backseat facilitators are sometimes my favorite people

the more i move through the world, the more i value my facilitation training. in the last three years i’ve been trained by the interaction institute as a facilitator in many different ways. i’ve attended two facilitation trainings (facilitative leadership for social change & the masterful trainer) in addition to being context trained. most of the context training was through working with my amazing director, danielle coates-connor, but there have been moments where watching a situation and then debriefing it with a group of skilled facilitators has added to my facilitation capacity as well.

i’ve taken on a facilitative role in several contexts since leaving the institute. it continues to astound me how critical those skills have been to moving through the world effectively. the skills are even more important when trying to help groups of people make progress.

one thing that i’ve started to notice that i took for granted was the value of backseat facilitation.

now, in some, maybe most, contexts (like driving, lol), having a backseat contributor can be annoying or even undermining. in facilitation, having a backseat facilitator is amazing. sometimes, they’re even my favorite people in a meeting.

because the role of a facilitator is to help the group move forward, the more eyes analyzing the situation the better. as the facilitator at the front of the room, you can only see so much. a participant who is watching the situation from another vantage point is great. and then if that person is also trained with methods and tools to help the group move forward, sometimes they can make a skilled intervention that the lead facilitator wouldn’t have ever made. and sometimes, an effective intervention made by a skilled facilitator is the best way to keep a meeting on track.

anyway, three cheers for the backseat facilitators!

problem finding, not just problem solving

one of the guests on a recent obsessed with design surfaced a really good question. the guest was stephan ango, co-founder of lumi, and his thought-provoking question went something like this.

design is really good at problem solving. we teach designers to understand a context and constraints, and then they design (create) solutions.

so we (design schools and the design profession) teach students to be designers and to solve problems, but why don’t we teach problem finding? in fact, in many studio/project classes we teach students to redesign chairs and toasters (over and over and over), but that leaves the nagging question… do we really need a better chair?

now, from an episode of on being (which i can’t quite recall), i remember a woman talking about how and why we create. and, like she said, i believe that a fundamental part of human nature is to make things better, more beautiful than necessary, and in increasingly efficient ways.

but that said, design teaches and heralds people who are great problems solvers (think the eames’ and the eames chair)… but the problems those people solve don’t necessarily need solving. ango wonders why we don’t teach people to be better problem finders, and not just problem solvers. it’s easy to remake chairs over and over again. 

why not ask bigger, harder questions, and see what design has to offer? sure, it may not “solve” the worlds greatest problems, but it’s sure to net the world more positive than making another goddamn chair.

in a parallel way (i think), academia does the same thing. in the process of writing my thesis, i was forced to narrow my topic so much that the question i ended up researching almost wasn’t even worth answering. this is a common phenomenon (ask anyone who has gone to graduate school where an output was a paper). and, in the scheme of my program, my thesis constraints were very liberal.

the phd process is that same problem narrowing process, but to the nth degree. the process creates people who are experts about a very specific slice of the world. often it’s debatable (as several of my current phd earning friends will attest) if their work and research is or will ever be meaningful.

so how do we train people to be better problem solvers and problem finders?

some of the best things about religions aren't religious

i think this is the last thought that has lingered with me from alain de botton’s interview on on being. 

in his book, religion for atheists, he describes his own pathway through and around religion. he grew up in an staunchly secular household and was therefore never really exposed to religious spaces. but over time, he began to notice that despite his secularity, he really enjoyed some parts of religious contexts. he gave examples like collective rituals and incredible architecture. this inspired him to dig, from a research standpoint, into the history of those things that he enjoyed.

what he discovered was the religions tend to absorb things from the culture in which they are situated. in fact, in his opinion, some of the best parts (ideas, practices, rituals) of religions were incorporated into religious practices from non-religious people.

this sort of blew my mind even though conceptually it’s not that strange of an idea. all groups are situated in a context. in a very natural way, being relevant is important and about survival. if part of your job is to make sure other people have access to the thing (religion) you think is so great, you’ll do what it takes to share it. and that means maybe adopting some of the practices of your local culture in order to get people in the door.

alain says he goes in detail on this in his book, but even without reading it i understand his thought that one of the reasons many people find solace in religion, in spite of their own acknowledged dislike of the religion itself, is that the things they like aren’t actually religious at their root. they have been framed as religious practices, but they’re really not.

i’m not quite sure of the implications of this, but it’s definitely a cool thing to know and think about.

america: a nation founded on genocide and trauma that is afraid to acknowledge death and grief

back in july, i listened to the pauline boss episode of on being. i can’t remember exactly what she studies but below is a paraphrase of a comment she made:

we [america] are a nation founded on trauma and genocide. of course we don’t want to and are afraid societally to acknowledge death and grief. if we did, it would never end because it’s baked into every institution we have.

to be honest, i’m struggling to remember the exact context of what she was discussing, but it had something to do with the myth of closure. what i do remember is how true i thought her statement was.

i’ve specifically been thinking about this in the context of police. in america, so many people respect and trust in the police. however, the roots of the police are racist as fuck. the roots of the modern police forces we have today are people (often poor, white, and immigrant) that rich white people paid to “enforce order” among slaves, free black people, and people who agitated against the wage-labor systems enmeshed in slavery and indentured servanthood. this strategy (as is often employed by rich people) gave poor white people a stake in the systemic status quo. even though the extractive labor systems of slavery were bad for them and they should have been aligned with people trying to change the system, the police forces gave them incentive (jobs) to keep things as they were.

but we don’t talk about that. we talk about guns and police brutality and black-on-black crime (which isn’t real) body cameras and “good cops” and reforming police.

what we really need to do is re-imagine how communities stay safe. safety is almost definitely not possible when one community pays another to protect it from a third community. even if people don’t understand the roots of the system, the effects of its foundation reverberate throughout it. for a while i didn’t understand why people (especially some black lives matter activists) were calling for an end to police. i get it now.

if we stopped to truly acknowledge and move productively through the death and grief caused by our systems, we could no longer avoid the question “where is all this death coming from?” if we looked at the roots of almost all of our systems, we would be forced to face the fact that this whole thing is based on genocide and trauma (eradication of the native american people who were here first, slavery, farm labor, factory labor related to clothing and technology production, etc).

hm.

open question on internalized oppression

what do you do when someone who has internalized oppression says something that is oppressive to their own group? 

last week i was talking to a friend (woman) who called her boss a bitch. now, i fully believe that gendered derogatory terms are sexist and never to be used. had my friend identified as a man, i would have had no problem calling out that behavior. however, given that this friend was a woman (member of oppressed group) and i am man (member of oppressor group), i really wasn’t sure what to do. can someone in an oppressor group address oppression in the corresponding oppressed group?

this situation has presented itself a number of times. a different friend called her boyfriend a pussy because of his low work ethic. a third friend, who identifies as half-black (but still black), told me i was unqualified for something because i was a dark-skinned nigger.

how does one intervene in those moments?