Category: facilitation

From the Archives: Tom Atlee – Responding deeper than symptoms

Four quadrants of a Critical Uncertainties exercise in multiple colored pen written on a white flip chart.

The blog link for this amazing quote from 2011 is dead, but Tom Atlee (Co-Intelligence Institute) continues his amazing work (you can support the Institute here.)

As I reflect on the quote, I think of the current high level of polarity that we so often seem to want to ignore, gloss over of simply avoid by not interacting with those who believe differently than we do. If we just focus on symptoms, we just make it worse. See a few ideas below the quote…

Just because some energy or activity ceases to be clearly and publicly visible, doesn’t mean it has died or gone away. Especially when you suppress it with violence, you almost guarantee it will continue, growing and evolving, surfacing with new energy and impacts in new times and places, often to people’s great surprise. Addressing symptoms of a disturbance seldom handles the cause, which will soon find other outlets to manifest whatever need is not being met.

Tom Atlee, Co-Intelligence Institute

I appreciate a few of the Liberating Structures that help us step past our assumptions (the place of just focusing on symptoms and not causes?) such as Critical Uncertainties, Agreement Certainty Matrix and Ecocycle. When we offload some of the posturing and judgement and give some space for sense making, we can get closer to cause.

via What happens now with OWS? – Random Communications from an Evolutionary Edge.

OLD! The “chairs” technique for synchronous web gatherings

Blast from the past!

This will give you a laugh about the types of things we were doing back in the early 2000’s for synchronous online interaction. This is a conversational snippet from the now defunct CPSquare community (a community about communities of practice.) Skype allowed us global teleconferencing, but no video at the time. I love that dredging this up reminded me I learned the technique from Fernanda Ibarra! The image referred to in the conversation is below. Ah, the days of clipart. More from 2010.

Picture of a circle of cartoon clipart chairs with a name underneath some of them and instructions in the middle.
Just used this today with a group of people most of whom had not used Skype  for teleconferencing before.   I posted the slide  (modified to arrange the chairs in clock mode as you talked about in the FCoP telecon the other day) as a google presentation.  Names were ready in the center and to open I asked people to “take a seat” by moving their names — demonstrating by moving mine.  Then we used the result for the speaking order (group was small  — only 8 people)  — it worked like a charm  — Fernanda Ibarra and Nancy White — you are  geniuses! As you said in your guest appearance at FCoP earlier this week, small things do indeed make a big difference.  One person mentioned the “chair thing”  as an example of “what worked” at the end of the call when we did a round robin of what worked, what didn’t, what would you do differently — so I had the opportunity to mention that I learned about the circle of chairs from you!

best,

Ann Braun

On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 4:00 PM, < Help_in_Real_Time@conversations.cpsquare.org> wrote:

Excellent Webinars Reply #10
Posted onSat Feb 07 2009 19:19:00 GMT-0100 (PST)
Nancy White-
One Small Interactive Exercise per Webinar
I learned this small trick from Fernanda Ibarra, who I think is a Foundations alumna as well, so maybe we can lure her here. She showed me the value of doing some small, easy interactive exercise at the start of a webinar which stealthily increases people’s familiarity with the tool and adds something to the meeting.
Fernanda taught me about the chairs. She puts up a slide (I’ve attached my version) at the start and asks everyone to use the text tool to put their name under a chair. This sets the sense of group/circle/conversation, acquaints people with the whiteboard tools and is an easy, non-intimidating task.
Attachment: chairs.ppt

Patrick Lambe on Against Bestness

Photograph of yellow warning signsthat says "water over roadway" and "dead end" surrounded by flood waters. Clouds and trees reflected on the water.


In 2008 Patrick Lambe wrote this fabulous blog post challenging our notion of, or perhaps obsession with, bestness. Green Chameleon » Against Bestness

First, I encourage you to read the whole post. It is still spot on resonant. Patrick highlights many of the missteps of trying to focus on all things best: best practices, simplistic taxonomies, etc.

Why do we fall for bestness? For me, it is our own entrained thinking and simply not paying attention to the signals where a focus on best is, at best (haha) is a wrong turn.

Second, I’d love you to share the signals you notice when you (if you ever do) start focusing on bestness instead of the right thing to do right now. (Or some variation.)

In taking a step back from constant work, I’m reflecting on some of my choices with groups and clients and see moments where I have consciously or unconsciously not heard what others offer because I thought I had what was best.  Signals? Defensiveness. Interrupting others. Prioritizing the voices that agreed with me.

My antidote? Stick with structures that prevent behavior that I succumbed to now and again. This is probably why I use Liberating Structures, or at the least, consider my process choices based on how much the bring all voices to the work.

Not another “how are you?” Alternatives from Kat Vellos

Brilliance from Kat Vellos https://www.instagram.com/katvellos_author/ and https://twitter.com/KatVellos/status/1392606023718825986/photo/1 (Her blog post about it here.)

I think I now sleepwalk through someone asking/answering “how are you.” That said, sometimes I’d love a meeting where I can skip ALL check-ins, check-outs and just get the work done and the meeting OVER WITH. This is a unique kind of pandemic-induced fatigue for me. I seek not the gathering place on some days, but the cave.

Interesting…

What does consent look like to you as a facilitator?

“Consent is key. Relatedly, whatever you do, get consent from the local government and the local community. Involve them in the decision-making and processes. For example, in a humanitarian crisis (outbreak, environmental, or manmade), development organizations and INGOs (e.g., UN, Save the Children, IRC, MSF) aren’t allowed to enter a country to provide support until the country has invited them or accepted their offer. This is one example of tapping into existing structures, which are in place for a reason, as well as the importance of consent.” https://www.fsg.org/blog/covid-19-seven-things-philanthropy-can-do

I’ve been thinking more and more about how I have controlled and oppressed others through my well-meaning facilitation. I jokingly call it “facipulation,” and seek to be very transparent about how I approach facilitation. But that is no excuse to ignore my filtered and often biased approach.

I have been working to understand how better to work with the Tribes in my state as it relates to my work with an integrated floodplains management network. Informal conversations between the consultants and the leadership team have opened up many new and nuanced vistas about what consent means.

As I begin to glimpse the complexities of sovereign nation relationships (thank you Bobby), the relationships within and between tribes, and practices of who can or does speak for whom, it is clearer that I based most of my sense of “inviting people in” on my white, American, female and other identities, without having a clue how they were received by others different than me. More importantly, WHY they are perceived the way they are. My personal value was to ensure that “everyone speaks.” Does that, in fact, equal egalitarian engagement? Not necessarily.

In my belief in networked and multi-nodal approaches, I often dismissed existing power structures as oppressive, without even understanding HOW they worked. I lumped them into the buck of obstruction and sought to work around them.

But what happens when working around them makes matters worse? While you might not agree with me and I with you, dismissing the way we each wish to engage does nothing for moving forward together. So what does the path “between” look like? How do we flock together and hold our uniqueness and diversity intact? How does that inform consent and group process?