Facilitating Breakthrough: Reading Club Reflections Part 5
Chapter 10 & Conclusion
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.
This is the last gathering for our book club, hence the last blog post in the series. It has truly been a rewarding journey! A favorite sentence from the book for one of our book club members is “There is no future without opening up to one another, with sincerity, as fellow human beings”. This is exactly how I felt participating in the book club: we all opened up with sincerity and treated each other as fellow human beings. If we could model this type of behaviors as a community of facilitators, we would certainly open the hearts of the teams we facilitate!
We felt so enlightened by each other’s presence that we all decided to keep this connection going. Anne said she may start another slow reading book club, and of course we all immediately signed on to the idea. Amy, Anne and I are actively planning to host a series of “Facilitators’ Salon”. So, stay tuned!
The conversations that take place during the book club are always inspiring. In this gathering, we covered many deep topics: Can you see yourself as part of the problem? How might facilitators get beyond resistance? How might we exemplify equity and justice in facilitation? In this blog post, I share my current thoughts on these topics, but each of them deserves further thought and attention. I will continue to hold them close as I continue my facilitation practice. Sometimes we need to live into the answers, instead of sporadically coming up with the answers.
Can you see yourself as part of the problem?
Boston College leadership professor Bill Torbert once said to me, “The 1960s slogan ‘If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem’ misses the crucial point, which is that if you’re not part of the problem, you can’t be part of the solution.”
For people who are used to positioning themselves, politically or psychologically, as outside and above (“I am innocent”), such taking of responsibility (“I am not innocent”) involves an uncomfortable stretch. A crucial challenge in trying to effect transformation through collaboration is therefore to be able to see how one is part of the problematic situation.
— Facilitating Breakthrough, Adam Kahane
I love the teaching from Bill Torbert that “if you’re not part of the problem, you can’t be part of the solution”. I am probably in the minority of those who have always believed this way. Early on my mother taught me: if you cannot own your problem, you do not know how to get yourself out of the problem. Personally, this attitude speeds up my own learning; as a facilitator, this attitude helps me to identify surprising leverage points to effect change in a group.
“In a ham omelet, the chicken is involved but the pig is committed.”
More often than not, we are too busy justifying the legitimacy of our own behaviors and defending that we are innocent. By doing this, we could miss out on one of the best leverage points for change that is totally within our own sphere of influence. That is why I love the teaching from Complexity University, “the original sin of tackling complex challenges is the belief you can change systems without changing yourself”. The truth of the matter is, we are all part of the systems, through the myriad of entanglement and feedback loops that are often invisible. In tackling complex challenges, it is more important than ever to see ourselves as part of the problem. We should all be more like a “committed pig”, and less like an “involved chicken” in making the ham omelet.
“The original sin of tackling complex challenges is the belief you can change systems without changing yourself. “
— Complexity University
In contrast to the complex approach of tackling challenges, one key feature of the business-as-usual approach is objectivity: the people who work on the problem cannot be the people who have “skin in the game”. In my view, this orientation towards “objectivity” is often responsible for bad strategies. For example, if the United Nations is delivering a strategy for a specific country, and the team cannot have members who are from that country, because such members are not ‘objective’. But the underlying reality is that if the plan fails, the strategic teams are not impacted. How does this psychology work effectively? Would people really work harder for something that did not impact them? Would someone really care more if they did not have a viable interest in the game? Similarly, in today’s world, when politicians decide to involve a country into a war, they usually do not send their own family members to the front line. In the ancient times, the king themselves led troops into battles. I am willing to bet the kings would be much more careful and thoughtful making decisions when their own lives were at stake. Many policy failures can result from this stance of “objectivity”. With this mentality, decision makers may not always be incentivized to take enough time understanding the situation and all the possible ramifications of the policy. If a particular policy fails, they can easily switch their attention to another topic; they do not lose anything personally.
I sincerely believe that we need people who have committed investment at stake to more effectively tackle complex challenges.
How can facilitators get beyond the resistance?
This stance of being outside and above often produces condescension and imposition and hence countervailing resistance and mistrust, as it did in the dynamics between me and the group during the first day of the Manitoba workshop. Such verticality (“We have the right answer”) generates defensive horizontality (“We each have our own answer”).
— Facilitating Breakthrough, Adam Kahane
As a facilitator, I am continually aware of the possible resistance the mere presence of an outsider can trigger in a team of people who are used to working together with each other in a certain way. I have had experience where external experts come in and attempt to interject their influence over the group. I find my own internal dialogue fraught with resistance: “who do you think you are to tell us what to do”. As the book stated, if facilitators come in with the attitude that “we have the right answer”, it is very likely that stance will trigger defensiveness from the team that “we each have our own answer”. In this case, the facilitators have failed before they even started: their work becomes resisting the resistance, instead of enabling the team to move forward.
This also points to the importance of “context” in complex challenges. In complexity, there is no “best practices”, but “reflexive practices” that respect each context. I am very reluctant to say the word “model”, because it almost implies that “this will work everywhere”. It is never true. The word “framework” works much better, because it implies “these are principles that have wide applicability, but how it works out in your own context is going to be unique and different from other contexts. So please pay attention and be adaptive”. This story from a community leader makes the point. As he was preparing to start a new program, a team member who was involved in a similar initiative said “we should provide spaghetti dinner to our participants. It worked great last time”. This community leader said “Does it have to be spaghetti? Will pizza work?” The main principle here is that people develop a sense of community by breaking bread together; spaghetti can work, so can pizza, or other food, depending on the specific context.
I once gave a talk about how resistance happens when external people come into groups. I illustrated the point with the “limit to growth” model. The immune system of the team is triggered as a reaction to the external influence forced on the team. The resistance of the immune system becomes the limit to the effectiveness of facilitators. To remove the limit to growth, they could view themselves as learning partners to catalyze the innate change capacity within the group. This way they are much more likely to slip under the radar of the immune system without triggering any resistance.
How might we exemplify equity and justice in facilitation?
In a context of great imbalance or inequity, as in Guatemala, how can poverty be uprooted without some sector of society being very dissatisfied? It is their economic interests which will be affected. I think that balance and satisfaction for all are possible in the realm of discourse, but not when you go down to ‘real’ politics in a context of enormous inequality.
Without a drive toward Justice, collaboration can merely reproduce an unjust status quo.
— Facilitating Breakthrough, Adam Kahane
In a previous post in the series, I spoke about how I have personally found in my own practice that equity is the most challenging of the three pillars of transformative facilitation: connection, contribution and equity. During the book club, we each gave examples of how we are working towards equity in our personal facilitation practice. I consider them to be inspiring beautiful roses that give me tremendous hope and confidence.
My example was creating the enabling conditions so that a person with the highest stature on a team did not take up too much airtime. Anne gave the example of holding the safe space so that students and postdocs felt safe to name the power dynamics in academia that made their ideas less valuable than those of faculty. Osnat shared the story of her personal awakening process through her doctoral studies to notice the patterns of power dynamics in meetings. Amy talked about her realization of the importance of internal reflection. I felt deeply encouraged by these stories of personal growth and creativity.
I would like to highlight two approaches from the book that are easily implementable to make progress towards equity and justice. One approach is to intentionally compose a collaboration to include participants who are usually ignored or marginalized. Another approach is for participants and facilitators to pay attention to and talk about how their own team dynamics might reproduce injustices in the larger system; then they have the opportunity to change these dynamics and enable all participants to contribute and connect equitably. I definitely see myself experimenting with both in my facilitation practice and creating more creative methods and approaches in the future as I continue to gain experience and understanding.
The facilitators’ work is important
This is the starting point for all transformative facilitation. A group of people find the situation that they are facing to be problematic. They and others may have attempted to deal with it through forcing, adapting, and exiting, but have found that these options have been inadequate and have produced stuckness. They want to collaborate to find a better way forward.
— Facilitating Breakthrough, Adam Kahane
The centering question to identify whether a group is ready to work with a facilitator is: does the group want to come together to move forward? I find the openness and commitment to coming together in order to move forward is often created by previously failed experience and the resulted “stuckness”. The facilitators’ work is crucial to help get a group moving forward again.
Getting unstuck takes energy. If I compare stuckness to being frozen, which is most appropriate for this time of the year, then facilitators can bring in the warmth and energy that will help to thaw things out. Keep in mind our mission may falter if we run out of the fuel necessary to keep the warmth glowing long enough, or strong enough to reach the requisite temperature. This points to the reality that we often find that teams do not have enough resources for the level of intervention needed to continue moving forward.
My hope is that this will change as we make the case for the demands of complex challenges and generate more awareness for the critical roles facilitators play in strengthening the teams who tackle complex challenges. It is my true belief that this is the purpose of my work.
This is the last in the blog series about the book. Want to read more from the series? Please read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 of the series.
