Facilitating Breakthrough: Reading Club Reflections Part 1
Forward, Introduction, Chapters 1& 2
This series of reflections are based on Adam Kahane’s new book Facilitating Breakthrough: How to Remove Obstacles, Bridge Differences, and Move Forward Together, and the reading club Anne Heberger Marino @leantocollabs organized. We meet once a week from Oct. 28 to Dec. 2 in 2021.
You are invited to join our book club conversation through this mural board @leantocollabs has created. Please feel free to put stars on the ideas you connect with and add your own ideas in the middle.
Facilitation is a key pillar in my emerging career in team science. I often think of evaluation as the lagging indicator that analyzes past performance, and facilitation as the leading indicator that influences future performance. Building on my immersion in the Liberating Structure community last year and earlier this year, this book Facilitating Breakthrough marks another leap in my understanding and practice of the art and science of facilitation.
Reading the book is an intellectual enjoyment, while participating in the book club organized by Anne Heberger Marino enables an experience of the three essential ingredients for collaborating across differences outlined in the book:
- contribution: our need to achieve, how we express the motive of power
- connection: our need to collaborate and live together, how we express the motive of love
- equity: our need to do this fairly, to experience a sense of justice
This series of blog posts capture breakthrough insights for me personally from participating in the book club. Our first gathering on Oct. 28 answered three key questions for me: What are we really doing here? Are you really ready to collaborate? Why did the anticipated magic not happen?
What are we really doing here?
“You Are Removing the Obstacles to the Expression of the Mystery!” The essence of what I am now calling transformative facilitation is therefore not getting participants to work together but helping them remove the obstacles to doing so. You can’t push a stream to flow, but if you remove the blockages, it will flow by itself.
— Facilitating Breakthrough by Adam Kahane
The shift from “getting somebody to do something” to “removing the obstacles to doing so” is a major one to me. The image of a stream illustrates the point perfectly: it is in the nature of the stream to flow, we just need to remove the blockages. Similarly, as David Bohm points out, all beings are enveloped in the wholeness and interdependence is in our nature. We just need to remove the obstacles to activate our interdependence. The obstacles come in many shapes and forms as outlined in the book: institutional, political, economic, cultural, psychological, or physical structures.
Bohm’s theory went beyond interdependence to wholeness. Interdependence is something you can see. For example, a mother and a child are interdependent in countless ways you can observe. Such interdependence is a sort of window into a deeper domain of wholeness. Interdependence exists at what Bohm called the “explicate” level. But wholeness exists at the “implicate,” which is the unmanifest or premanifest level.
— David Bohm, as quoted in the book Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership
Thinking about facilitation as removing obstacles effects two shifts in me:
- Facilitation seems more humanly possible. Facilitators are participating in the unfolding of something that is meant to happen, instead of pulling something out of thin air.
- My attention shifts from “adding” to “subtracting”. It is about what works for the team, not about what the facilitator is good at. This shift grounds me in each unique teams contexts, which is much more aligned with my most important leadership philosophy “meeting people where they are”.
However, I do not see “removing obstacles” at odds with my usual way of describing facilitation as “creating enabling conditions”. Instead, I see them as two movements of the same act, complementary to each other. Sometimes creating new enabling conditions exposes the dire need to remove obstacles; sometimes the pains imposed by obstacles necessitate the creation of new enabling conditions. It is hard to say which one comes first, or which one is more important. As advocated by Buckminster Fuller, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” In this sense, creating enabling conditions is simultaneously removing obstacles.
Are you really ready to collaborate?
Many people want contribution and connection to be inclusive and fair, but there are structures that give certain people more freedom, privilege, and power than others. As a consequence, some people have fewer opportunities to contribute and connect than others, and this impedes collaboration.
— Facilitating Breakthrough by Adam Kahane
Of the three essential ingredients, contribution, connection and equity, I find equity the hardest in my personal practice. Many people like the idea of collaboration, but not the reality of it, especially when the question of power creeps in. When letting go of power knocks on the door, collaboration flies out the window.
Equity is an increasingly important topic to consider because of the serious challenges collaborations face in today’s world. As pointed out at the beginning of the book, “in many contexts, people face increasing complexity and decreasing control. They need to work with more people from across more divides.” True collaboration necessitates relinquishing control and make room for emergence, which pose constant threats to power as traditionally conceived.
When confronted with letting go of control, privileges, powers, combined with working with discomfort that comes with the unknown, and delivering results under stressful timelines, most leaders slip back to the unilateral control mode, as pointed out by Roger Schwarz in his book Smart Leaders, Smarter Teams.
Among all those thousands, we have identified fewer than ten leaders who did not use the unilateral control approach when a serious challenge reduced their effectiveness. Despite all the developments in leadership over the last forty years, when it comes to challenging situations almost all leaders slip into the same mindset. They have reasons for doing so, but there are also good reasons (and ways) to change it.
— Smart Leaders, Smarter Teams by Roger Schwarz
This is very much a challenge I am grappling with in my current facilitation and leadership practice. I encounter it every day, and honestly speaking, I am often quite intimidated by the demonstration of power by “powerful” people. In our book club, one participant said “in academia there are those with PhDs and MDs, and everybody else”. I definitely see that dynamic at play, and much more. As a person with a PhD in the social sciences, and a young Asian female, what am I supposed to do when a senior STEM faculty member dominates?
Perhaps the more important questions to ask are: does true collaboration call for a shift in our understanding of power? Is equity in collaboration even possible if we continue to hold unto the status quo?
Why did the anticipated magic not happen?
Facilitation is necessary when people both want to create change or face a challenge they want to address and want to collaborate to do so. When these two conditions are met, these people have energy to work together, and the facilitator doesn’t need to provide the energy to get them to move forward. The facilitator only needs to support them to use their own energy to move forward.
— Facilitating Breakthrough by Adam Kahane
When the “magic” happens, the energy is palpable: we are accomplishing what we set out to do, and even more; everyone on the team is in flow; a new entity is born, called “the team”, or “the whole”, that is bigger than the sum of the parts. It feels as if I were flying.
I have learned not to take credit when the magic happens, just as I have learned not to take too much blame when the magic does not happen. If we think of facilitators as catalyst, the team that the facilitators are working with are the chemical ingredients. They both need to be right in order for the chemical reaction to happen.
This book summarizes the required conditions for the team with this one question: Are the groups ready to collaborate in order to make a change? Wanting to make a change generates the “creative tension”, as Peter Senge describes, that compels the team to make moves, while committing to a collaborative approach keeps the team together in the face of obstacles.
Tackling complex challenges is difficult. Prioritizing teams needs to be one of the key innovations.
From my own facilitation practice
Some of the book club participants resonated with the following two insights I shared from my own facilitation practice.
Making room for connection
Since working remotely due to COVID, social science researchers have found over and over again that the number one thing people miss from in person working environment is the “water cooler time”: running into each other at the coffee machine, informal conversations at lunch time, passing on a piece of information at the hallway. This can be partially compensated with personal connection time at each virtual meeting.
I often start the meetings I facilitate with a check in activity. Check-in prompts can be personal such as “how has your summer been”, or “what is one tiny delight from your life this past week” or relevant to the business at hand such as “how do you feel about the current proposal” or “what are your concerns about today’s topic”. My personal favorite check in question is “what is keeping you from being present”. It is a great question to help people fully arrive at the meeting by naming and letting go of the distractions. It feels like “Removing the Obstacles to the Expression of the Mystery” in action.
Check-ins can be done in breakout rooms for 3–5 minutes, or can be done via chat for 1–2 minutes. Most of my team members love it. One team member appreciated the activities with the comment that “you gave us permission to just sit around and talk. It is great for developing personal relationships.”
Between the team leader(s) and the facilitator
We also talked about the need for facilitators to manage expectations that may come from team leaders. Some team leaders feel that their work is done when they identify a qualified facilitator, that the facilitator will take care of everything. This is far from the truth.
Facilitators bring in the process expertise. It needs to be integrated with the team’s subject matter expertise to be effective. Just as doctors often tell patients “nobody knows your body better than you”, as a facilitator, I often tell my teams “nobody knows your team better than you”. Before I accept a facilitation assignment, I always clarify the amount of time investment the team leader can expect. I always involve the whole team in drafting the agenda as well.
Successful facilitation calls for deep trust and interdependence between the team leader, the team members, and the facilitator. Developing trust takes time and commitment, but there is no way around it.
Point of Curiosity
I would like to conclude this blog post with one question I have been pondering: How to generate awareness among leaders for the need of good facilitation. I believe running a good meeting is one of the most important leadership tasks, but I observe over and over again that opportunities for moving forward are missed because of poor facilitation during meetings. I am curious to explore ways to open up the space for good facilitation. What are your thoughts?
