Facilitating Groups utilizing Emergent Strategy Principles
I read a lot of books about facilitation - I’m clearly a lot of fun at parties! Lots of times, these books say some variation of the same set of principles and guidelines. I usually find myself skimming these texts, or skipping straight to the tools/practices the authors offer, without needing to spend time rooting myself in the author’s approach. But adrienne maree brown’s Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation has stopped me in my tracks a bit. I’ve not only begun to incorporate its principles into my own facilitation practice, I’m also actively proselytizing about it to anyone I know who facilitates meetings.
At Elevate, we have the pleasure of working with many different groups working toward changing the systemic conditions that are creating and reinforcing marginalization and injustice. We do this in a number of spaces, from early childhood to homelessness to workforce development, and in every situation, we’re challenged by the complexity of the systems, the scope of the challenges, and the nuances of the relationships of the people in the room. These spaces require us to be not only skilled facilitators but also constant learners and scholars of the ways in which systems change can actually be brought about.
Holding Change is part of adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy Series, and is a practical application of the concepts articulated in Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. If you’re someone who works in Collective Impact or other collaborative spaces, I believe these texts should be required reading. Both Emergent Strategy and Holding Change pushed me outside of what I thought I knew about building community, facilitating groups, and working for systemic changes towards justice, but Holding Change in particular has more to say about specific, tangible practices for those of us in facilitation roles. It’s organized into a few key sections:
Assessments (be still, my evaluator heart!) to:
Understand group culture, efficiency, and effectiveness,
Explore your own facilitation approach, and
Engage in learning with co-facilitators about their approach to facilitation and how they show up;
Writings from Black feminist leaders (facilitators themselves) who have inspired amb’s work; and
Thoughts, principles, and tactics for facilitating and mediating, utilizing concepts of emergent strategy.
I know I’ve said it already, but reading this book has truly started to transform the way I show up as a facilitator. Some of the concepts and practices in my book were things that I was doing (either intentionally or unintentionally), but many of them made explicit what I already knew to be true (in my facilitator bones). Here were my key takeaways from Holding Change, in my own words, combined with some of my own lessons learned in my years of facilitating groups.
Trust is the most crucial element for change. If you’ve been in a collaborative space with me before, you’ve likely heard me talk about the importance of trusting relationships - we know that change only happens at the speed of relationships, and relationships only grow at the speed of trust. As a facilitator, learning how to trust yourself, how to trust the group to know where the work needs to go, and how to cultivate and encourage trust-building among group participants - these things are absolutely essential. Holding Change provides practical strategies for assessing, building, and repairing trust.
Small things matter. One of amb’s key principles of emergent strategy is the relationship between the small and the large. She says, “small is good, small is all, the large is a reflection of the small.” Creating trust happens as a result of consistent, small promises that are kept. Building a healthy culture happens as a result of small, intentional actions aligned with a set of shared values. Building momentum and energy in a group happens when you’re able to celebrate small wins and victories. It’s often easy for us to “shoot for the stars” - to focus on big visions, big strategies, and things that feel like they “matter” - and forget to keep our eye on the small things that truly create change. It’s the facilitator’s job to ensure that these small things are identified, intentionally implemented, and celebrated.
Sometimes you have to break the rules and go where the energy is. One of my earliest memories of starting Elevate alongside Hannah and Jessica is of the three of us facilitating a meeting. We had a clear agenda, with timings and talking points and slides and graphics (we’re nothing if not prepared!). Towards the middle of the meeting, however, I noticed we were running over time on certain conversations and decided to go where the group was having energy. My decision to pivot mid-meeting caused some communication challenges amongst myself and my co-facilitators (and gives us something to laugh about now), but the instinct to let the conversation be flexible, non-linear, and iterative is an important one to lean into as a facilitator. The work being done is always the right work.
We must find a way to lean into our shared humanity. Throughout Holding Change, it’s clear that one of the critical elements of transformative facilitation is the facilitator’s ability to recognize and embody their own humanity (with humility), and to encourage participants to recognize and embody their own. Many practices and exercises are focused on building empathy and connection, about identifying our motivations and challenging them into the work, and even about acknowledging the humanity in “problem” participants as we consider how to better invite them into the work. amb instructs us to “Celebrate each other’s lives in the room. Sing ‘Happy Birthday,’ look at baby pictures, applaud the graduations and divorces, invite the whole person in.”
I have to say - I’m early in my journey in embracing concepts and principles of Emergent Strategy. White dominant culture (particularly our academic training, and the scads of corporate-focused books written on strategy and “leading teams”) focuses on structured, linear ways of planning and visioning, and often encourage us to detach our ‘self’ from the messy, emotional, and deeply human work of coming together with other people to create change. I’m actively working to unlearn some of those practices myself and learn new ways of operating from teachers and leaders like amb and others. Cultivating awareness of and embodying this emergent approach to strategy and facilitation, one that embraces connectedness, humanity, humility, iteration, and transformation, is a path that I’ll continue to walk, but I can already see how groups with which I work respond positively to the ways I’ve begun to change how I show up as a facilitator (to be in more alignment with these principles). I hope you’ll join me on the journey, and I look forward to hearing about it.