FACILITATION | CHANGE | DISSENT MANAGEMENT
Overcoming resistance: Strategies for dealing with dissent in facilitation
(from observation to acknowledgment)
Here is what I took from Daniel Goleman: Emotions do exist. We shouldn’t ignore them. Even less should we try to suppress them, pretend they don’t matter, or wait for them to magically disappear.
Instead, our goal must be to acknowledge them. Allow them to exist. Nurture them, maintain them, atone them — lest they escalate up to the point of getting out of proportion and risking to hurt someone.
The Roman and the early Christian church called it temperantia, temperance, the restraining of emotional excess. The goal is balance, not emotional suppression: every feeling has its value and significance.
Daniel Goleman in Emotional Intelligence (1995)
I’m a facilitator. Why should I care?
How is that relevant for us, facilitators? We are not psychologists and there is no need for us to be. Why should we care about emotions now? Don’t we have enough on our plate as it is?
Like a mill calms down impetuous water, a facilitator tempers emotions
Well, as we speak, and even if this may change before long :), the sessions that we facilitate are gatherings of human beings. And humans have emotions. In some cases our emotions are forces for the good — but more often than not we have to deal with emotions that pull us down.
This is fairly normal — as most of the work that we are called upon to do, is about delicate themes and even more delicate interactions:
- We facilitate change, sometimes dramatic change: “Which of the processes that we have painfully built over the years, with sweat and tears, should we now drop in order to make room for new ways of work?”
- Even if we should avoid zero-sum situations, we sometimes play a role in tradeoff decisions, leaving part of a population happy at the cost of an unhappy lot on the other side: “Thank you all for putting forward a couple of proposals each. They were all brilliant! Unfortunately this semester we only have a budget left to implement one proposal”
- We are involved in solutions that decidedly affect the life of many people: “We need to make redundant 10% of the organization’s headcount. Let’s agree on the criteria to decide who will be affected and who won’t”
- We set up structures to come up with nonobvious answers: “What new product can we develop that can win over our competition?”
- We make space for deeply intimate and painful topics: “What policies should this hospital and its workers implement to support patients who are terminally ill?”
We are all doing the right things!
Meetings often start with the best foot forward: the facilitator has done a lot of prep work. Not just the textbook 3 times as long as what the workshop is expected to last — but six or ten times as much.
In the best case, a facilitator arrives at the venue or in the call well ahead of time — enough to spend fifteen-or-so minutes practicing mindfulness and preparing to be fully grounded & receptive to how people will arrive.
All participants have been diligent and have done their pre-reading. One can clearly see that from how they talk about the topic to be covered. They have not waited for the call to think about the subject matter for the first time. They have opinions, they have done research.
Everything is sliding super smoothly.
And then, bang. The eerie green glow of dissent takes over the screen — and drapes the meeting table in discomfort.
It is said that:
A meeting without conflict could have been an email. A webinar. Maybe a short exchange on Slack.
I tend to agree, with a but.
Conflict, which is perceived by its enacters as a battle leaving winners and losers, is never a wholesome way to go forward.
Dissent, on the other hand, is an almost necessary component of any decisional process.
Creating space for dissent is the way diversity gets valued in the world. (…) It honors the Bohr maxim that for every great idea, the opposite idea is also true.
Peter Block in Community: The Structure of Belonging (2008)
In facilitation work, the problem is not that dissent is present but that it remains unexpressed.
What matters is whether conversations are healthy or unhealthy, whether the facilitator has a conflict at hand (which is bad) or an expression of dissent (which is a gift).
Are we discussing ideas or values? Are we focusing internally on people, or externally on facts?
Regardless of whether there is a conflict or a mere exchange of the gift of dissent, emotions are likely to get triggered: fear, frustration, insecurity, jealousy, discomfort. All these and more will cross the minds of people who see their ideas challenged, torn to pieces, overcome by smarter ideas or just ideas expressed better.
I’m just a facilitator, what can I do?
The first thing to do is to observe with intent. This is why so many Kishotenketsu facilitation workshops focus on our agency of observation.
But observation is not enough. We have to notice.
Here is what we tend to do:
■ antipattern 1 — blind
Very often we are so focused on making the meeting run smoothly according to our pre-defined schedule like only the best Swiss clockwork would be able to, that we altogether forget the human component. We stop looking at people and focus on timers and agenda items and Mural boards.
■ antipattern 2 — busy
And very often we focus on content too. Even if, in principle, content matter is not a matter to be managed by the facilitator.
■ antipattern 3 — ignore
The temptation is very often to just ignore what’s going hoping that it will disappear. Or we are afraid to be seen as oversensitive and too much focusing on the human component. Or we are concerned to be losing precious time in a session that is so packed with things to do that every second is super precious.
■ antipattern 4 — fix
Or we may try to fix things. Many facilitators introduce humor in the hope that the mood is lifted, but at best achieve a brief moment of distraction. Or we try to address the matter.
When we think we have to answer people’s doubts and defend ourselves, (or let others defend themselves), then the space for dissent closes down. When people have doubts and we attempt to answer them, we are colluding with their reluctance to be accountable for their own future.
All we have to do with the doubts of others is get interested in them.Peter Block in Community: The Structure of Belonging (2008)
□ the working pattern
The pattern that does help is incredibly simple — which doesn’t mean it’s easy. Having observed with intent, and having noticed, the facilitator shows interest.
Just pause and simply reflect back on participants the process we are observing. Questions are best. Do not wait for answers.
- I notice that the language we are adopting is veering toward being passive-aggressive. Do we consider that being a helfpul way to achieve our outcomes?
- We have started interrupting each other. Would it be worth reviewing our team alliance before we move forward?
- I believe some of us has not had a chance to share their perspective yet. Should we make room to collect everyone’s input?
But also, with tact and being extremely careful not to make someone feel singled out:
- It seems like the conversation has become quite heated. I suggest that we take a five-minute break to allow everyone to decompress.
- I think the latest comments have passed the mark of what’s a civilized conversation. Should we talk about what’s happening?
So what?
More often than not, unnoticed and unnamed dissent has the propensity to blow out of proportion.
The elephant in the room tends to be a burden that weighs on everybody’s shoulders. The moment we call it out, it’s fairly typical to obtain a reaction of relief, like our mind said “ok, it’s bad, but nowhere near as much as I feared!”
It’s the same principle that doctors adopt when they need to tell the patient a piece of bad news. No words left intentionally vague, no silences charged with unlabeled emotions: just call the things as they are, and give them an understandable name. When medical professionals do this, they operate in a space of ratio knowing that they will need to leave as much space as they can for the emotions that they will trigger. And then they wait, and let the person process what they are feeling. They let them go through their grief cycle without interrupting them, without consoling them. Allowing them to just be and feel.
Acknowledging openly that a working group has lost clarity of focus can be incredibly cathartic. First of all because it makes everyone in the room feel heard. “Surely it must be obvious that I’m upset/sad/offended” thinks everyone, and yet no one says it out loud. And that thought grows inside like a silent cancer.
The weight, the cancer, the insecurities, they all operate at a level of our brain that inhibits rational thinking. Just like our ancestors who entered in purely instinctive fight or flight mode when feeling under threat, so are we, “modern humans” incapable of having a rational conversation when we are upset/sad/offended.
First, we need to normalize our emotions. We do that by acknowledging them — merely as a fact that just happened. It could have not happened but it did. Ok, so what? Find the nonintrusive way to restore order in our brains. Let the negativity flow out so that we can make space to accept new ideas to flow in.
This is the role of the facilitator:
to facilitate the many flows that fill and empty our minds making sure that no emotional flood destroys them
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Thank you for reading!
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