by Christine
Little
Director of Global Learning & Organizational
Development
Habitat for Humanity International
"As
long as we wish for safety, we will have difficulty pursuing what
matters."
Peter
Block, The Answer to How is Yes: Acting on What Matters
(2002)
The meeting was stalled with
40 people standing in clusters around the edges of the room. They
were stuck, frustrated, and looking for me help them out. For
a day we had moved through the safer activities of the meeting,
working in small groups, gathering input for the content of a
purpose statement, discussing and charting the stickier points
of process and structure.
But this question was a high risk question. "Which of these
points are you personally committed to putting some action to?"
There was no hiding from that question in a small group. There
was no hiding from it in the creation of more elegant bullet points.
It could not be anonymously penned on a flip chart or jotted onto
a sticky note right before darting out the door.
This question was personal. It was confrontational. It confronted
them with their own freedom to choose - am I committing to what
we can create in this room, or am I opting out?
Since reading Peter Block's compelling book "the answer to
how is yes," (and having been in an even more compelling
two-day workshop with him) I have rethought the way I design for
safety in dialogue.
"Threat can work against
dialogue. If I will be ridiculed for a wrong answer, I am likely
to withhold my answers until I am sure they are right. If honest
opinion gets punished, I may opt for the safe, comfortable, slightly
less honest dialogue that frequently fills meeting, training and
conference rooms.
Threat can work against dialogue. If
I will be ridiculed for a wrong answer, I am likely to withhold
my answers until I am sure they are right. If honest opinion gets
punished, I may opt for the safe, comfortable, slightly less honest
dialogue that frequently fills meeting, training and conference
rooms.
Safety can also work against dialogue.
Exposure is the price for meaningful dialogue. And significant
change -- the ultimate pay off for learning -- is not safe, painless
or easy. It requires courage. Our design and facilitation would
do well to promote courage rather than safety. Courage is ultimately
more useful for the world.
I have facilitated, and participated
in, elegantly designed processes that made it easy to hide, to
play it safe or to avoid meaning. In these gatherings, dissent
has been put on the "parking lot" so that it can't derail
the process in the room. Questions and reporting techniques keep
the dialogue manageable (especially for the facilitator), but
they neutralize expressions of doubt, confusion, and disagreement.
I still use small groups. I still sequence
activities to move from easy to more difficult. I don't call on
individuals to confront them with the question I think they are
dodging. But I also create space for individuals and for the group
to participate in more courageous dialogue.
Here are some ways I have changed my
approach to design and facilitation in pursuit of courage over
safety:
-
I
use questions that examine doubt, commitment and personal
choice. "Head" questions can generate good information
- we need them to get the ideas out there, but "gut"
questions can bring a group to confront its choice.
-
I
have greatly reduced my reliance on clever techniques
that gather information in manageable bites. The SNOW cards,
graphic organizers and two-word answers that I favored in
order to boost dialogue, generate more information and create
safety, were also diminishing some of the meaningfulness of
the dialogue. They have their place. But the frequently served
my need for time management and control more than they served
-
I
build time into my design to process with the group how
they are functioning (individually and as a group) in the
meeting room. Block notes that the meeting itself is a metaphor
for the organization. It is rich with data, and often partly
invisible to people in the room. It is worthwhile to examine
what it means if people are quietly agreeing to decisions
in the meeting, then frenetically trying to lobby the CEO
at break.
-
I
stay with the group when the tension builds, when they
are stuck, or resisting, or polarizing, but I don't give
into the temptation to save us all by quickly designing a
safer task.
This last part takes the most courage from
me. I am proud of my capacity to design tasks, ask the right
questions, keep the group engaged in the work. I like to be
the person in the room who can design the environment and the
work in such a way that a group produces what it set out to
produce. The trouble is, if the session is mainly a demonstration
of my design capacity, it may not actually be a demonstration
of the commitment of the people in the room to carry forward
what they have planned.
As we stood in that meeting room, the tension
grew. The participants stopped talking about their own dilemma
and switched to talking about how the meeting was being run.
They said I was asking the wrong question. That we needed to
go back and get the wording of the bullet points right first.
That the categories were all wrong.
In my own mind, I could already hear how the story
would be told about this failed meeting. "Two wasted days!
The CEO sitting in the room for two days! All those wasted airfares.
And the problem is she got the design all wrong." It was
an act of will not to break the tension by moving them into
small groups and giving them the task of rewording some bullet
points. That would have guaranteed an output. But the bigger
prize -- personal commitment to the decision -- would
have been lost.
After a torturous 20 minutes, something shifted.
The group took control of the meeting. They started moving the
tables around so that the room was better designed for the work.
They very quickly formed groups and figured out their own process
for collecting and reporting. I had designed some questions
for them, but I didn't even put the flipchart up. My questions
no longer mattered. They had decided to commit, and they already
knew what had to be created in the next two hours. All I needed
to do was sit down and let them work.
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