Last week I had the pleasure of attending a Facilitative Leadership training offered by the Interaction Institute for Social Change (IISC). I took away a fantastic set of insights and processes to use in the various workshops and trainings I do, in addition to better coaching, listening, facilitation and leadership skills. The two-day training hosted a group of about 15 people at the IISC office in Boston. The goals were to build our ability to engage the colleagues and communities we work with as partners in creating the change we all want to make. I wanted to share some of my thoughts about the training and its connection to our work here. If this stuff sounds relevant you should attend their training because it was great!
They began with grounding the work with a model that values results, process, and relationships equally. This challenged me, since I often leave process as an unspoken output. I’m a results person by training; the engineering disciplines I was taught don’t generally focus on process or relationships (to their fault). Luckily my education work & community have set me straight since then! This component was really helpful for me, to highlight and name some of the things I’ve done or seen but didn’t have a language for talking about.
We explored their “Systems Approach Iceberg” which they’ve set up to help identify the appropriate point to intervene in a system to create the change you want. In this framework an “event” triggers the situation, but you can dig down to identify the patterns, structures, mental models, etc that underlie the event. The idea is that if you name those concretely, you are better positioned to pick an action that can help create the change. Basically it is all about picking the right leverage point. Like many other things in the training, this connected with our work here on building tools to help people engage in their communities to create change.
I particularly appreciated the “maximum appropriate engagement” chart they introduced us to. The idea is that in any social process you need to analyze the stakeholders goals’, and then based on that decide the best way to engage them. Sometimes consulting and then making a leadership decision is far more appropriate than a consensus-driven approach. Sometimes you just need to decide and let everyone know. The idea that you need to identify the appropriate way to engage, and the process of stakeholder goal identification to help you do that, was super helpful for me.
Connected to that question of engagement, they introduced and let us practice one approach for building consensus in a group. However, they didn’t tease apart the blurry lines between these options for engagement. I would have enjoyed seeing more examples of techniques across the spectrum of engagement, but I understand the classic facilitation paradox of breadth vs. depth here. For instance, in our Data Mural workshops we need to build consensus around a story to tell with the data at hand. To do this we push some of the narrowing process into breakout groups, letting them cluster brainstorm ideas into themes that they then bring back to the group. This subtle variation makes the group agreement process easier because there are fewer items to work with, but still lets individuals feel heard, acknowledged, and engaged.
We spent a good chunk of the time on meeting preparation and agenda work. This wasn’t directly relevant to me because I’m in a lucky situation where I don’t have many meetings right now. However, the reminder to build agendas by focusing on audiences, goals, and desired outcomes is super helpful for all the workshop planning I’ve been doing. Teasing apart participant goals is consistently hard, but sometimes the obvious idea of asking them directly in advance works surprisingly well! Forcing yourself to write these things down is super important, becuase otherwise I find we forget to do it.
Another major topic I learned a lot from was the exercises they did around listening. I’ve been introduced to the fundamentals of coaching before, but hadn’t had an opportunity to practice or develop those skills. I had a blast the super-fun activity they did where we paired up and each person got to pretend to be the worst possible listener they could imagine. I was laughing too hard to finish it! Of course, that was following by a longer active listening practice session, so the insights paid off.
Not surprisingly, IISC is connected already to our work here in a variety of ways. For one, their president Ceasar McDowell is a Professor at MIT’s DUSP progam. We worked with him on the 21 Days of Questions campaign here in Cambridge (using our Vojo.co platform). At a higher level, they are concerned with the same questions of civic engagement that we are, and focus on capacity building in the organizations trying to make social change in their communities
IISC have a well-developed curriculum and book that support this training, fleshing out far more than we covered in the two day training. Our excellent trainers Jenn and Maanav focused on a number of the areas and led participatory exercises that let us practice techniques. Big thanks to them for leading such a great training!