex topic (it's the issue that I'm most frequently asked to help groups with), and experience has taught me that if there's unresolved tensions among the players (in relationship to the topic), then we won't get good hearing and good problem solving until we've first cleared the air.

While I have a defined approach for accomplishing that—with which I've had considerable success—it doesn't work with everyone and it doesn't work every time. [For an in-depth explanation of how I advocate working with conflict, see my five-blog series starting March 18, 2009.]

Friday night, during the time we'd designated for unpacking unresolved conflicts, one member of the group called out another for shirking. Let's call the accuser Adrian and the accused Jesse. In Adrian's view, Jesse rarely showed up for Work Days, often talked more than he contributed when he did show up, and mainly focused his contributions to the garden, which was Jesse's hobby and not something that everyone in the group felt was a priority.

After Adrian spoke and felt complete, Jesse had a chance to respond. Jesse reported that there was no new information in Adrian's frustrations—that it had all been said before. Jesse felt fine about what contributions he'd been making to the community, and complained that Adrian was always looking over his shoulder, trying to find fault. Clearly, their perspectives on Jesse's contributions varied widely. When asked if they want to explore this further in plenary, they both declined, preferring to meet one-on-one at a later time. They both said they didn't need further attention on this dynamic in order to hear well and work cleanly with the plenary topic of participation.

Taking them at their word, we helped set up a meeting for the coming week, at which a mutually agreeable third party would facilitate.

Nothing more was said about this until the closing evaluation Sunday, at which Jesse witnessed how awful he felt about what had happened with Adrian Friday night. Even though Adrian felt much better (having gotten the distress out in the open), Jesse felt worse.

When Jesse said he didn't need anything more Friday night, we were interpreting that as "I'm OK and I know what to do to try to repair relationship with Adrian." In reality, we learned two days later that what he meant was, "This is excruciating and I want it to end." While Jesse didn't appear to be in untenable pain Friday night, that's what he reported on Sunday. Oops. Never mind that Adrian felt better; Jesse didn't.

When asked, Jesse didn't have any recommendations about what would have preferred, and the group was left to ponder how to better work with conflict that emerges in plenary. Upon reflection, my sense is that we didn't do a good job of establishing to Jesse's satisfaction what was going on for him. That is, what were his feelings and what was his story about what had happened (in relation to what Adrian complained about). Instead, he just felt embarrassed and exposed in front of the group. Examination without connection reinforces isolation. The key is learning what connection or validation means to each individual. It's not good enough that I thought Jesse had been heard; the standard is whether Jesse felt heard. In retrospect, we went too fast, and I should have stepped in (I was coaching the community's facilitators and not running the meeting myself) and ensured that this step had been completed. My bad.

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While I always hope that the response to my work will be positive, there's a lot to be learned from stubbing my toe. In this case, I believe I need to be more deliberate in modeling and teaching how to establish connection when people are in distress. Without that bridge, all subsequent work with distressed individuals will be at risk for not landing well.

Lessons from the Bully Pulpit

Yesterday afternoon I endured trial by conference call—a kind of New Age endurance test. I had back-to-back calls set up, running from 1-7 pm and consuming all but 20 minutes—about enough time to pee, get a glass of water, and shake off the first call to get ready for the second.

Because I'd be tying up a phone for so long, I took both calls from the FIC trailer. While I was undisturbed (good) and not disturbing others (also good), there was a decided downside to my choice. A late winter storm rolled in and I experienced the folly of sitting for six hours in an unheated space. Despite being bundled in a down vest and a woolen cap, the rainy 35-degree weather inexorably sucked the heat out of my body, to the point where I was unable to record notes during the last hour because my fingers were numb. Shivering, I was ever so thankful for the restorative warmth of the woodstove in the main house afterwards!)

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Both calls were attempts to untangle conflicts. While the second was work I was doing for a client (facilitating conversations about someone else's troubles), the first was about a conflict I was a party to. And that's the one I want to explore in this entry.

It was essentially an attempt to understand better why a colleague (whom I'll call Dale) and I were having so much difficulty working together the last 18 months. While being in conflict is not new territory for me (having a facility for assisting others through struggle hardly means I'm proof against being reactive myself, or triggering reactions in others), it was sobering to listen to the Dale's story. Here's what I got out of it:

1. As an administrator, I'm often in the position of drafting agendas, presenting issues, focusing conversations, and formulating proposals. In the process, it is not uncommon for me to be in the position of asking pointed questions, trying to keep the ball rolling. If you are on the receiving end of those questions, it isn't always a pleasant experience. One of Dale's first interactions with me was in such a dynamic, on a conference call, and he felt isolated and pushed around. Strike one.

2. A couple months after this exchange, I visited Dale's community in an attempt to work further on the issues over which we were tussling, this time with half a dozen of Dale's community mates present. On the key issue, it turned out that everyone from Dale's community saw the issue the same way, and I saw it differently. Because it was something I had worked hard on (for more than a year) and was one that I felt was fundamental to the program's future, I was highly frustrated with the community's position. I spoke passionately in making a plea for my thinking, yet persuaded no one. Dale was shaken by my behavior and felt I had disrespected the community. Dale began to see me as someone who gets carried away with his emotions and lets his feelings cloud his judgment. Worse, I was seen as a bully; someone who has no qualms about pressuring people into agreeing with him and is used to getting his way through intimidation. Strike two.

3. It took a while for me to understand the damage that had been done, and the ways my behavior (first during the conference call, and then during the meeting at Dale's community) had left bad impressions. When, subsequently, I rasied questions over the appropriateness of some reimbursement requests submitted by Dale (that came to me as administrator to process), things got worse. Where I thought I was just doing my job with diligence, Dale thought I was selectively punishing the community for disagreeing with me months earlier. In short, I was abusing my role and out of integrity. Strike three.

4. In yesterday's call, I learned that Dale had gotten advice from others about how best to deal with me: don't give me direct feedback; be as careful as possible about how communications with me are worded; pick your battles; and let me "win a lot." In short, I needed to be coddled, presumably because I tended not to handle critial feedback well, and was prone to being reactive. Ouch!

What Is My Part in This?
As painful as this conversation was—and as different as Dale's story is from mine—my task is to sift through it for what I can use to understand the ways in which my choices were poor, and can be improved.

Lesson #1: As someone who is often in a leadership role, or a position of power, I need to be scrupulously mindful about context—especially when I feel strongly about something. I think Dale is right that I can come across as intimidating, and I need to do a much better job of checking with my audience about how to be with them when I'm an advocate. I can't count on people being open to hearing passionate statements from me. It's not about authenticity; it's about overwhelm.

If I'm upset, or otherwise having an emotional response, then the opportunity for misinterpretation is even greater. Most groups don't discuss or have a common understanding about how to work emotionally, and it's not smart to just bring my feelings into the picture without setting the stage. I should be saying something like, "I'm having a reaction to what's being said and am unsure how to proceed," and then taking cues about where to go next from the responses I get to that disclosure. In my haste to express my views, I still tend to forget that the fundamental need in that moment is to proceed in such a way that the channels of listening remain open. What good is "my truth" when the only thing people are hearing is my tone and volume?

Lesson #2: I waited too long to check in about the damage. Never mind that I had frustrations that mirrored Dale's, if I want better relationships it's on me to initiate. It's my job as administrator to keep lines of communication clear and I got lazy. Pouting doesn't help.

Lesson #3: While I'm thoroughly familiar with the potential trap of commingling the roles of facilitator and presenter, I allowed myself to slide into it during that conference call where the damage with Dale first began. While it was efficient to have me both run the meeting and present the issues, it was a false economy. In the end, it was way more expensive for me to attempt to manage a conversation about an issue on which I was clearly not neutral. Dale has been a strong proponent of securing neutral facilitators for subsequent meetings, and that's good thinking.

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Of course, at the end of the day, stumbling is humbling. Fortunately, it's also human. While I'd much rather not have had the experience, now that I have it's on me to make the most of it. My challenge is to use the scars to help remember to do it differently the next time I'm about to speak passionately, the next time I'm aware of tensions with my behavior, the next time I'm setting up a meeting about which I'm a stakeholder on the issues.

I'm reminded of a bumper sticker that encapsulates my choice here: "Experience is mandatory; learning is optional."