Facilitating Breakthrough: Reading Club Reflections Part 4
Chapters 8 & 9
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.
In the fourth gathering of the book club, we continued to dive deeply into the practice of transformative facilitation. The guiding question for each chapter is: How will we get from here to there (Chapter 8), and how do we decide who does what (Chapter 9). Coincidentally, the Chapter 8 theme corresponds quite well with the recent invitation I received to facilitate a workshop chartering a project team through their funding gap to sustain the results. I appreciated the peer coaching while my fellow book club members appreciated a real case to apply learning from the book. It is almost always a win-win situation whenever we can bring real world cases into the conversation. I am feeling really passionate about establishing a reflective community of practice for facilitators.
How will we get from here to there?
Boxer Mike Tyson said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth . . . If you’re good and your plan is working, somewhere during the duration of that, the outcome of that event you’re involved in, you’re going to get the wrath, the bad end of the stick. Let’s see how you deal with it. Normally people don’t deal with it that well.”
— Facilitating Breakthrough, Adam Kahane
I enjoyed this chapter very much because it is completely in line with my “prototyping spirit”. I often think of the journey of getting from here to there as a journey along the divergence-convergence-divergence continuum. As we gather divergent information, prototyping can help move along the trajectory to convergence by solidifying or eliminating options. The best way to get an answer is to try it out. I often say: poke the system, and see how she responds. More often than not, you cannot predict the response. Complex adaptive systems are full of surprises. Always be ready to make course corrections based on the response, and then try out the new plan again.
In terms of facilitation, I always “prototype” my plan by having my participants try out an activity and getting feedback from them. This is how I iterate my plan before the actual event, as well as afterwards for the next occasion.
We should always expect to receive that proverbial “punch in the mouth”, and we should always prepare and practice for it. “Punches” are coming more frequently as systemic changes are accelerating at a rapid pace .
I have also written quite extensively about this topic, so without belaboring the point, here are two other pertinent quotes I really love from the book.
Walker, there is no path. The path is made by walking.
— Spanish poet Antonio Machado
Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.
— US president and former army general Dwight Eisenhower Eisenhower
What does ‘service’ look like in facilitation?
When I facilitated with O’Brien, he always insisted on having thirty minutes alone just before we started a meeting to collect his thoughts. He told me, “The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervenor.” O’Brien was pointing to the importance of the inner orientation of the facilitator, and especially of a focus on serving with what he called love. “By ‘love,’” he wrote, “I mean a predisposition toward helping another person to become complete: to develop to their full potential. Love is not something that suddenly strikes us — it is an act of the will. By ‘an act of will,’ I mean that you do not have to like someone to love him or her.”
— Facilitating Breakthrough, Adam Kahane
It is great to encounter Bill O’Brien in this book. His philosophy that “the success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervenor” was first introduced to me by Otto Scharmer in the Theory U world. I recently saw it as a side note I wrote years ago in my Analects of Confucius book. That reflected the deep impression it had originally made on me.
“Serving enables us to escape our small, defensive, egoic self and enact our larger, better, and more alive one, and in doing so to inspire others to do the same.” This is another of my favorite sentences from the book. What is the ego’s agenda? I have identified three top agendas of the ego: to be right, to be in control, and to be better than others.
To illustrate this point, here is a story from my own facilitation experience. As a way to generate bottom up dynamics for a workshop, I devised a plan to collect ideas from all participants with the exercise “what is on your radar” from Luma Institute’s human-centered design. I have utilized the method successfully on several occasions, so I was quite confident that it would go well with this group. However, the group leader came back to me and said flat out: I do not like this exercise. When I heard his remarks, I could literally see my ego flaring up, she was ready to defend and fight, she was ready to prove that she was right and that she had the superior idea.
When I was less mature, I always had this arrogance regarding the “process expertise” I brought to the table, as opposed to the “content expertise” everyone else offered. I have several memories of imposing my ideas on the group I was invited to facilitate. As I look back, I regret that yet I also recognize the developmental stage I was in as a new facilitator.
At the moment it occurred, thankfully I caught myself and quieted down my ego before she lashed out. With maturity comes the understanding that behind every request, behind every disagreement, there is a need. The question should not be “who is right” but “what is the need”.
I found out from the leader that he needed the exercise to be less open ended. They were in Year 2 of the project, not starting from scratch. Consequently, we changed the name of the exercise to “For Your Situational Awareness”. The format of the exercise stayed exactly the same, and combined with another exercise called “Wise Crowd”, it turned out to be one of the biggest highlights of the workshop.
Perhaps changing the name of the exercise was not a big deal. But it fulfilled a need of the group, so it was an important adjustment. By exercising flexibility and humility I realized I was there to serve their needs, not to impose my will.
I love it that the book elevated the concept of service. In my experience, that orientation makes all the difference. Service makes it possible to “remove the obstacles to the expression of the mystery”. Service opens hearts, gains trust, and delivers results.
Recently I was asked “what is your leadership strength?” My answer was:” In service of what is emerging”. This is in the same spirit as Iain McGilchrist’s comment in his new preface to The Master and His Emissary: I have sought to be true to whatever is . I have been impassioned to discover the picture that is already there, given in the structure of our selves, our brains and our minds.
I have been quite fascinated by Iain McGilchrist. His new book The Matter with Things is definitely on my reading list, as I am considering doing some “crash reading” during the holidays. His recent interview with Rebel Wisdom is absolutely amazing. It would be a dream come true to start a reading club on either one of Iain McGilchrist’s books (The Master and His Emissary or The Matter with Things). If anyone is interested in joining the effort please let me know!
