RESPONSIBLE FACILITATION
Individual Empowerment Through Effective Group
Facilitation
Section One: The Inclusive Responsibility of a
Facilitator
Chapter 1: The Coming of the Age of Participation
“Modernism, which dates from the late 19th
century, is associated with mass production, uniformity and predictability;
post-modernism with flexibility, choice and personal responsibility.”
Michael
Prowse, “Post Modern Test for
Government.” Financial Times, April 21, 1992.
Before there was
facilitation there was participation. Participation is built into the DNA of
human community and human interaction. The authors of The Age of
Participation wrote in the introduction to their book in 1995:[i]
“Powerful shock waves are shaking human
institutions. The ancient Greeks felt the first tremors. The Renaissance and
the Enlightenment felt tremors too. Like tectonic plates, two views of
government have been grinding against each other for thousands of years….
Participation is emerging as a powerful alternative form of governance. Of
course, the idea is not new. Throughout history, humanity has been moving
toward increased participation. Athenian democracy in the fourth century B.C.,
the Magna Carta in thirteenth century Britain, the Declaration of the Rights of
Man in France, the Declaration of Independence in America, the United Nations
International Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 were all attempts to spread
national and community power, rights and responsibilities.”
If we are going to
understand the responsibility of a facilitator we have to begin with an
understanding of participation. The sub-title of The Age of Participation
is “New Governance for the Workplace and
the World.” Participation is about governance. However, what is governance?
Every human group
has governance. Whether it is a family, a community, a nation-state, or just a
group of friends trying to decide what to do on a Friday night—governance is
happening. Governance is about how people organize themselves to make decisions
and the process used to make those decisions. We organize ourselves because we
want our decisions to enable the group’s security, to be fair and to provide
for the common good of the community or nation-state. We call this governance
the Political Dynamic. Every group, organization, or family has a political
dynamic, we just do not usually think of it that way.
Some forty years
ago, the Institute of Cultural Affairs conducted a research project to enable
its concern for effective social change. We asked ourselves what is the social
process? What is the process that has to go on in every human community if that
community is going to survive and thrive? We said that this should be a
universal and history-long process. That is, it should be true for an Amazon
tribe as well as a modern nation-state like Germany or the United States. In
addition it should be true for the early civilization in the Nile Valley as
well as modern Egypt. The product of that research we called simply, The Social
Process.
Using the wisdom of
modern anthropology and sociology we found that every human community has three
dimensions. The first is foundational—that without which the community will not
survive—which is the economic dimension. The second is relational—how we
organize ourselves and all our relationships—which is the political dimension.
And the third has to do with meaning—what is significant, what are our values
and how do we communicate these—which is the cultural dimension.
Obviously when
thinking about participation we are focusing on the political process however
the last three centuries have seen each of these areas undergo a revolutionary
transformation which is significant for our understanding of the place of
participation and facilitation in the 21st Century.
The first of these
transformations occurred in the 18th Century and was a product of
the Age of Enlightenment. Emerging out of the Renaissance’s focus on this world rather than the heavenly realm
and the human in this world and accompanied by the Reformation’s declaration
that every human being is made in the image of God and its concern for the
individual’s relation to the divine emphasizing the equality of each person in
their relation to God, the philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment articulated
an understanding of the human community which placed sovereignty not in the
hands of a sovereign but in the hands of the governed. The political
revolutions that overtook les anciens régimes , starting in 1786 in
Philadelphia and in Paris in 1789, have continued to this day. These
revolutions inculcated the principle that
every human being has the right to participate in the decision-making processes
that are determining the destiny of his/her community. While we are still
working out the practical implications of this, what is important is that the
principle is now intrinsic and globally recognized.
The second
transformation was in the economic process and occurred in the 19th
Century. What we now call economics was invented in the middle of the 19th
Century by such men as Marx, Engels and others who analyzed the economic
dynamics in human society. The principle that was established is that every human being has the right to
participate in and secure the well-being of him/herself and his/her family.
Again we are still a long way from achieving this but the principle is there
and is universally recognized.
Finally, the 20th Century saw the Cultural
Revolution. In hindsight we have called the first years of the 20th
Century la belle époque. However it
came to a crashing end beginning in 1912 with the sinking of the unsinkable
Titanic and then in August 1914 Europe sank into what came to be called The
Great War—the war to end wars—eventually dragging the rest of the world into
it. By November 1918 regimes had fallen, long established dynasties and symbols
of power had collapsed and with millions of lives lost in what seemed to be a
senseless struggle: people’s confidence in the established order was profoundly
shaken. The peace that followed set the stage for the second great struggle of
the 20th Century. Only twenty years after the end of The Great War
the world again sank into conflict and the Nazis emerged, setting about using
modern industrial processes to attempt to eliminate a whole people and all
those who did not conform to their ideals. In 1945 in the skies of Japan, the
United States initiated the atomic age. For the first time in human history we
possessed the ability to annihilate a whole city with a single blast and we
quickly built enough of these weapons to destroy the planet. By mid-century our
faith in progress and the meaning of it all had been profoundly shaken. People
looked around them and saw glaring injustices that were built into the
structures of our society and the cultural norms that informed those
structures. Around the world people rose
up to demand control of their destiny and to participate fully in the community
of which they were part . The civil rights struggle in the United States
transformed the country’s culture. Around the world colonial empires fell and a
whole generation rose up against what they understood to be an unjust war in
Vietnam which denied a people the right to determine their destiny. Simone de
Beauvoir published The Second Sex in 1949 and Betty Friedan published The
Feminine Mystique in 1963 launching modern femininism. The world I was born
into in 1940 is a world gone forever. The last half of the 20th
century saw a Cultural Revolution sweep the world. Much of what has happened
and is happening in the world today is the working out of this Cultural
Revolution. I do not think we are yet sure what is the fundamental principle of
this revolution . However, I would want to suggest that it is something close
to; every human being has the right to
freely participate in and practice the cultural gifts and wisdom of all the
world’s communities.
Each of these
revolutions was a paradigm shift in human consciousness and together they have
delivered us into the 21st Century with a world view and
understanding where participation is of inordinate importance. However, it was
the Cultural Revolution that allowed us to see that participation is not simply
a political or legal right. Through the paradigm shift that occurred in the 20th
Century we have become conscious that participating in the decision making
processes that are determining our destiny, and the destiny of our
organizations and communities, is an aspect of what it means to be a human
being. We have come to see that if you are not free to determine your own
destiny then your humanity is lessened. I have written elsewhere:[ii]
This
is a universal principle that is fundamental to what it is to be a human being.
When this right is being denied to people, their humanity is diminished. It
matters not if it was in Philadelphia in 1776, the streets of Paris in 1789,
India in the 1930s, South Africa in the 1980s, Tiananmen Square in 1989, the
Soviet Empire of the early 1990s, Myanmar in the 2000s or the Middle East in
2011; people know that participating in creating their destiny is an essential
part of their humanity.
Perhaps it is clearer to us today than it has been to
past generations but people have always sensed that participating in
determining their destiny was an intrinstic part of their humanity. Plato’s Republic describes a form of goernment
that involves a degree of participation by members of the community concerned
with the well-being of their community. I do not believe that it was an
accident that a form of participatory government was conceived as an ideal by
one of the world’s first philosophers. In a certain sense the whole history of
humanity can be viewed as a journey toward greater and broader participation.
However the three great paradigm shifts in the last three centuries have
brought us to a unique time in the human journey. As we move into the 21st Century all three dimensions of the
social process are faced with an emerging paradigm that is putting
participation at the center of the human enterprise.
As communities developed
across the globe there were innumerable ways invented to determine who was in
authority. In some communities leadership and authority was invested in the
strongest person and authority was transferred when someone could defeat the
leader. In many communities authority was given to someone who could
demonstrate a special relationship with the gods. As communities became larger
and more complex there developed the need for a more stable mode of
transferring authority and so the concept of passing authority from one
generation to the next in the same familial line was instituted: sons, and the
occasional daughter, inherited authority. But to ensure that this was both
accepted and respected the holder of the office of leader was invested with
divine authority. Eventually this authority was invested in the office itself
so that when a person ascended to the throne they were identified as a god. It
was only in 1945 at the end of the Second World War that the Japanese Emperor
was officially divested of his divine status. In the West, with the arrival of
the Christian era, the idea of actually being divine had to be modified, and a
sovereignty associated with the divine, what eventually came to be called the
Divine Right of Kings, was established. The ruler was anointed by God and
invested with his/her authority by God. Their power was absolute and they were
accountable only to God. They were sovereign on this earth. In the movie, Kingdom of Heaven the arrival of the
Christian army is announced by a leader of the Muslim army saying, “Jerusalem
has come.” Not the Christians are here but “Jerusalem has come” meaning the
sovereign King of Jerusalem, who was the state, has arrived. In another scene
when the King is confronting a rebellious nobleman he says, “I am Jerusalem.”
And of course Louis XIV is infamous for reportedly saying “Je suis France.” It
was understood that to oppose the King was to disrupt the natural order of the
universe—it was to rebel against God and God’s established order. When the
English beheaded a King in the 17th Century and the French did the
same in the 18th Century it shook the very foundations of the
established universe. In Shakespeare’s King Richard II the king faced with a
rebellion articulates his belief that he who is anointed by God will be
protected by God:
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
For every man that Bolingbroke hath
press'd
For the philosophers
of the Age of Enlightenment to proclaim that sovereignty resided in the governed
and not in those who were doing the governing was to undo thousands of years of
conventional wisdom and a carefully constructed system of governance. Since the
revolutions of the late 18th Century we have been working out how the
sovereignty of the governed could best be implemented and who should
participate in the process.
However, we continue
to invest authority in the office so that when a person assumes an office they
are invested with the authority that accompanies that office. In addition we continue
to structure our organizations in a hierarchical form. In the 16th
and 17th Century Dutch and English entrepreneurs had to find a way
for various people to invest their money in a common venture. The Dutch East
India Company was created in 1600 to trade with India and what became Indonesia
and the English (British) East India Company, created in 1602, actually ruled
much of India until their control was ceded to the British government. The
organizational form of these companies was founded on what was familiar to the
men involved; that is, a hierarchical form of governance similar to that under
which they lived. This organizational form became the norm and was codified
into our legal system. If you are establishing an organization you will be given
a set of guidelines for establishing the statues of the organization. Those
guidelines will call for a hierarchical organizational form of governance. The
problem with this is that the paradigm shifts of the last three hundred years
have undermined the understanding of authority and organizational form embodied
in these statues. Dee Hock writes in Birth of the Chaordic Age:[iii]
from which it emerged and on which
its health and existence depend.”
A hierarchical
organization is a command and control organization that invests all authority
in the person occupying the office at the top of the hierarchy. The hierarchy
exists to funnel information upward and decisions downward so that they can be
implemented. I remember reading about a faltering corporation where a manager
in a plant wanting to change working procedures would have to send his requests
through something like seventeen layers of bureaucracy in order to get a
decision from the top of the hierarchy and then wait while the same seventeen
layers relayed the decision back to him. With the arrival of information
technology this system began to collapse for three reasons. The first reason
was simply the amount of information that was available. It quickly became
impossible for one person to deal with all the information that computer
systems could generate. The second reason was the speed with which information
could be made available. Rather than getting information that was dealing with
events that took place a month or more ago computers could give people real
time information about what was happening as it happened. The third reason was
that this information could be made available to the people who were actually
responsible for responding to the information. They did not have to wait for
the person at the top to review the information and make decisions based on the
information.
However the greater
problem with the hierarchical organization was what had happened in the Cultural
Revolution regarding authority. Whereas we used to understand that authority
was invested in a position and the person occupying that position was empowered
to wield that authority, a new image of how authority was invested emerged as
the Cultural Revolution developed. We no longer believed that because someone
had been put into a particular position he was automatically invested with the
authority accompanying that position. We came to understand that it was our
decision that would determine whether we accepted that person wielding the
authority of his position and the basis of our decision was our assessment of a
person’s authenticity. A few years ago a book entitled, Why Should Anyone
Want to be Led by You?: What it Takes to be an Authentic Leader was
published. The authors’ assessment was that the basic factor in getting people
to follow you as a leader was authenticity and not that you had taken a
position at the top of the hierarchical pyramid:[i]
“….the contemporary focus on authenticity. It is a reaction
to the turbulence and change of modern life. Work and family institutions seem
under threat. Recent geopolitical events have dramatically and tragically
reinforced this sense of turbulence. As rates of change increase, individuals
are ever more motivated to search for constancy and meaning. We’ve become
increasingly suspicious of a world dominated by the mere role player.”
Whether in the
economic, political or cultural sphere, we no longer automatically cede control
of our future to someone sitting at the top of an organizational pyramid; and
so those structures of our society that are hierarchically organized continue
to malfunction. In 2002 the following was published in The Financial Times:
“The acceleration of organizational
change is captured in a recent study at the University of Oxford of top 50 UK
companies from early 1991 to 2000. In
the early 1990s, about 20 per cent of these companies were undergoing major
reorganizations every year, yet by the end of the period the rate of
reorganization was well over 30 per cent.
The average big business today can expect major reorganization every
three years. Microsoft has gone through
the process four times in the past five years.”…. Restructuring Roulette,
by Richard Whittington, Michael Mayer and Anne Smith. In the Mastering Leadership series, The Financial Times, November 8 2002.
Of course the
problem is not going to be solved by repeated reorganizations. The problem is
what Dee Hock points to in the quote I mentioned earlier. The hierarchical, command
and control organization was invented in a social environment that no longer
exists in our world and without that environment it will increasingly
malfunction and people will increasingly find it a dehumanizing place to spend
their lives. We live in a time where survey after survey indicates that people
have lost faith in both public and private institutions.
The quote at the
beginning points to the contradiction inherent in our time.
Modernism, which dates from the late 19th
century, is associated with mass production, uniformity and predictability;
post-modernism with flexibility, choice and personal responsibility.” Michael
Prowse, “Post Modern Test for Government.” Financial Times, April 21, 1992.
In the 21st
Century organizations and institutions in all dimensions of society will have
to be flexible in responding to the
ever changing economic and social environment in which we live. Whether they
are public, private or a non-governmental organization only the quick footed
will survive. Rosabeth Moss Kanter wrote in the foreword to Winning Through
Participation:[ii]
“In today’s fast-paced world of constant change and
pressure for responsiveness, all organizations must dance to new rhythms. And so the Giants are finally waking up and
learning to dance…One of the most important dance steps they are learning is to
involve their people in problem-solving and planning.”
Part of today’s
reality is that people have choices.
A dimension of the cultural revolution is that we all live in an urban world no
matter where we actually physically live. A fundamental factor in this urban
world is that we are faced with a multitude of choices about every dimension of
our lives. People growing up in today’s world expect to be able to choose and
decide for themselves what they will do, how they will do it and when they will
do it. When they show up in an organization or institution they expect to have
the same freedom of choice or at least to be consulted before decisions are
made.
Finally we come to personal responsibility. In today’s
social environment people expect to be consulted about things. In the
traditional hierarchical organization responsibility meant being willing to do
what you were told to do. However, today people want to be involved in
determining the future of the organization or community they are part of. They
are no longer willing to blindly follow or accept dictates from on high. In a
recording I had of a Bruce Springsteen concert he introduces the song, Born in the USA, by saying, “…blind
faith in a leader will get you killed.” About a hundred and twenty thousand
people responded to that with a roar of applause.
Flexibility, choice
and personal responsibility all involve participation. The post-modern world of
the 21st Century is truly the age of participation. I believe that
before the end of this century we will have invented a new form of organization
in all dimensions of society and fundamental to this new organizational form
will be a structure that enables full and effective participation from all its
members.
[i] Goffee, Robert; Jones, Gareth. Why
Should Anyone be Led by You?, Harvard Business School Press, 2006.
[ii] Spencer, Laura J. Winning
through Participation, Kendall/Hunt Publishing, 1989.
[i] McLagan, Patricia & Nel,
Christo, The Age of Participation. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1995.
[ii] Campbell, James. Foreword, Bending
History, Societal Reformulation—Toward a New Social Vehicle. Resurgence
Publishing. 2011.
[iii] Hock, Dee. Birth of the
Chaordic Age, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. 1999.
