Category: facilitation

Connecting Infrastructure and Power

I was intrigued by a post from my wonderful friend and colleague, Eva Schiffer, on LinkedIn a while back. Coming off a conversation with the creative Gianluca Gambatesa, Eva quoted him with something that opened up a lot of questions in my mind about power. Gianluca said “There is a tight link between power structure and infrastructure. By making infrastructure more accessible, we can destabilize and open up power structures. Oh. So. Much. To. Unpack! Then Eva went on to ask for examples.

Before I can mine examples, I want to understand what we mean by infrastructure and power structure. In my group process work most often the aim is to distribute power out to engage everyone and support work that distributes agency and responsibility across a group. It is rarely a goal to destabilize power, but to distribute it. So the idea of “opening up” power structures resonates.

Decision making can be a good place to test ideas. In practice that might look like clarity of decision making (as opposed to fake consultation – I’ll listen to you but I already made up my mind), clarity of how power is exercised and by whom in decision making processes. Power structure is expressed in this case by who makes what decisions, how they are communicated and enacted.

So what is infrastructure in this case? In the LinkedIn thread most references were to collaboration tools: Google drive, Slack, etc. Accessibility to tools requires they are available, properly configured to distribute control of the tools, backed up so useful experiments don’t risk mass destruction of stuff, and skills for people to use those tools. Who can choose and mess with the tools is super important – something we learned in our research for Digital Habitats.

I immediately wondered about the role of transparency of tools, how they are configured and who controls them as one sort of accessibility. There are other layers of accessibility: is a tool friendly for those who cannot hear or see? Is it free of embedded bias? Are the use practices built on shared values and goals or is it a free for all? My bias here is finding the sweet spot between over control and under control. For a diverse group, is the tool accessible ENOUGH to allow access and support diversity? Eva, in a latter comment, noted “Transparency is part of it. But also: Does this structure make it easy for me to fully contribute if I’m not highly privileged?”

That takes us to the less visible side of tools-as-infrastructure – the processes we use with the tools, each other and our shared work. Who has the power (there is that word again) to, as Eva called it, “fully contribute” regardless of one’s priviledge and power.

Process is infrastructure. Lack of process is infrastructure. Workarounds to avoid or change process is part of infrastructure as far as I’m concerned. Yet it is rarely noted in ones “infrastructure plans,” eh? It is the place where power is exercised with little visibility, or perhaps little accountability.

Some other stuff:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2019/08/08/facebook-and-electio
n-influence-will-history-repeat-itself/

Renee Diresta gave a superb talk at Long Now about the difference
about social media which Long Now retweeted about:

"When people say propaganda has always existed, they're absolutely
right. But what has not always existed is inexpensive,
sophisticated, precision targeting."
- Renee DiResta (@noUpside) on how social media algorithms help
spread propaganda on altogether new scales.

https://twitter.com/longnow/status/1518706648730140672

Disability Justice Audit Tool

Screenshot of the cover of the audit tool reading: Disability Justice: An Audit Tool. Written by Leah Lakshmi, Piepzna-Samarasinha, envisioned by Stacey Park Milbern and Leak Lakshmi Piepzan-Samarasinha
Cover page

I recently downloaded Northwest Health’s “Disability Justice: An Audit Tool” at https://www.northwesthealth.org/djaudittool# – it is a quick, free download. From the website their description:

Disability Justice: An Audit Tool” is aimed at helping Black, Indigenous and POC-led organizations (that are not primarily focused around disability) examine where they’re at in practicing disability justice, and where they want to learn and grow. It includes questions for self-assessment, links to access tools, organizational stories and more.

While white facilitators aren’t the target audience, this is a terrific and more broadly useful piece. For me it stems from Intersectionality, one of the ten principles of disability justice. Intersectional work is one of the essential practices we all need to learn and use, especially those of us who call ourselves facilitators. While the checklist is organizational oriented, it is great food for thought and ACTION.

First, what is disability justice? From the tool:

Disability justice is a term and a movement-building framework (i.e. a way of envisioning the ways people can organize around and think about disability) that centers the lives and leadership of disabled Black, Indigenous and people of color and/or queer, trans, Two Spirit and gender nonconforming people.
To paraphrase Patty Berne, disability justice leader and co-founder of DJ performance and political collective Sins Invalid, disability justice steps into the “cliffhangers” left over from the disability rights movement.

Disability Justice: An Audit Tool

I was particularly taken by Patty Berne’s description about the cliffhangers left oer from the disability rights movement. It make me wonder about how we overlook something because we are focusing on something else we think is important. I reflect upon my feminism as a white woman and how it so thoroughly distracted me from racism for so long.

If we are not intimately involved in the issues of disability rights, we can forget about it. Time for action.

The action I put forth to myself is to read, journal and reflect upon the tool to identify first where I have an am falling short on disability justice in my life and work. It has been gratifying to see how many people have started to pay attention to things like access issues in online meetings, so that opens the door a crack for more and more fundamental changes. The checklist can help me go deeper. Thanks, NW Health and all the individuals who created this tool.

Stop “Assuming Good Intent”

Image of 8 panel chalkboard framed in red with writing in white. One panel reads "HURT NEVER."
Hurt Never

One of the first lessons I learned about hosting and facilitating online conversations was “Assume Good Intent.” As I read someone’s words online, this approach was practiced before I reacted, to assume the writer “meant well.” A breath before reacting. I have to say, it did keep me from writing overly reactive posts…sometimes.

This practice came out of hosting in the Electric Minds community, and later on The Well and other online communities. In his tip sheet on The Art of Hosting Good Conversations Online, Howard Rheingold talks about “assuming good will.” It made so much sense to me that it became one of the cornerstones of my online facilitation workshops. My assumption was that if people practiced good intent, gave each other the “benefit of the doubt,” all would be well. Or at least less bad. 🙂

What I missed so blindingly was who gets the power to assume good intent. And that someone’s good intent could be coming from a well of white supremacy. This all blossomed into my consciousness with a post on LinkedIn by the astute Tara Robertson.

Tara pointed me to Megan Carpenter, who wrote something much more useful.

“I’ll give you grace if you give me effort”

Megan Carpenter

That feels like it makes the responsibility clear for each party, and not excuse a lack of care or grace under the flag of “good intent.”

It is funny, now I’m seeing the words “good intent” everywhere I look, and I am consciously trying to reshape my language towards grace and effort.

Comparing F2F and Online Idea Generation – broaden our focus!

Picture of a small person looking out of a blue car's window as seen through the side mirror, with fainter image of hands on camera taking picture through front passenger window.
How many perspectives? Foci?

Earlier this month on the KM4Dev email list, one of my colleagues pointed to a study comparing F2F and online idea generation in the journal Nature and concluding F2F produced better results.

Virtual communications curbs creative idea generation, by Melanie S. Brucks and Jonathan Levav was a fascinating read. The authors did more to test their hypothesis compared to other studies I’ve read which claim one environment or other is better for some function. I take them with the proverbial grain of salt. This one got me thinking more deeply. Here is a bit from their summary:

Departing from previous theories that focus on how oral and written technologies limit the synchronicity and extent of information exchanged4,5,6, we find that our effects are driven by differences in the physical nature of videoconferencing and in-person interactions. Specifically, using eye-gaze and recall measures, as well as latent semantic analysis, we demonstrate that videoconferencing hampers idea generation because it focuses communicators on a screen, which prompts a narrower cognitive focus. Our results suggest that virtual interaction comes with a cognitive cost for creative idea generation.

Brooks and Levav

Narrower cognitive focus! In the example studies, they talked about the power of objects around is in a physical room to help us get creative. We limit those options when we diligently focus on the screen online. Wait, we focus on the screen because that is what we have habituated as proper virtual behavior. “Focus on the screen! Avoid distractions! And then we lose a bit of ourselves. Have you ever had that experience at the end of a Zoom where you have to reground yourself in your physical space?

Broader cognitive focus! Our habits impact our participation and our results. What if it is our lack of imagination and attention to what full presence and participation means that hampers us? What if we invited ourselves to use our F2F external environment WHILE attending to the screen? What if stepping away from the screen was part of the idea generation practice which not only widened our visual cognitive focus, but reawakened our kinesthetic selves?

It is convenient to assume that environment trumps all. And thus we begin to bias our thinking about the issue of F2F vs online options and choices that are so top-of-mind these days.

Maybe we are asking the wrong questions. What if the question was “what kinds of focus most contribute to idea generation?” And THEN ask how that focus can play out across different environments. This might be a great area for experimentation!

Image of tree branches in foreground, looking across a bay to a row of factories in the pink/orange of dusk.
View from a hotel room in Cameroon

From the Archives: Reflections on the FbD Learning Series

Screen shot of four videos from Floodplains by Design's "Collaboration Campfires"

Along time ago and in a place far far away, I supported an awesome network of folks at Floodplains by Design. When the pandemic hit we did a lot of the proverbial pivoting. Network work often entails a lot of meetings and we moved everything online. We ran a series of online facilitation workshops in 2020 and in 2021 and lo and behold today I resurfaced the videos of the sessions. The 2020 series was positioned as “Virtual Coffees” and the 2021 series was called the “Collaboration Campfire!” If you are so inclined, take a stroll through the videos here: https://vimeo.com/user142408470

Here are a few of the things that stand out for me from those two years of constant pivoting.

  • A small but consistent core of community leaders are the glue that enables intermittent and even one time participation to have value.  Our co-chairs and core members provided consistency, stability and network weaving through their wonderful relationships.
  • The community core (plus guests) designs as a TEAM, not the external facilitator designing and delivering. Team design yields experiences that meet a range of needs rather than one championed by a single designer.
  • Find that balance between process and content. Content is essential for the technical floodplains work, but the social bonds between members is nurtured through process.
  • Vary the process, but not everything, all the time. We used a lot of Liberating Structures and we would try and use a structure more than once, but not the same set or string of structures every time. This gave both comfort (familiarity) and variety. More importantly, it built capacity for folks to go back and use the process on their home turf. Or river, as it were.
  • Don’t over-pack the agenda. Oi, some day we will all integrate this learning into our practices!
  • Reflect and learn after every round. There is always room for new insights and ways of doing things.
  • Celebrate!