Facilitating Breakthrough: Reading Club Reflections Part 3
Chapters 6 & 7
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.
I really admire Anne’s quick actions to implement suggestions. I really appreciate the support of this community. At our second book club gathering, we talked about “reflective communities of practice”; at the beginning of our third book club gathering, we did exactly that. The question I offered was: how might we host a holiday party for a virtual community? We generated great ideas, such as sending people “celebration” packages. I like the idea of all participants holding the same physical objects, but it is hard to imagine shipping packages all over the world, since a lot of my audience reside outside of the US. My iteration is going to be inviting everyone to bring household items, such as candles. I have been to events where everyone is invited to light a candle. It does create a physical sensation of being spiritually united together.
The remaining chapters of the book take a deep dive into each of the practices of transformative facilitation. Chapters 6 & 7 tackles the first two questions respectively: How do we see our situation? How do we define success? In our book club, we covered both practical matters such as time to prepare for a workshop, and more philosophical considerations such as balancing moving forward with staying in a relationship, and working together with disagreements.
How much preparation is needed before facilitating a workshop?
The process included two three-day workshops in Panama, but I worked on this project every day for a full year, organizing preparatory and follow-up work, negotiating among the participating governments and participants, drafting documents, and keeping our teams aligned. Facilitating a process to address a problematic situation involves much more than just running workshops.
— Facilitating Breakthrough, Adam Kahane
I have always known that for every hour of presentation, it takes about 3 hours of preparation. I never thought about the ratio of preparation time versus facilitation time, even though in my experience 80% of the work is done before the workshop actually happens.
Successful preparation is critical for successful facilitation. In the Partnership Brokering certificate program I am taking, participants were paired up to facilitate a 25-min session of a partnership initiative. Since everything was role playing, my partner and I did not know much about the audience. Even though we had thoughtfully designed and practiced our facilitation plan, we were not able to respond effectively to a ‘curve ball’ thrown at us towards the end of the session. Instead of adapting the facilitation plan, we insisted on sticking to our original plan, which, in hindsight, was not the best decision.
My reflection points back to the importance of preparation. The more facilitators know their audience, and the more they prepare for the process, the more flexible and adaptive they can be. In my personal experience, I am more inclined to control when I am not well prepared. I am more inclined to be present to the interactive dynamics and adapt the plan if I have done my homework. If what is going on in the room and what is going on in the facilitators’ mind are two separate processes, most likely it is because the facilitators did not spend time understanding the real needs of the group.
Our book club was quite taken by the amount of time the author had to prepare: one full year for two three-day workshops. We all felt that we could use more time in preparation. So where is that time going to come from?
How might we balance moving forward and staying in relationship?
If reaching agreements is one pole of facilitating, what is the other? It is finding ways to move forward while staying in relationship. In the first workshop of the Food Lab, we discerned that at that early stage in our collaboration, it was more important to form the group and begin to work together than it was to try to reach a conclusion. In the second workshop of the drug policy project, the productive working relationships that the participants had formed enabled them to reopen their conclusions to incorporate a late, divergent addition. As these two examples illustrate, social innovation usually does not result simply from coming up with new ideas but from forming new relationships, connections, and alliances that enable new or old ideas to be implemented.
— Facilitating Breakthrough, Adam Kahane
What a balancing act between moving forward and staying in relationship! As the African proverb goes: if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.
I find “openness” one of the key ingredients to that balance between moving forward and staying in relationship. Insisting on one specific outcome can squeeze out the air for relationships — it becomes a contest of will, a binary choice. There is no room for co-creation. Staying open to explore multiple options for mutual gains makes space for relationships to grow.
If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.
— African proverb
As I argued in my recent widely cited paper Three complexity principles for convergence research, complex adaptive system is a positive-sum game with infinite potential for co-creation. The strength of relationship determines the degree of co-creation that can happen in a collaboration. In this sense, moving forward and staying in relationship mutually reinforce each other. This is in line with the dual focus on learning and belonging I have advocated in this reflection article about the Adaptive Space program.
What happens when collaborators do not agree?
A few months later I was in Bogotá to conduct a public interview of Santos, and I asked him why he had mentioned Destiny Colombia. He answered, “I often refer to this project because it is where I learned that, contrary to all of my upbringing, it is possible to work with people you do not agree with and will never agree with.” I found this reply illuminating because facilitators often imagine that if participants could just meet and talk, they would discover that they actually agree. But Santos was emphasizing a more common and challenging scenario: participants who meet and do not agree but still need to find a way to work together.
— Facilitating Breakthrough, Adam Kahane
This point about working together with disagreements is most illuminating to me. I have always believed that to agree or disagree are not binary choices, but a gradient, a spectrum. That is why I often utilize Sam Kane’s gradient of agreement in my facilitation. I also see agreement as a dynamic process: as our understanding of ourselves and of reality evolves, so does our degree of agreement.
So why can we still work together effectively without fully agreeing?
Even though our perception of reality is different, we are still working out of the same reality, so there is always room for convergence. In another word, the fundamental interconnectedness of the same reality is still holding those who do not agree together. Take the famous proverb the blind men and the elephant for example. The blind men who are feeling different body parts of the elephant disagree with each other. But so long they continue to discover more about the same elephant, eventually their perceptions will converge. Disagreement is a developmental stage of the sense making process. More coherence will lead to more agreement.
The mind-body connection perspective also helps. Agreement, as described in the book, is primarily a function of the conscious mind. The mind loves to be different, to be unique, to distinguish itself from others. So the mind’s default tends to be disagreement unless otherwise proven. Whereas the body is the opposite: the body is a vehicle for unity. So we could surmise that while the mind might disagree with each other temporarily, the body holds the potential for agreement to emerge.
Agreement is more important in areas of higher levels of coupling and interdependence. For example, how could a collaboration function if collaborators did not agree on the challenge they are tackling, or if they did not agree on a common purpose? It is important to make intentional decisions about areas to work towards agreement early on, and areas where agreement can emerge as collaborators continue to make adaptive moves.
This is Part 1 and Part 2 of the series if you are interested in reading.
