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.