Key Facilitative Skills: Semipermeable Membranes

As a professional facilitator for more than three decades, I've had ample opportunity to observe which skills make the most difference. As a facilitation trainer the past 15 years, I've collected plenty of data about which lessons have been the most challenging for students to digest.

Taken all together, I've decided to assemble a series of blog posts on the facilitation skills I consider to be both the hardest to master and the most potent for producing productive meetings. They will all bear the header Key Facilitation Skills and it's a distillation of where I believe the heavy lifting is done.

Here are the headlines of what I'll cover in this series:

I. Riding Two Horses: Content and Energy
II. Working Constructively with Emotions 
III. Managing the Obstreperous
IV. Developing Range: Holding the Reins Only as Tightly as the Horses Require
V. Semipermeable Membranes: Welcoming Passion While Limiting Aggression
VI. Creating Durable Containers for Hard Conversations
VII. Walking the Feedback Talk
VIII. Sis Boom Bang
IX. Projecting Curiosity in the Presence of Disagreement
X. Distinguishing Weird (But Benign) from Seductive (Yet Dangerous)
XI. Eliciting Proposals that Sing
XII. Becoming Multi-tongued
XIII. Not Leaving Product on the Table
XIV. Sequencing Issues Productively
XV. Trusting the Force 

• • •

Semipermeable Membranes: Welcoming Passion While Limiting Aggression  
Because groups are composed of humans, there is always an emotional component present at meetings. It may not be ascendant at any given moment and may not need attention, but there will invariably be times when it will. Amazingly enough, most groups never talk about how they want those moments to go. They just hope to survive them.

I think we can do better.

How did we get in this mess? It's not hard to understand. Unless you purposefully stop and think about, meetings in cooperative groups are fairly likely to unconsciously mirror the meeting culture we all grew up with, which is that business will be wholly conducted in the rational realm. 

While there is unquestionably a smattering of exceptions, the predominant way we run meetings in the US is to have everyone offer their best thinking—and if a response originates as a feeling, as a queasy stomach, or as a krick in the back of the neck, the person is expected to politely translate that into ideation before sharing with the group. In actuality, humans absorb information, process it, and "know" things in a complex variety of ways, only one of which is rational thought.

Unstoppering the Emotional Bottle
There is also emotional knowing, intuition, spiritual, and kinestethic. While it's rare that all of these are in play at the same time, why is it smart to force everything into a single language? I believe a better strategy is to widen the playing field and work in the original tongue. In this essay I want to focus on just one of these neglected languages: feelings.

What if groups expressly welcomed members' emotional input? I believe this change has the potential to substantially alter meeting culture for the better. In groups that lack an agreement about handling strong feelings, the most common response is shut down. Work on issues tends to come to a screaming halt in the presence of screaming. For many of us, the emergence of strong feelings is accompanied by aggression and damage to relationship. As no one wants to be the target of someone else's scathing comments, there is often an overwhelming urge to put a lid on it before someone gets hurt. 

While that urge is understandable, I don't think it's the best response. For one thing, it's unsatisfying. For another, it's expensive. You don't make progress on the topic (which is hostage to the distress), you have surfaced strain in the group which has deleterious consequences on trust and relationship if allowed to stand unaddressed, you have missed an opportunity to harness the energy that fuels the upset, and you have missed the chance at the information that undergirds the feelings (they didn't occur in a vacuum). That's a large downside.

If the group gets paralyzed in the presence of strong feelings, it starts to shift a lot of things. Not only does it stall things out in the moment, but people learn to be cautious about what they say if they think it may trigger reactivity. Thus, it distorts the conversation even before reactivity emerges, which impedes progress and contributes to meeting fatigue. Inefficient meetings paired with occasional unproductive outbursts are enough to discourage attendance, which further degrades the ability of plenaries to get the work done (it's damn hard to build solid agreements with voices missing). So not being able to deal authentically with fulminating upset is expensive. I'm not saying it's easy—only that it's costly if you don't.

A Better Idea
Given that emotional responses are normal and relatively common, I believe groups function better if they can treat reactivity as a normal occurrence—rather than as a moment to be feared. I believe you can ask participants to limit emotional expressions in two important ways:

a) It should be related to the topic at hand—the same standard you'd have for any contribution to the conversation; and

b) It's OK to express your feelings, but you should check aggression at the door. That is, no attacks. No negative judgments. Thus, there is a significant difference between these two statements of the same event:

Statement 1: "I'm furious that you walked out of the common house kitchen while you were frying bacon and a grease fire broke out."

Statement 2: "You fucking idiot! How stupid do you have to be to leave the kitchen unattended with bacon frying on the stove? You could have burned down the entire common house!"

Both statements make clear that the speaker is seriously upset with the cook's neglect, but only the second one goes into attack mode, dumping on the cook. While many people my "hear" the judgment of the second statement when only the first is said (feeling the attack implied by tone), the truth is that the first statement is clean, by which I mean the person is owning their feelings and making no demands. It allows room for movement.

This is what I mean by a "semipermeable membrane," allowing a free and full statement of feelings, while objecting to aggression. This is important because the way through this is by starting with a validation of the feelings, and that task is made much more complicated if you first have to navigate an attack, which is likely to generate more reactivity and heighten volatility. This can get very messy in a blink.

Distress as Virtual Earwax
The person in distress often feels isolated and suspects that people may not want to hear what they have to say. Often their heart is racing and their attention is distracted by a busy internal dialog. I think of this as virtual earwax. In the extreme, a person can be so consumed with their distress that no outside information gets through—they hear nothing that others say and are therefore unavailable to collaborate in building workable solutions. And even if their ears are not completely clogged, partial plugging can still result in serious distortion.

In this condition, it is essential that you connect with the person in distress, showing that you want to know what they're feeling and what it means. When done well this is always deescalating, and serves to clean the ears out. Note that this is not a promise that you're taking their position; it's a good faith effort to understand their position. Others may hold similar views, or maybe not. Facilitating an upset person means being their ally to get accurately heard; it does not mean that anyone will agree with them or that they will get their way. That will depend on what others do with the information. By not overreacting to distress it undercuts the tendency to give upset people additional influence on what happens (in the mistaken belief that placating them will create safety—if people get what they want they'll be less likely to lash out). When groups respond this way they encourage people to go into distress as a strategy to control outcomes. It's not pretty.

In the model I've laid out, you connect with the person in distress for the purpose of understanding what the reaction is and how it relates to the topic. Once you've achieved that to the person's satisfaction, you continue the examination of the issue. As I see it, on-topic upset is not a distraction, it's just another way to enrich the conversation. 

The corner you're trying to turn here is accepting the normalcy of reactivity and getting the group to not react to reactivity—to receive it as just another form of input, to be weighed on merit, rather than on decibel level or the amount of tears shed. Those aspects are part of the input and taken into account, but they are not determinant (prove that you love me by giving me what I want). In any event, you certainly don't want to abruptly terminate the discussion just because someone is in reaction. You want the emergence of distress to be a time to lean in, not to shut down.

Playing the Cards You're Dealt

I was recently asked to facilitate a community meeting where there had been a considerable build up of unresolved tension with a long-term member who wasn't living on campus. This member had been asked on short notice to attend a rare mid-week meeting to make some progress on the tensions (with my assistance) and the wheels were put in motion based on his acceptance.
Less than 24 hours before the start of the meeting, however, it was discovered that there had been a major misunderstanding about this person's availability and he couldn't come after all. Oops. I had prepped for a meeting at which we could work on unpacking the backlog of distress based on the expectation that all the key players would be in the room. Suddenly, that meeting was not longer going to be possible. Now what?

• • •

One of my recreational passions is duplicate bridge. While contract bridge is a beautiful and complex card game in its own right, the genius of duplicate is that you score points based on how well you play hands compared with how others play the exact same hands, thus eliminating the vagaries of being dealt good cards. While it's typically more fun to hands with strong cards, there is no inherent disadvantage to picking up a weak hand—because everyone you'll be scored against will play that hand as well.

Thus, to be good at duplicate bridge, you need to excel at playing whatever hand you've been dealt. Interestingly, skill at duplicate bridge is reasonably analogous to skill in facilitation, where, over time, you will be dealt a mixture of strong and weak hands, and the real test is how well you do with what you have—rather than how well you can avoid surprises.

To be sure, when you have a facilitation assignment, it behooves you to do your homework and to create a plan that you think will give the group its best chance for a dynamic and productive meeting. (Sticking with the bridge analogy, planning allows you to stack the deck in favor of a good meeting, and you certainly want to take advantage of that.) That said, it's a myth that you're totally in control, or that good planning is destiny. As happened to me in the opening story, sometimes you get a meeting that's fairly far removed from the one you'd planned for. In such instances, you can complain about your rotten luck… or you can deal with it.

In the situation that inspired this blog, I asked the group what it wanted to do at the start of the session. While clearing up tensions is far and away better done with everyone in the pool, there's still good that can be accomplished with a crucial participant missing.

When there's significant distress associated with an issue, I've learned that it's almost always salutary to try to lean into it rather than away from it as a prelude to problem solving. Here's why:

a) Distress distorts
When you're in the grip of a reaction, there's a strong tendency to filter whatever is said in relation to the triggering events through a negative story that assigns bad intent to the speaking person. Rather than looking for the value in what they said, you look for a nefarious, duplicitous, or divisive motivation. Worse, once you find a way to accomplish that you then use your projection as further evidence to justify the original story. Yuck. This is a poisonous environment that greatly complicates constructive problem solving.  

b) Unresolved tension undermines trust
Responses to group issues depend on trust among members to produce satisfactory results. Brittle decisions (which is what you get when you push ahead without resolving tensions first) tend to lead to lukewarm implementation at best, and sabotaged follow through at worst. While you may think it's quicker to bypass dealing with distress, it's a poor bargain if the problem remains unsolved and you have to come back and do it again. In the end, damage to trust (being confident in everyone acting from good intent and meaning what they say) is very expensive.

c) A guarded attitude kills creativity
In order for collaborative decision-making to blossom, you need to create and maintain an environment of ease and curiosity. That's damn hard to manifest with people simmering, on edge, and suspicious. Instead of out-of-the-box breakthroughs, you stuck-in-the-box tug-of-war dynamics where each side of an issue keeps trying (unsuccessfully) to pull the unconverted over to their side of the line. (Has anyone ever seen that lead to a happy ending?)

[Note that this principle obtains whether you're using consensus or a ouija board, so long as you're intending inclusive and spirit-lifting results.]

For all of these reasons, it's better to tackle the tensions before the issue, and half a loaf is better than none. Thus, at the outset of the meeting, I laid out a summary of the places where the unresolved tensions were adhering and invited the group to spend the first half of the session voicing what's been hard for them about these dynamics—expressly not attempting any problem solving. For the first hour we were simply trying to clear the air. 

While this was intended to be done with the lightning rod person in the room, we went ahead anyway with my having laid out four important caveats at the beginning:
o  I had already sent to the missing member the same summary of the tension points, so he knew what we might be speaking to.

o  I insisted that the group commit to sending to the missing member a summary of what was said, so that people knew that before they spoke, and the  missing person wouldn't be hung out to dry in the agony of imagining the awful things that might have been said out of his hearing.

o  I made it clear that the missing person would undoubtedly have his own things to say about these same dynamics and that it was crucial for everyone to understand that what was said in the meeting would not be the full picture and that there needed to be another opportunity set up for an exchange with the missing person present, if at all possible. 

o  The point of proceeding (even though a key person was missing) was to ease tensions among those present for the purpose of moving into a less charged or spring-loaded environment for sorting out how to respond. It was expressly not for the purpose of faction building or coalescing condemnation of the missing person.

I was pleased that everyone spoke at least once during the opening hour, and we were able to use the second half of the meeting for a productive sorting out of the various threads of the presenting challenge. The quality of the listening was solid throughout (which outcome was significantly enhanced by starting with heart statements rather than head statements) and we were able to end the meeting with having laid out the essential factors that need to be bridged in order to moving forward with all on board: 
—The ways in which the missing member had inadvertently been placed in a role vis-a-vis the group for which he was ill-suited and that wasn't working well for anyone—including the missing person.
—How financial stress, and the disparity of personal finances within the group, both increased pressure on the dynamic and complicated how to navigate a safe passage through the issue.
—What constituted acceptable risk.
—A delineation of the opportunities available if the risk was accepted.
—A counterbalancing enumeration of the ways things could go south if the risk was accepted.
—The impact on the group (& relations with the missing person) if the risk was not accepted.
 
My fondest hope is that we were able to turn the corner on advocacy at the meeting and be in a sustained environment of moving forward with the sense that all of these considerations are legitimate, and that the prime directive from this point forward is making suggestions that people think could work for everyone.

While it remains to be seen how well that was accomplished, I felt pretty good about our chances to still make a three no trump contract after discovering that we were missing the ace of our longest suit. In meetings, as in life, there are always chances. The challenge is making the best of the ones you have, rather than lamenting that you don't have more.

Consensus Challenges: Redirecting Competition

This is the continuation of a blog series started June 7 in which I'm addressing a number of issues in consensus. Today's topic is Redirecting Competition.

I. When do you know enough to act? [posted June 7]
II. Closing the deal [posted June 10]
III. Wordsmithing in plenary [posted June 16]
IV. Redirecting competition
V. Bridging disparate views
VI. Harvesting partial product
VII. When to be formal
VIII. Harnessing brainstorms
IX. Coping with blocking energy
X. Defining respect
XI. Balancing voices
XII. Knowing when to accelerate and when to brake
XIII. Knowing when to labor and when to let go
XIV. Accountability

• • •

One of the core challenges with consensus is committing to culture change. With rare exception, people who have made the choice to live in intentional communities—or to be part of cooperatives of any stripe—have been raised in a competitive culture that's adversarial and hierarchic. Just because we've got it in our heads that it's a good idea to move toward cooperation does not mean we'll behave that way when there's disagreement and the stakes are high. 

In fact, as a group process consultant for 25 years I'd say that the single most common dynamic that I'm hired to help groups work through is the tension that arises from members behaving uncooperatively when they don't see eye to eye on core topics. To be fair, this is hard to do. Unlearning deep conditioning is not for the feint of heart, and it is a rare bird indeed that welcomes critical reflections about their ruffled feather behavior in the heat of a cock fight. (Even though it was supposed to be a compassionate and dispassionate exchange of ideas, it turned into a passionate and tense exchange of salvos).

While it's all well and good to aim for cooperation, what are your options when competition emerges from the cave of our reptilian brains and seizes control of the energy in the room? How do you manage the monsters and get back to where you meant to be?

In my experience it's helpful to see people in competitive mode as under strain. While their behavior may be experienced as aggressive, manipulative, or otherwise unpleasant and/or disrespectful, it's more constructive if you can imagine them as fighting for air space rather than fighting to dominate. An image I rely on a lot (especially if emotions are running high) is that the upset combative person is drowning, and in that dynamic nothing matters to them more than getting oxygen. In the extreme that person does not care a whit what damage they inflict on others in pursuit of getting air, and civility is (at least temporarily) lost as a consideration. They not even be aware of what they're doing.

While it's certainly not always like that, it can be, and you need to be prepared for that possibility. Never mind how they got so triggered, they are. While it could be less wild and urgent than I've described, let's assume it is for the purpose of handling the most extreme case. (I figure if you can deal successfully with 500-pound gorillas then negotiating with gibbons and chimps will be a walk in the park.)

There are two main approaches to authentically deescalating this dynamic, and the order in which you employ them is important.

First, you need to build a bridge to the gorilla's emotional state (rather than commenting on the gorilla's destructive behavior). This means being able to reflect back to the upset person what they're feeling and what it's tied to (somebody said or did something, or someone didn't say or do something, that triggered this response—make sure that's understood). When doing this, it's important that you are able to give a summary that the upset person recognizes as accurate. 

Caution: It's typically inadequate to simply say, "I understand how you feel and what your reaction is about." It is not enough to have a sympathetic look on your face, you have to be able to give them phrasing they recognize and you need to be able to do this with an affect that comes across as matching. 

When done well, the distress should immediately start to diminish (everyone likes being accurately heard). This contradicts the tendency for the upset person to feel isolated and misunderstood (or uncared for), and is the essential starting point for redirecting competitive energy.


Second, go on to explore why this matters to the person (the upset is a sure sign that the stakes are high) and then make an attempt to bridge between this person's personal desires (which are certainly in play) and group values or norms. The point here is to legitimize why this person's point of view should be taken into account. In effect, you are trying to guarantee them air space—so they will no longer need to fight for air to breathe.

As an example, I had a conversation last week with a woman who wanted my reflections about a longstanding upset she has had with her fellow community members over what she considered were niggardly and fear-based rules that sharply limited visitor access to community facilities. Note that these rules applied only to strangers, not to members' personal guests. The woman (a friend) was focusing on her desire that the community be a gracious host that welcomed people exploring community life. It was embarrassing to her that the community was being so inner-focused and small-minded. This dynamic was tying her in knots and she wanted my thoughts about how she might untie them.

I started by giving her back a summary of what she felt and why it mattered, thereby establishing that I was holding her accurately and validating the relevance of her concerns as a group issue—by which I mean, that the community's public image and its commitment to helping to promote community living were reasonable group values, not just her personal agenda.

Having established that rapport, I then proceeded to imagine what the feelings and underlying concerns were for the people on the other side, even though none were present for this conversation. As background, the community is located in a dense urban area and has had some history with break-ins and theft. My speculation was that the people advocating strict rules for visitors were focusing on community values as well—just different ones than my friend. My grope was that they were concerned principally with safety and a sense of home and hearth. It was a primary concern for them that their whole property—not just their apartments—be a safe place where they didn't need to be on guard, something rare in their urban setting.


When put that way, my friend could see it, and her knots immediately started to loosen. She wasn't, after all, anti-safe or anti-home; she was pro-hospitality and pro-outreach. 

While there is yet an important and not necessarily easy conversation to have about how to appropriately balance the values of safety, home, hospitality, and outreach, that conversation cannot proceed well until the players have first figured out how to not see the dynamic as a battle, where those with different views are the enemy, blocking your access to oxygen.

Hopefully, this exchange will lead to there being more breathing and more cooperative energy for the balancing conversation—while the monkey brains can play outdoors. 

Registered Sex Offenders & Community Membership

Over the winter I was working with a community that tackled the issue registered sex offenders (RSOs) as potential members. It was a tough conversation.

Essentially it boiled down to a clash between a core commitment to providing safety, in dynamic tension with a root desire to be a transformative community that believes in redemption. Yuck! One of the most dyspeptic things a group has to wrestle with are questions of how to balance two basic values that don't play nice with each other in a specific configuration. On the question of whether RSOs could be members, those conditions obtained.

As you might imagine, the community did not spend time contemplating this possibility when it first formed. The back story is that the group is now over 10 years old and has twice accepted members only to discover afterward that the person was an RSO. As you can imagine, both experiences were gut wrenching. While there was no clear evidence that in either case the person did something sexually inappropriate while in residence, there were some unsubstantiated accusations and considerable anxiety.

Until now, the membership intake process did not include inquiries about a person's criminal record, so neither of the two people in question misstated their situation. While it can be argued that they misled through withholding, there was no falsification.

Community vibrancy is based on trust, and trust was seriously eroded when the RSO status was uncovered rather than volunteered. While the two offenders may have honestly felt that this was something behind them and not worth mentioning, it's not hard to imagine the blood pressure spikes that occurred when this got revealed.

Sexual offenses come in at least three gradations of severity (laws vary by state), with federal guidance suggesting three categories:
Level A) All violent sexual offenses, and all offenses involving children under the age of 12
Level B) Nonviolent offenses (meaning non-coercive) involving minors in the 12-18 age range
Level C) Nonviolent offenses not involving minors

The community asked everyone to share in a Go Round whether they'd be open at all to RSOs being members of the community and, if so, under what conditions or with what limitations.

This was a tender and deeply moving circle, where everyone took whatever time they needed to answer and there was careful listening. In a group of 20 people, four spoke about their personal experience as a survivor of child sexual abuse, and a fifth spoke as a parent whose child had been physically abused. While the statistics on abuse suggest that there were probably more people in the room who had personal experiences with abuse, those are the one's who voiced it.

On the one hand, there were a number of people who ached to be able to offer a meaningful alternative to a punishment-oriented überculture—to give people a second chance.

On the other, the survivors reported dread at the thought of having convicted offenders in the bosom of their community. Parents feared for their children and a expressed a profound sadness at the prospect of tightening vigilance on free-roaming community kids if known offenders were inside the perimeter of the community bounds.

This conversation was further complicated by the recognition that the legal definition for sexual offenses didn't map exactly onto the community's norms, where swimming nude and peeing outdoors were acceptable practices, and there was no judgment about a 19-year-old having consensual sex with a 17-year-old. The community was in agreement that these behaviors—which could earn someone RSO status—were at worst minor peccadilloes and not at all on the same level as the horror of forced rape.

So what to do? While there was widespread acceptance with the notion that a blanket ban on all RSO's would probably mean that some deserving folks (who perhaps were unlucky enough to get convicted of peeing by a roadside) would be denied the opportunity of membership, the prospect of looking at RSOs on a case-by-case basis (to winnow out the nogoodniks from those worth taking a chance on) represented an emotional wringer for the sexual abuse survivors in the group, who expected the process to be a re-traumatizing gauntlet. In the end, it was too much to ask the survivors and parents to stretch that far and the community agreed to not allow RSOs as members.

Three people stood aside in that agreement—notably, that trio included one of the survivors—and the group gave all three a final chance to speak from their heart about why this decision was hard for them. I thought it was one of the most touching and unifying treatments of a tough topic I'd ever witnessed.

That said, the community was not yet done with this topic. Does the new agreement translate into background checks on prospectives? What about people who used to be RSOs, but their registration has expired (only Level A offenders are registered for life)? What about people who have committed sexual offenses but not been convicted? What about people convicted of violent crimes but not sexual ones?

In the continuing conversation certain themes emerged. To the extent that there was openness to considering people who had committed offenses, the group was more willing to stretch if the person freely admitted it (lying about convictions will be considered grounds for immediate expulsion), and was able to demonstrate that they'd done some serious personal work to understand what that was about, so that it was far less likely to happen again.

While there is still more to do (how does one demonstrate that the personal work they've done is "serious" enough?), it buoys my heart when a groups opens up a hard issue and gets closer as a consequence of the examination.