Neutrality

Our approach to consulting is collaborative in nature and requires facilitation of meetings and design sessions at various points in the engagement. Out of the 1960's the mantra for facilitators was neutral servant of the group. In order to allow all ideas a place at the table, it was important for the facilitator to be neutral, certainly with respect to the possible solutions, but also with respect to the general areas of subject matter as well. To hold a position meant unfairly swaying the group in one direction. Because a facilitator steers process, it is unfair of them to use the process as a tool to also promote an agenda.

Nice in theory.

In practice, it's hard for a facilitator to be neutral and in many cases it may be detrimental to the group and its progress towards a solution. A seasoned facilitator has seen hundreds, perhaps thousands of groups working at similar challenges. This accumulation of experience yields an acumen that has a place--a verbal place--in many sessions. Indeed, it may be that in the 1990's we entered into the era of the facilitator-consultant who brings deep knowledge of group process and knowledge of solutions sets to common problems as well. Or at least brings frameworks of knowledge that can be applied to specific challenges. The facilitator still has an ethical obligation to avoid malicious manipulation of the group, but an equally ethical obligation to not let the group stumble in the dark when he or she could shed some light on the path.

Here's an example from last week. Our facilitation team was working with a group of non-for-profit organizations who were all members of a national coalition. They were trying to decide on a broader purpose for the coalition: a mission and some overarching goals. Our team was facilitating the session. At one point Michael and I had a discussion in the back of the room about whether to intervene. It seemed that the group really had two missions instead of one. The mission for the first idea supported an existing initiative that had a 20+ year history and was coming out of adolescence into adulthood. To move further and increase scale, it needed to standardize some aspects of service delivery and training and build infrastructure. The mission for the second idea supported a nascent initiative just in its infancy as a collective idea for the members to work on. The first second idea is much more idealistic, much broader in scope and possible impact and much more complex to undertake. The first idea is simpler in scope and application but will have a much smaller impact. The group naturally was pulled between these two ideas, trying to meld them into one.

The situation and its solution sound simple as I explain it now, but at the time most of us were pretty perplexed. Michael generated a little sketch in the back of the room and showed it to me. It depicted the two ideas in serial fashion over time with idea one ramping to scale and then feeding resources into idea two. He wanted to introduce it to the group. I balked, not wanting to unduly influence the group's direction. I had made a few interventions earlier in the day, both of which influenced the type of solutions the group was generating (not just the process they were using to come up with the solutions). As we talked about it further I made a slight amendment to his sketch to show s-curves of the two ideas and how at this time one idea was in early adulthood and the other was an infant and so they needed to be treated separately. The adult needed some of the mundane things that help businesses consolidate their position and grow market share. The infant needed lots of visioning and little experiments to learn just how to grab the problem and understand it. This conversation took place very near the end of the session.

One of the participants then asked whether any of us on the team had any insights to bring to bear and Michael and I both took the models to the front of the room. I sketched it out and Michael talked it through. It changed everything and led to an incredible insight among the participants and relieved a great deal of stress at the same time.

The whole issue can sound trite the way I've written it but it's an important tenet of our practice. I used to have a dictionary that had two definitions for the word facilitate. One definition was "to make easy" and the other definition was "to make smooth." The first definition is the most common but I prefer the second. At first glance there doesn't seem to be much difference. But the road up to the summit of Pikes Peak is smooth, but walking it isn't easy. Most of the challenges that groups are trying to solve are difficult and to water them down to make them easy defeats the purpose of facilitation. However, to design an event so that the pathway through it is smooth is quite a different thing. For a facilitator to take the paternalistic approach and solve problems for the participants defeats the purpose of the session--to allow the collaborative solution to emerge naturally through the interaction of the participants with one another along this smooth pathway.

Hence the creative tension between employing the skills of a facilitator and the skills of a consultant and the question of neutrality.

Perspective

On our bookshelf at home we have a copy of Perspective and Freehand Drawing, a high school or college textbook printed in 1919. I was sitting in a chair in the family room and happened to catch the title while scanning the books. It's a book for architects. The first part teaches how to use grids and guidelines to sketch ornamental designs. The second part teaches one point and two point perspective. As I leafed through the book I thought about The Blind Men and the Elephant.

Naturally.

The story came to the West in a poem by John Godfrey Saxe and also has a Buddhist version (the version highlighted above is a Jain version). I'll copy the Buddhist version here.

A number of disciples went to the Buddha and said, "Sir, there are living here in Savatthi many wandering hermits and scholars who indulge in constant dispute, some saying that the world is infinite and eternal and others that it is finite and not eternal, some saying that the soul dies with the body and others that it lives on forever, and so forth. What, Sir, would you say concerning them?"

The Buddha answered, "Once upon a time there was a certain raja who called to his servant and said, 'Come, good fellow, go and gather together in one place all the men of Savatthi who were born blind... and show them an elephant.' 'Very good, sire,' replied the servant, and he did as he was told. He said to the blind men assembled there, 'Here is an elephant,' and to one man he presented the head of the elephant, to another its ears, to another a tusk, to another the trunk, the foot, back, tail, and tuft of the tail, saying to each one that that was the elephant.

"When the blind men had felt the elephant, the raja went to each of them and said to each, 'Well, blind man, have you seen the elephant? Tell me, what sort of thing is an elephant?'

"Thereupon the men who were presented with the head answered, 'Sire, an elephant is like a pot.' And the men who had observed the ear replied, 'An elephant is like a winnowing basket.' Those who had been presented with a tusk said it was a ploughshare. Those who knew only the trunk said it was a plough; others said the body was a grainery; the foot, a pillar; the back, a mortar; the tail, a pestle, the tuft of the tail, a brush.

"Then they began to quarrel, shouting, 'Yes it is!' 'No, it is not!' 'An elephant is not that!' 'Yes, it's like that!' and so on, till they came to blows over the matter.

"Brethren, the raja was delighted with the scene.

"Just so are these preachers and scholars holding various views blind and unseeing.... In their ignorance they are by nature quarrelsome, wrangling, and disputatious, each maintaining reality is thus and thus."

Then the Exalted One rendered this meaning by uttering this verse of uplift,

O how they cling and wrangle, some who claim
For preacher and monk the honored name!
For, quarreling, each to his view they cling.
Such folk see only one side of a thing.

Somewhere in primary education I learned Saxe's poem by heart and assumed for years that every other child in America did the same. So on the few occasions that I've used the parable when facilitating collaborative sessions I've been surprised that few of the participants had ever heard of it.

The story goes to the heart of the challenge of collaboration. Human beings are limited in their perception by the range of their senses and by the mechanics of their brains. Our eyes take in only a narrow bandwidth of the electromagnetic spectrum but they process volumes more data than our ears hear or our skin feels or our noses smell. We build tools to extend our ability to perceive the world, like scanning electron microscopes and infrared cameras. But to compound the issue, our brain tends to discard most of the information that arrives on its doorstep. In fact, we take in only a tiny bit of information until the brain can say, "oh, yeah, that's my bedroom" and then the brain fills in the rest of the information. So we tend to not even see what's before us. This phenomenon has been made famous by the experiments of the Visual Cognition Lab.

So we're limited concerning what information we can take in and we discard most of that in favor of seeing what we believe to be there anyway.

The story only gets worse when it comes to solving complex social problems. And a meeting or collaborative session, regardless of its stated objectives or purposes is really only an exercise in solving a complex social problem. Despite how much data or facts are gathered, presented, manipulated or modeled, the politics and social agendas--usually hidden--predominate. If you can work through the social issues, then there's a chance that some of the facts will become relevant. But remember that "facts" are part of our perception problem--we have a limited and conditioned ability to perceive reality.

This leads me back to the elephant. Often facilitators use the expression "what's the elephant in the room" to refer to some huge problem that everyone knows about but no one is talking about. Making the elephant visible and giving everyone permission to talk about it is one of the keys to solving the social problem. The problem with this problem takes me back to the blind men. Even though there's an elephant in the room, and everyone has permission to talk about it, not everyone is perceiving the same elephant. Unfortunately, they may be using the same words to talk about it but the words have different definitions.

How can this dilemma be resolved? First, people need to gain some idea that they're each looking at the same thing but seeing it differently. This is where I like the blind men and the elephant as a parable. Next, we like to suggest to people that it's not the people who are in conflict with one another but rather their models that are in conflict. If people can separate themselves and their egos from their models, they can more easily solve the problem because they can migrate to other perspectives. And this is the key: migrate to other perspectives. If the facilitator or consultant can aid the participants to change perspectives, there's a chance for success.

Years ago one of the popular exercises in collaborative events was role playing. Participants would trade roles and act out their new parts in a simulation of some sort. So managers would play sales people and vise versa to try to get some understanding of what it's like to live in the other person's shoes. The activity is artificial but can be effective.

The next stage up was to add a realistic context to the role playing, so gaming or simulation was added. This is more effective because there are external control stimuli that the players must respond to. In other words, they can't just make up the theater and play the role, but they have to take input, manipulate it under constraints and then judge the output. Simulations, when properly prepared, are much more effective tools to get people to see other perspectives. But they're expensive to set up.

If you have a group that's amenable to meditation techniques, these can be quite effective because each individual separates him or herself from the point of view they have been holding. Our personal views of the elephant tend to define ourselves to ourselves. We believe that if we yield our point of view, that's losing and that makes us a loser. So to even suggest that we should trade points of view can be anathema. But if we can understand that the point of view and the feelings about that point of view can be separate from our Self--if we can detach ourselves from them--then we can deal a little more dispassionately with the elephant.

We also describe several ways in which model conflict can be resolved, and we let everyone know that all of these outcomes are legitimate. We also try to get the group to work through possible outcomes in each scenario. Here are the scenarios in order from least compassionate and creative to most compassionate and creative.

Two models are in conflict: A and B. How might the situation be resolved?

• No resolution. Each party takes their model and goes home. Or they bloody each other into a stalemate. They agree that the problem remains a problem to be resolved at some later time. So long as they agree to this or are both too fatigued from the battle, it's a legitimate outcome.
• War. A defeats B or B defeats A. It's also a legitimate outcome if one party bullies the other party into submission. Sorry folks, but this is the way parts of our world works. Acknowledge it.
• Concession. A wins or B wins. The other model is discarded. So long as both parties agree, this is also a legitimate outcome.
• Compromise. Take half of A and half of B and put them together to create a solution. Each party agrees to discard the remainder of their solution. In this case, neither party can entirely let go of their egos, so it's a common way for things to be resolved in the West. But it's far from ideal.
  
• Soup. Take a part of A, a part of B, and a part of C that you invent together. This approach is getting somewhere. The parties actually work together to create something new in order to make the cobbling together of their two models. When collaboration happens in the real world, much of it looks like this. You really can't just put the two models together--usually they require some glue or filling inbetween them.
  
• The Third Way. Hold both A and B in thought in dynamic tension--accept them both as true--until a third solution emerges that may be completely independent of either A or B. In an experiment, researchers put a monkey and a banana in a room with two ways to get to the banana. The researchers wanted to see which way the monkey would choose. The monkey found a third way.
  

Here's how these resolutions stack up in a sequel to The Blind Men and the Elephant.

• No resolution. The blind men can't agree about anything and either fight over their ideas or stalk away. Note that they are ignoring any further exploration of the elephant...
• War. The blind man who thinks the elephant is like a wall pummels the man who thinks the elephant is like a snake until he caves in. Now we all believe that elephants are walls. This is called progress...
• Concession. The man who believes that elephants are like ropes is persuaded by the man who thinks elephants are walls. Walls, after all are such impressive things and besides, it's time for tea.
• Compromise. The guys get together and build a wall with a snake attached to it (combining their two models) and proclaim it the science of elephantism. Now we're enlightened...
• Soup. After looking at the science of elephantism a bit more they agree that there is some space between the snake and the wall, and something of a difficulty in attaching the snake without killing it. So they model something between the snake and the wall and maybe come up with something that looks like a head.
• The Third Way. They all trade places, examine the elephant again, step back and realize the limitations of their metaphors, ride the elephant in motion and after much deliberation, discard their old ideas for a more complex, but more accurate living systems model.
  

So back finally to perspective in drawing. You may be familiar with one, two and three point perspective. The one, two and three refer to the number of vanishing points on the drawing. But in a real drawing, the shadows, sloping roof lines, and so on each have their own vanishing points. A real drawing may have a dozen or more vanishing points and all of them are necessary for the final image to emerge yet none of them alone are sufficient to depict the complete model.