I recently was hired to help a group of people (Chester Real Change) generate a visual model that represented the transformative process they collectively experienced regarding the impact that violence had had on them.
As a participatory leadership facilitator, I worked with my client to create a structure for a retreat and questions that could meaningfully generate deep reflection. We decided we would start with personal process and then move to group work and image generation. I proposed a 20-minute individual journaling session that would encourage reflection on the following questions: What changed for you from the beginning to the end of the process? In which moment did you experience the shift? What helped the shift unfold?
In 5 minutes, participants were done and laughing and talking. Struggling to control any expressions of irritation, I asked participants to share their reflections.
“Well, I don’t like the term ‘shift’,” One participant said. “Things didn’t really shift for me. Things didn’t change; it’s just that I was having a group experience. For the first time, I got to meet other people who had to deal with violence in a different way.”
Community building in Chester, Pennsylvania
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“So,” I asked, “if you were to pinpoint the moment in which you felt that community, the moment in which things changed for you, when was it?”
The director of the host organization stepped in: “What I’ve learned in this process is to NOT do what you are doing, which is to contrast, simplify, and interpret other people’s answers, but to listen to different perspectives. I think she gave you the description of her experience, and you need to listen deeper and not try to change what she said.”
The handslap hurt, but was helpful and needed. I realized I had forgotten to take off my evaluator hat: I had focused on desired outcomes and pushed the conversation instead of allowing it to go where participants saw fit. Otto Scharmer in Theory U would say that I was thinking from limited past experiences instead of presencing: stepping into the possibilities of the future by sensing and connecting with it as it takes form.
Scharmer says that you sense and connect by holding an open heart and open mind. I wasn’t open enough. Generating a process for facilitation is very different than generating one for evaluation. With evaluation, you stick to a process to identify and measure desired outcomes; in facilitation, you must let go of the process and allow it to change, trusting that a vision of the future will emerge.
I was grateful for the director’s comment (and thanked him), because it allowed me to take off my evaluator hat and allow the future to take place instead of pushing and planning for it to do so. The moment in which I became aware of this I was able to hold the space for more generative listening, and I engaged participants in the active role of letting me know if the process was working for them. I checked in with participants and made many variations to our process throughout the day.
As the best meditation practices teach us, once you let go of the strong attempts to empty your mind, you may achieve that which you desire. Similarly, when I completely let go of my facilitation goal, not surprisingly, a conversation took place where we identified the image we so aspired to create.