Who needs facilitators?

While there’s been a flurry of posts on the Australasian Facilitators’ Network list about the processes used at last weekend’s 2020 summit (where 1000 of Australia’s ‘best and brightest’ - not my words - gathered in Canberra to discuss 10 topics with a Chair and co-Chair for each topic and an array of facilitators) there’s been disquiet, and some downright fury, at the quality of facilitation at the summit. 

An article in today’s Australian newspaper talks about concerns that some voices were not heard, others misrepresented, and outcomes pre-determined at worst or manipulated by the Chairs at best.Hard to know if these claims are true. But it does raise an opportunity to explore just what the role of the facilitator is/was/should be in such a situation. Here’s what’s clear so far: 1000 people sat through an opening and plenary sessions at the beginning of each day and at the end where the big ideas were revealed from each stream. At other times they were in their ’streams’ groups of 100 - seems different facilitation processes were used with each stream (based on images from television reports). I saw processes where people came to a podium and talked for a short time about their ideas. I saw people sitting in rows; I saw people sitting in small groups; I saw some graphic facilitations; and I saw people writing on flip charts.

Fellow facilitators who knew about the call for facilitators to help with the summit said the brief was broad and vague (aren’t they all?) and none of them was selected. Seems it was a process of ‘who you know’.

I’ve heard first-hand comments like: “The facilitator in our stream wanted agreement before they would write anything up. They wouldn’t allow us to disagree and have different points of view.”

I’ve heard via the media that what people said was rewritten in the scribe/facilitator’s words to a point where the person couldn’t recognise their own words or ideas.

If true, this is not good facilitation and any facilitator worth their salt knows it too - and wouldn’t do it. No matter what the stakes or what the pressures. So it raises the questions about who was facilitating and whether they had any facilitation skills at all. It raises a more important question about the image of facilitation and facilitators.

Good facilitation is transformational – enabling individuals to work together for growth, development and change. And facilitation is no longer an added extra – the skills, the understandings and the personal awareness that accompanies good facilitation can be a part of everyone’s professional kit bag. Facilitation requires us to believe in the wisdom of individuals and groups and their capacity to resolve, build, challenge, shape and grow. But all this doesn’t always come naturally, especially if we are used to being in control. We have to learn some of the basic practices of facilitation and, most importantly, learn how to GET OUT OF THE WAY.

Taking chances

Anne Pattillo and I have started a new business together. It’s called Facilitating with Confidence and we have a web site. I haven’t linked to it because there’s been a few stumbles in getting it up. This experience of adding to our already existing individual businesses with a new joint venture is exciting, nerve wracking, frustrating, risky and plain exhausting. Why are we doing it then? Neither of us need the business per se, but we like working together, and we reckon we work together well, each complementing the other. And it’s fun to create something new.

We’ll have a significant on-line component - which means we’ve had to learn a whole stack of new skills. This is good. Well, it is for me. I’m reminded of the Curse of Knowledge in Chip and Dan Heath’s book Made to Stick. It’s easy to become too comfortable with what we know. It’s humbling to start afresh - learning new skills. It’s a reminder of what it’s like to be learning something new.

Patti Digh mentioned something like this at last year’s improv conference in Banff too. She used the metaphor of having climbed to the top of a mountain and then encouraging others to come on up. From the top, the journey looks easy; from the bottom, or even part-way, the journey may look daunting. This is a good thing to remember when training others. It’s a good thing for me to remember. It’s relevant to our new business.

I was just chatting to my friend Andrea who is now living in San Antonio, Texas. Andrea knows more about how groups work and the roles people take on in groups than I can ever hope to know - and yet she patiently and with great good humour walks beside me on my journey as I try and learn. She quite correctly guessed that our new faciltation training would be full of improvisation, and creativity, and humour, and innovation. We hope so too! We want to invite people like Andrea to be a part of the on-line world of Facilitating with Confidence.

So if you too cross your fingers and we keep working behind the scenes, soon, real soon you’ll be able to visit and find out what it’s all about. Stay tuned!

Words into action

I’ve been pondering this question for a while and would like your thoughts. Here’s some scenarios:

#1: There’s a lot of commentry around regarding the forthcoming 2020 Summit and how the ideas will translate into action

#2: Comment heard on the radio: ‘It’s all very well to talk, but what are we going to do about it?’

#3: Recent workshop designed to provide information and dialogue - frustration that no specific follow-up actions emerged.

My question is:What is the value of talk?My thoughts are that there isn’t enough talk. Talk and conversation and discussion and dialogue simply to explore and wander through ideas, taste them, throw them around, spark new ideas, keep the synapses active, and inspire. The need to come up with actions, next steps etc seems to devalue talk - that talking isn’t inherently valuable, but a means to an end.

And I guess inherent in this is responsibility. Actions etc tend to default to what ’someone else needs to do about it’. Isn’t it enough to have an interesting conversation that translates into new personal knowledge, maybe understanding, that may, or may not, translate into action. After all, we are who we are because of all the influences built up over our lives. Isn’t personal responsibility enough?

Life’s retrospective

Today we visited the Sidney Nolan exhibition at the Potter Gallery in Melbourne.

While looking at this great artist’s work across a lifetime and seeing, as one does in a retrospective, the changes, developments and influences manifest in his art, I reflected what a gift this is. And wondered if it’s possible for us mere mortals who bumble our way through life to have access to a similar retrospective. I’ve always admired people who can keep journals for this very reason - the story of their lives recorded and available for reflection. I’ve relied on my (unreliable) memory and a few artefacts to track my life’s journey. Now I suspect that blogging and twitter may provide a window through which we may glimpse our lives (and the lives of others) and that which influences us.

Conversations that Create

This is really exciting! Last year I attended the Applied Improv Conference which was hosted by the Banff Leadership Centre, and took part in a pre-conference workshop delivered by Colin Funk and others of the Banff Leadership Lab. It was sensational and the major influence for me to focus more on the role of creativity. Now they are coming to Australia!  It’s going to be creative and fun and thought provoking and challenging and inspirational. Interested? Be quick - it’s limited to 30 people. The dates are May 7 - 9 in Sydney. Click here for more information conversations-that-create.pdf

Improv for Small Business

At a small business networking meeting I introduced the principles of improv theatre. It became clear to me that improv, and other creativity activities, enables us to make the subconscious conscious.

Here are the key points from the workshop:

• Successful businesses are agile and creative

• Improvising means combining your existing skills and knowledge with the resources at hand and an immediate need for something to happen

• When things don’t go to plan we may need to improvise

• Improvisation is a skill anyone can learn and is governed by a series of rules

• Useful improv principles for small business include:

Accept offers: say “Yes! And…”

Be present: attentive, alert, curious

Do something: act, start anywhere

Be average: excel by not trying too hard

Make mistakes: take risks

Let go: be open, not attached, to the outcome

• Using the principles of improv enables you to be more spontaneous

• Being spontaneous enables you to be open to new ideas, creativity and innovation

And what small business wouldn’t want that?

Changing habits

Sir Ken Robinson in this podcast - that ranges from the role of education and creativity, weddings in Las Vegas and creativity with the Singapore Government to what it’s like to be knighted - says that ‘habit is the enemy of creativity’.Here’s the relevant quote from the podcast:

Okay, well if you want to boil it down in two minutes, it’s about two things; it’s about habits and habitats. I mean by habit, the routines that we follow during the course of our daily life, the more we do the same thing everyday, the more we think the same way. So, one of the ways of unleashing your creative capacity is to do different things, stimulate your imagination, do things you wouldn’t normally do. If you never go to an Opera, go to one. If there are some books you have never read, go and read them. If there are people in your building you have never spoken to, go and speak to them. If you go the same way to work everyday, go some other way.

Open your mind to new possibilities and new experiences and do things you haven’t done before, because often, being creative is finding a new medium of expression for yourselves, and the people who achieve most I think have found their medium, they are in their element, and they love the thing they do. So, open yourself out to new experiences and question the things you take for granted, so change habits.

Secondly, it’s habitats. Really the environment we live in, the environments we work in, the way we configure the desks, the buildings, who we relate to, has a huge effect on how we think and how well we think. Redesigning your office space, redesigning the physical relationships between you and other people can have a huge liberating effect on your whole creative capacity. 

I’ve changed my habitat - now to work on those habits.