What does a facilitator do?

In my last post, I mentioned some of the benefits of facilitation. In this post, I will offer a brief "inside look" at what kinds of things that a facilitator should be thinking about and paying attention to while they are working for you.

When designing an agenda, a facilitator considers:

• Issues, conflicts, feelings in the community.
• What the group has tried before.
• Skill level of the group. Sometimes the group can benefit from sharpening their skills.
• Methods that the group is used to using. Sometimes the group can benefit from learning new methods.
• Where the group is in their overall process. Are they a new group? Experience?
• What the group needs to accomplish.
• How much time they have to meet.
• The ebb and flow of energy levels throughout the meeting.
• The ebb and flow of “divergence” and “convergence” throughout the meeting. Ideally, you want to end on convergence.
• The ebb and flow of “process” and “action.” Each meeting has its own ideal balance.
• Accounting for all of the learning styles—feelers, observers, thinkers, and doers.
• Planning to make space for all voices are heard—especially minority voices.

Just to give you an idea of the variety of meeting formats that can be used, I will mention a few below. The facilitator should be competent in using a variety of styles:

• Go-rounds
• Large group processes
• Small group processes
• Dyad processes
  
• Brainstorming
• Card storming
• Prioritizing
• Voting (there are many kinds of voting)
• Consensus (there are different versions of this as well)
• Problem solving processes (again, there a several)
• Sharing circles
• Fishbowls
• Kinetic mapping
• Guided meditation
• Role play
  
• And also a variety of openings, transfer-ins, “light and livelies,” closings

Before the meeting, the facilitator needs to attend to the physical space:

• Privacy, interruptions, noise
• Set up, furniture, energetics, sight lines, wall space
• Easels, flip charts, tape, pens, any props or supplies needed for exercises
• Writing up agenda, groundrules, instructions, etc. on flip charts and hand outs
• Make sure that the notetaker, scribe, greeter, timekeeper, coffeemaker, presenter, heart-keeper, etc. roles are filled
• Make sure the comfort factors are handled (food, drink, bathrooms, temperature, accessibility)

During the meeting, the facilitator needs to:

• Lead the opening
• Lead the transfer-in
• Review the agenda
• Explain the activities
• Provide instruction (training is a whole other skill set, but one that the facilitator should have)

And then the meat and potatoes of the facilitation itself:

• Contact statements (“getting” where each person is at, so that they know they are heard, and the group gets it too)
• Summaries
• Weaving (connecting individual statements to each other)
• Groping (if it is not clear what is being said)
• Delegating
• Conflict management

While keeping the following mindsets:

• Invite the whole person (including intuition, emotion, heat, body—not just mind)
• Be “content neutral”—not have a stake in the particular outcome
• Find the common ground
• Be everyone’s ally
• Remember: it’s not about you
• Know what you don’t know
• Model an eagerness for new information, be curious
• Admit your mistakes and be open to feedback and where you are at your own learning edge
• Service—always be in the question: “what does the group most need in this moment?” and then do that

Of course the whole time the facilitator should be tracking:

• Where are we in the agenda?
• How much time do we have left?
• What is going on with each person?
• What is going on with the whole group?
• How can this increase the groups capacity to work together?
• What is coming “around the bend”—what is this interaction going to lead to?
• Is everyone participating equally?
• Are the minority voices being heard?
• Are all the learning styles getting their needs met at some point?
• Are both the “process” and the “action” people getting their needs met?

Scribing is also a very important component of meetings:

• agendas
• brainstorming
• note-taking
• parking lots
• graphics to highlight, weave, etc.
• non-verbal representation
• group recording and reporting back

And finally, the facilitator should be holding three levels of the group's process:

• the current interaction
• the ebb and flow of the meeting
• the place of the meeting in the greater process--especially, what skills can the group be learning now, that will help it down the line?

Hopefully these lists will give you some idea of the kinds of things that go on inside a facilitator's head, and what you are paying for.

Reflections on Intentional Communities

I had two opportunities to interact with intentional communities last month; one as an observer and one as a participant.

I am taking a second round of facilitation training for communities, this time with Laird Schaub, who originated the two-year program. (Regular readers may remember that I did seven sessions with Tree Bressen in 2006 and 2007.) We had our second weekend together, and I am totally hooked on the high of being with 18 other people who are just as passionate about facilitating in communities as I am. I am also really amazed at all of the community-oriented activities that are happening in Asheville, NC.

Over the course of this, I got to observe a cohousing meeting. They were discussing what they could do with a plot of garden to grow more of their own food. First we had them visualize the garden five years down the road. Then they spent a long time brainstorming, and we had two scribes noting everything down. They were a pretty savvy group, and ended up covering all of the bases that a permaculture consultant would have addressed. I know this because DH and I recently had permaculture consultants develop a plan for our yard.

As the brainstorming wore on, I found myself thinking "why don't they just hire an expert and be done with it?" Which is not like me, as I have a high tolerance for brainstorming-type of activities. But 45 minutes pushed even my limits. However, I thought about a basic principle of organizational communication that I learned years ago: participation = buy in. The ideas they generated were their ideas, not somebody else's, who was telling them what to do.

The next part of the meeting was very lively. Our scribes cut up all of the flip chart pages so that each idea was on its own strip. Then we spread them all out, face up, on the floor. In the next 14 minutes, the cohousers put them into clusters. They moved the strips around, looked at what they had done, discussed, argued, negotiated, and moved them again. Then the facilitator had them review each cluster one more time, and come up with a label for that cluster. This exercise is called "snow cards" or "blizzard" because all of the white pieces of paper blanket the floor or wall like snow.

Now the clusters were manageable, and the group figured out where they would start, and who would shepherd the process until they figured out exactly how it would continue. The whole thing took three hours, and they were very satisfied with the work they got done. And how much fun they had.

Meanwhile, I was at the back of the room scribbling notes about the structures the group had and processes they were using to make this kind of decision. Another principle of organizational communication is that structures influence behavior. However, most people don't think about this when they are frustrated with the way somebody is acting. They usually attribute it to a deficit in that person. So it can be very useful to look at the structures and processes, and make sure they are aligned with the organizations purpose, values, and assumptions.

What I have learned from Laird and Tree and Diana Leaf Christian is that there are some very specific recommendations they make for intentional communities, gleaned from their years of experience living in and facilitating them. And as they haven't published their books on this topic yet (ahem!) I am creating my own process maps. Ultimately I am hoping that we can create an open source library of these maps that communities use, so that they can diagnose problems and don't have to reinvent the wheel.

I'll talk about my other adventures next time.

PS. Happy New Year!

transitioning to a new paradigm business

If you ask my husband what he does, he'll tell you he "drives nails." But what this really means is that he is a subcontractor for new home construction, doing production work. Or he did that until recently. Last year, there was a sharp drop in new homes being built. He went from running five to six crews down to one full-time in-house crew plus one part time crew he subbed out. But now he can't keep one crew busy. He was getting homeowner contracts, because people realized that they couldn't move, so they would upgrade their existing home. But now, nobody is spending any money on anything. We have only so much money left to cover payroll, and then, we have to call it quits. It's heartwrenching. His guys have been with him for decades. They are family.

Fortunately, he saw the writing on the wall a long time ago, and has been searching for a new line of business for the past year. And it was a relief, in a way, because it hurt his heart to work in such an unsustainable business. In fact, he started the "turnkey" model of subcontracting, because he couldn't stand to see all the waste that was produced when the builders bought the materials and just hired the labor. Turnkey Decks, Inc. was born.

Then one night, while listening to Coast to Coast, he heard David Blume speak about distilling alcohol for fuel. Suddenly the lightbulb went off. If this model could work, it could answer all of his needs. He could disconnect from "the system" and become not only energy independent, but contribute to his own food production as well. Blume is a permaculturist, so his model is completely integrated, with no "waste products" at all--only streams to fuel other processes. In fact, alcohol is not the "cash crop"--it is the byproducts and what are derived from them, that is what is sold.

So today, we had a big powwow with his crew. Our dear friends, DF-F and DF-J, hosted the event. (DF-J is also on the crew.) We brought donuts, and watched 2.5 hours of video. After having pizza for lunch, we talked. I "scribed," to use facilitator's jargon, using a modified version of the Dynamic Facilitation process. I took down all of the pictures of DF-F's family on one wall, and put up six flipchart sheets. Each one had its own heading:

• data
• problem statements
• solutions
• concerns
• questions/research
• action items

As the conversation went on, I scribed the content, sorting each one onto each flipchart, and adding sheets as we needed. Scribing is a particular skill all to itself, but I happen to be very good at it, in part because I am a "kinetic" processor. It actually helps me to listen to do things like write on flipcharts, which can be handy for the group.

Having the record of the conversation up on the wall for all to see helps the group be conscious of what has been said already, which has many benefits. One is, nobody has to repeat themselves--they are secure that their input has been captured. Another is, they can build on what has been said--answering questions, coming up with solutions, etc. The "wisdom of the group" is not only captured, but affirmed, for all to see, which generates confidence and even more contribution.

On a side note, I have found that the category of "concerns" is one of the most important to include. Just having the blank sheet on the wall "opens space" for people to speak about their concerns, which is incredibly important in group process to avoid "groupthink" and running into problems later that were not addressed because people did not feel comfortable bringing them forward.

Besides the "questions/research" and "action items" categories that I mentioned above, I have also found it useful to add the "decisions made" category in some situations. In our situation, we hadn't agreed to be a decision making body yet, so I felt that was premature.

In our meeting today, I witnessed new possibilities being born. We have a long way to go in terms of finding out whether we can pull an "energy farm" off--we need to do a lot of due diligence before we find out if it is even worth investing in--but there was a lot of hope in the room.

I'll keep you posted.

19 months later: Back in the saddle

Hi everyone,

After a 19-month sabbatical, I am rejoining the blogosphere. I look forward to discovering the new faces and voices in the green- and communities- arenas. I'm guessing that there will be more than I can keep up with, but I will make a stab at it!

I think back to the day of my last post with a lot of emotion. We were disappointed by the turnout at our StepItUp event--Obama decided to have a rally at Georgia Tech the same day, and 20,000 people showed up for it! Even our own organizers snuck off to participate in that historic event. Now, of course, I wish I was one of them.

How far we have come since then. On so many levels. The Atlanta Beyond Oil Meetup Group, which sometimes only had three people at the meetings "back in the day," is now very popular. JoJo has done a fabulous job of hosting the meetings at his beautiful home. The last time I was there, he showed me where he was expanding the garden. It was inspiring.

I feel like there has be a shift in consciousness... not only at the political level, but also in my own circle of friends and aquaintences. People understand the importance of sustainability. There certainly has been one in myself.

I have spent the last several years learning how to facilitate in communities, because I believe that this is where I can make the greatest contribution--creating an environment that supports people in having the conversations about the issues that challenge their communities. I believe that change is going to happen in communities, not only because relocalizing makes sense, but because human beings are community-oriented beings, and working at this level will satisfy a fundamental need.

I have been exploring forms of facilitation and meeting design that I believe are cutting edge, and embody the values and principles that I hold dear--maximum freedom, maximum choice, self-organization, respect, inclusion of the emotions and the intuition, right and left brains, as well as all learning styles, and trusting the wisdom of the group.

On the home front, we put in a garden this summer, and hired Isabel and Bob from Georgia Permaculture to walk our land and give us a plan for developing it using permaculture principles. DH has been studying David Blume's work about distilling alcohol for fuel, and we are hoping to start program, either on our acerage, or nearby.

So I will slowly be revising the links on the blog to reflect my new pursuits, and sharing what I learn along the way. I also see that Blogger has some new features, so I might be incorporating those as well.

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to connecting!