Rhizome, Oxfam, and the power of facilitation
Here’s a guest post from Naveed Chaudhri, Activism Team Leader, Oxfam Campaigns:
Oxfam is planning to pilot a new annual campaigning event, and we recently decided to ask our activist network for help in working out what it could look like. Staff had already been through a rigorous innovation process, and we wanted to consult on the initial outcomes. But we didn’t think our ideas were strong enough, and were looking to their grassroots campaigning expertise forto add a bit of inspiration.
We provided a really challenging brief for Emily and Maria, our Rhizome facilitators, for a one-day creative workshop, held in October. Inevitably, our internal priorities and plans stopped us from being objective; working with Emily and Maria freed the process from the straitjacket of our organisational thinking. Understanding that our very specific needs from the day could easily hamper people’s creativity, we basically briefed them to manage us! Ceding control allowed the three Oxfam staff members present to observe ideas as they emerged, and participate in discussions, without limiting the productivity of thoughts and conversations (this definitely wasn’t a focus group!).
What resulted was a very sophisticated piece of facilitation, controlling (not a comfortable word!) the space and the energy in it to generate the kinds of outcomes we had hoped for, opening up possibilities by stimulating “left brain” thinking, before helping the group sort, evaluate, and then develop its ideas.
This word “control”. Anyone who regularly facilitates groups has at hand a range of more or less powerful techniques to guide processes, manage interactions, and help groups achieve tasks, whether operating in fairly open spaces, or to more predetermined briefs, as here. In my own facilitation life, I’m interested in the power of relinquishing control to others, collaboratively exploring things like notions of identity, and releasing motivation through story telling (this learning document, co-written with Richard Watts from the everyone foundation, sets out a few of my preoccupations!). But a power relationship inevitably exists between the members of a group and its facilitators and organisers. This can sometimes be based in part on relative levels of skill and self-awareness, but more often, is just a function of the leadership that is tacitly assumed by people with roles assigned to them by organisations such as Oxfam. Of course these roles come with a certain set of skills and access to knowledge. But fundamentally, it is the participants in a session who decide, consciously or not, to give power to the people running the session, and/or to their fellow participants.
It was a real pleasure to watch two very skilled people negotiate these sensitivities, helping a big and well-resourced organisation with a very clear sense of what it wanted, do something which, by its nature, it couldn’t do by itself. Our exercise of control was to recognise our own weakness.
Note: these are my personal thoughts and not those of Oxfam GB.
December 17, 2012 @ 11:57 am
It was fascinating to read Naveed’s feedback, as the central challenge Maria and I had with this job was how to manage the tension between the needs (and power) of the Oxfam establishment on the one hand, and the need to support the creativity and empowerment of the grassroots activists, on the other. This required a nuanced and thorough understanding of power dynamics and Maria and I brought different theoretical perspectives into play here: Maria using the ‘Reflect-action’ approach (www.reflect-action.org) and Emily from Process-Oriented Psychology (www.processwork.org). It was a pleasure to find, working together for the first time, how complementary these approaches were, in that we agreed on our analysis of the power dynamics at hand. One of the keys to understanding power relationships is to recognise where they are playing out in each moment and not brush them under the carpet, and inevitably one of the hardest things for us to do was remain aware of our own power as hired facilitators, entrusted to manage the creative process. At times we felt like ‘piggy-in-the-middle’ between the need for creative freedom and the need for ‘results’, not always fully recognising how much control we had and that we were being trusted for our expertise. I think this was the biggest learning for us, particularly as women in the frequently male-dominated consultancy world where confidence so often wins the day. However, what Maria and I learned from this piece of work, was firstly, to have confidence in our far more related style of consulting and facilitating and, secondly, to recognise that we can be just as pushy or opinionated as anyone else, and that sometimes it’s precisely what’s needed!
Rhizome, Oxfam, and the power of facilitation – Naveed Chaudhri
January 26, 2013 @ 9:34 pm
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