Employing Differences

"If my goal is to change somebody else's behavior, I'm very unlikely to be successful. But if my goal is to make the relationship better and to change what I can change about what's going on with me, and how I'm engaging, and how I'm sharing in various ways; the likelihood that their behavior will change actually goes up."

Karen & Paul discuss one of the paradoxes of relational work.

"We can never really know what's going on with the other person. We're almost always guessing at them. And the question is whether or not the guesses we're making are helpful or not. Does it feel certain? Does it feel like I have absolved myself of any responsibility of needing to do anything different? Does it seem like this guess is always true, has always been true, will never change, and makes it feel like I have no options? If that's the case, then it's probably not as helpful to you in terms of changing what's going on."

Paul & Karen talk about more and less useful assumptions we can make about other people's circumstances and intentions.

"The place I want to start is recognizing, 'What's my pattern?' Do I always start with a question? Do I always start by saying, 'What do you think we should do?' Or do I always start with, 'Here's what I think we should do.'? If you're always doing the same thing – and by always, I mean nine times out of ten – then you're probably not choosing the thing that's useful for the situation."

Karen & Paul discuss collaborative problem-solving and whether to start with questions or statements.

"One of the most important things that you can have as a group is an understanding of how you want to repair things when things go wrong, because things always will. We can talk about how we want to work together. We can talk about what we want things to be like. And we know that those things are aspirational. Something will go wrong at some point along the line."

Paul  & Karen talk about recovery and repair when things between us go wrong.

"An actual written document or policy or proposal is a concrete thing that I can say yes or no to. I can say, 'I like this part, I don't like that part.' And it requires a fair amount of editing – of making it crisp and clear – so that we are actually talking about the same thing. Because when you get documents that are super vague and super weird, then we all imagine that there are different things in there than there actually are."

Karen & Paul discuss the necessities and challenges of preparing proposals for a group to consider.

"How do you do something other than just the tag team approach? For me, that's really all about designing the partnership. If we're going to partner on facilitating this meeting, what does that look like? And one way that that partnership can be structured is we're going to take turns. But that's not the only choice that we have."

Paul  & Karen discuss the benefits and challenges of co-facilitating. 

"Asking about how bad it is can help us to notice when we're digging in our heels in a situation where the conflict that we're going to need to go through to get to our 'better solution' isn't going to be worth it."

Karen & Paul discuss assessing, weighing, and judging the costs of various decisions.

"When people ask, 'Well, what's the best way to make a decision?' is where we fall into the realm of 'best practice.' And the thing is that there's very little actual best practice when it comes to humans working together, because of the complexities of things like this. A good practice in a particular situation is not necessarily going to be a good practice in another situation."

Karen & Paul discuss how knowing where to go from here requires understanding where "here" really is.

"There's a lot of different channels for sharing information that we often overlook when we're working in a group. We sometimes think that talking about things is the only way we can get information out there. In our experiences, there are a lot of other, richer ways that we have access to. And then it's up to us as facilitators to notice when might it be useful to do some of those things." 

Paul  & Karen share some of their favorite techniques for helping information flow without needing to use words.

"There are a number of ways that you can use fishbowls, but they all have that element in common of creating a shared experience for the larger group around a topic of some import and some relevance."  

Karen & Paul discuss the varied uses of one of their favorite facilitation tools.

The Cooperative Culture Handbook, which contains the Bridging Circle exercise, is available at www.ic.org/handbook

"When I started using dyads and triads and groups of four or five within larger facilitated sessions, it was a game changer for me. I saw the quality of participation, the quality of the ideas, and the decisions the groups were making change pretty dramatically."

Paul  & Karen talk about the advantages of using small groups inside large meetings.

"There are a lot of really useful things you can do with periods of time as short as 30 seconds or a minute – or as long as half an hour or more – of being together without speaking in that space."

Karen & Paul talk about the value of silent time in group meetings.

"If somebody showed up sobbing and saying, 'I'm having a horrible day,' we would probably shower care upon them. I want to encourage that same thing when they're showing up as loud and angry. The same neediness is actually being expressed. It's easier to do it when someone is weepy and sad and not lashing out, but it's the same problem."

Paul  & Karen talk about how creating a rule is rarely a helpful response to people getting upset.

"If you don't hold things in confidence, you break trust. But if you're not transparent, you also break trust. So how do we navigate this where we want to be in trusting communities, trusting environments, trusting workplaces, and some things need to be confidential and some things need to be transparent?"

Karen & Paul discuss how both confidentiality and transparency can improve or hinder the flow of information.

"There's a famous quote from Yogi Berra, who may or may not have actually said it: 'If you don't know where you're going, you might end up somewhere else.'"

Paul  & Karen talk about the importance of defining the thing that we want and thinking about what's going to get us there.  

"So, if my coworker comes in in that state – or someone in community or whatever – if that person is in front of me, and I would desperately love to fix everything for them, but I can't, how do I live with that? 

Karen & Paul discuss strategies for working through feeling helpless.

"What they're usually looking for is the recipe or the magic words. 'What's the thing that I can say that will change the way that this group operates so that we stop having this problem?'  And unfortunately, there are no magic words. There is no magic recipe for addressing these kinds of things. But there are some patterns that we have noticed. So here are some things that we tend to do when we start to work with groups around these sorts of things that can help in these situations."

Paul  & Karen talk about different approaches to shifting group dynamics.

"When we find ourselves in conflict – when we find ourselves frustrated with each other – those are indications that we should be asking, 'Are we trying to do the same thing?'"

Karen & Paul discuss how shared purpose is the core of any team or partnership.

 "When we're in the moment, and the person does this thing, we lose access to our emotional skills and our ability to work together. How can we calm ourselves down so that we can get back access to that, so that we can show up as the more skillful versions of ourselves? How can we engage with the other person to help them show up as a more skillful version of themselves?"

Paul  & Karen talk about interrupting our own tendency to get emotionally hijacked and using that to shift unproductive interactions.