Fault lines and facilitation June 10, 2009

This morning I’m still ruminating on the fault lines running underneath the surface of the group that I’ve been facilitating.  Funny that this weekend I was thinking, “I love my job!” and now I’m thinking, “My job causes me a lot of stress!”

Yesterday morning on my bike ride to work I decided that to honour the humanizing impulse I had to address the tensions I was feeling directly, and not to smooth them over and ignore them. I started the day with a check-in, and I started the check-in by addressing my goal to serve a humanizing impulse in all my actions, and to do that I think it requires addressing group tensions – but that by bringing them up, there’s also a danger of doing damage. And indeed: my approach helped some and alienated others. So, I continue to manage fallout, and continue to ruminate.

How do you learn from a ‘learning moment’? This is the same challenge I skirted around when I was asked that by another group I facilitated, because as much as I can say, ‘reflect!’ and ‘connect!’, ultimately that’s unsatisfying. There are no strategies or tools to whip out. It takes having sensitive feelers and then being skillful, and there are so few role models out there of soft and skillful handling of conflict – I have so seldom seen that in action – that we all have to make it up as we go along, and just… get better at it, I hope.

“Fail. Fail again. Fail better.”

The only other thought I have is that I don’t have a good distraction today to get me off ruminating about the group situation. Happily, I have a break from facilitating until Monday. And as I was riding my bike to work today, I realized that to best serve the humanizing impulse right now I need to take care of myself. So I stopped for a bagel and lemonade, even though I’m going to be a little late to a meeting. I’m almost done sipping my lemonade.

Being true to the work & group conflict June 8, 2009

I’m still chewing on the events of the day. I facilitated the first day of a new program. Interesting, thoughtful small group of participants, not without some internal stresses and tensions. A good challenge for me, but not 100% pleasant.

I’ve been thinking this evening about how to negotiate the tensions so that we don’t just glide over them, acknowledging them in private asides but ignoring them in the group. I am rather conflict-averse, so I get stressed out when I’m responsible for leading a group through tension that has the potential to erupt into full-blown conflict. But that’s my job, in this case, so I’ve been thinking about how to do that.

I don’t have the answer yet — maybe it will float to me through sleep, or maybe it will seem clearer after I’ve slept, since I certainly could use a solid night of rest — but just as I was brushing my teeth and readying for bed I started wondering, “What would I do if I followed a humanizing impulse in the moment of tension in the group?” And I don’t quite know what I would do, but I know that I would not ignore it. The move to humanize that moment would involve welcoming in the discomfort and the conflict because that’s a part of the human experience, and it is definitely a part of this group’s experience, and to deny that shuts down the full humanity of the group. Which is sad, but especially so when the purpose of the group is tied to humanizing education (though that isn’t the language we’re using).

I want to do that, be true to the humanizing impulse, but also do it softly, skillfully, so that no one is damaged in the process. That’s the scary challenge: that I might not be skillful enough to navigate the group through discomfort without creating damage. But it’s my job.