Facilitation as Stewarding Emergence - Part 1
As a friend was facilitating in our last dojo, I sensed we were getting longer and longer grace periods added to our timeboxes. Through a quick check-in, we discussed what prompts a facilitator to be overly cautious with timeboxes. It’s a common fear - fear of shutting down “good” conversations, fear of interrupting, fear of disappointing participants who may miss out or not get to contribute, etc. What struck me as a participant was that we needed the timebox in that moment to enable emergence for us.
I’m defining “emergence” in this context as "the properties or outcomes of a convening group that cannot be predicted or created in advance”. Our dojo had never come together as a dojo before. While all of us work together and often closely, we have not had this intentional, focused space of learning, sharing, and being with each other. Our high level of safety as a group was still there, but the outcomes we might arrive at, how we would interact, and our expectations of each other were all yet to be determined. We needed something that would remove the obstacles to all of those constructs emerging.
Did I mention we’re a bunch of agile coaches? We’re not the easiest to facilitate. We like to talk, we like to listen, we like to connect and explore and be curious. We like to find all the ways to obstruct emergence for ourselves as a group because we find so much joy in the emergence we can facilitate for others. Timeboxes, consequently, become a very useful technique for enabling emergence in our group. It offers us the opportunity to get out of our own way - to allow a rabbit hole to remain unexplored, to allow a passing curiosity to fade in favor of what’s available in the present moment, to connect with what’s possible next.
I encouraged my friend to be confident in her timeboxes. They are a tool for stewarding emergence, which is what we needed from our facilitator in that moment. If one of us was cut off mid-sentence, if one of us was left in suspense in hearing only half a story, if one of us felt anxious or rushed at the proposition of stopping now… It was all okay. We needed a facilitator who would be attentive to what was emerging toward our goal. It was through this interaction that my “Aha!” moment occurred. I know facilitation is bringing a group to a sum greater than its parts, but this was a deepening of that understanding - a felt experience of facilitation as stewarding emergence.
Having the night to digest the experience, I started to extrapolate the concept into common obstructions and common enablers of emergence. So far, I’ve come up with inequity, homogeny, and quiet as obstructions, and disruption, diversity, and connection as enablers. I’ve got some more thinking to do on those, so look for a post on that coming soon.