If somebody suddenly chimes in while she’s doing this, where somebody goes, "No, that’s full of shit," she turns to them and says, "Hold on. I’ll get to you in a minute." When she turns to them, she says, "What’s your concern? Give it to me."
Then she does the same thing to somebody else. Their turn takes as long as it takes. It’s totally the space is being held by the facilitator.
Simultaneously, everybody has heard what they had to say. They watched it being put up on the board, on the chart pads. It’s in there in the collective space again with no judgment attached to it. They’ve also watched an idealized form of listening being modeled.
The fully heardness has a psychological and physiological reaction in people. When they feel fully heard, the fight-and-flight response evaporates. The withdrawal, the pushing their ideas, all that just disappears and they’re just there.
It’s an inquiry. It’s not, "What you’re saying is..." It’s nothing like that. It’s like, "Am I getting this right?" Person goes, "No, no, no. It’s more like this." "OK, dah, dah, dah." There’s this back and forth going on.
They’re stepping into that person’s universe so that that person feels companioned in their world with zero judgment. They’re just trying to really be there with that person. They’re writing stuff down on the chart pads, whichever one is right, going, "Am I getting this right?"
The facilitator is taking what the person’s saying, going, "Let me see if I’m getting that." They’re repeating it back but not word for word, not rotely. They’re trying to get at what’s the essence of what this person’s saying and with the emotion. All the emotion that’s in it ...
It starts out with, "Who has something they want to say about this thing we’re here to talk about?" Somebody raises their hand. Say, "OK, tell me about it." The facilitator, their goal is to have that person feel fully heard. There are usually these four chart pads with problems ...
It was very funny and frustrating, an instructive moment. Anyway, Rosa says that as facilitator, she is the designated listener, that the people come in drunk on their own ideas and can’t really hear each other. She is going to be a designated listener.
He got frustrated. He says, "Don’t you people care about anything? Because you’re all being so considerate of the larger whole of what other people think." He couldn’t get any traction.
The founder of dynamic facilitation, Jim Rough, some of us got him to come and talk to people who are on the board of the Fellowship of Intentional Communities who were largely trained in consensus process. He did several hours with them.
The facilitator is very dominant in dynamic facilitation, especially early on. You need to have people who are in some kind of conflict. To the extent they’re in conflict, there’s something to work with, if they aren’t in conflict at all...
She then wrote her master’s thesis about why it works, which was very instructive for me. Although I have taken courses in it and read about it and all that, her description is fascinating.
...a number of times. It’s my jewel in the crown of process. I really would love to have a conversation sometime with you with Rosa Zubizarretta for whom we have I know The Tao of Democracy to thank, pulled it out of me. I got her into dynamic facilitation.
Bye-bye. I’m not quite ready to leave. Even though I don’t have anything specific yet, I would like to do a quick intro to dynamic facilitation for you since I refer to it...
He can’t help himself.
[laughs]
Thank you for introducing me to Audrey. Thank you for poking your head into the possibility of being in this call. You’ve been absolutely essential to how it’s unfolded. I love the fact that you were here.
One could say it’s a question to open space. They put people in this amount of space instead of a point.
Questions are not there to be answered.
He’ll get it absorbed in a hour, not a problem.
People can do it in attempt to evoke that dimension of life from somebody else and work their way towards, how’s that going to play out in the way that works for everybody in this situation and you can live from that place, which is I think what Miki’s...
Like I say. [laughs] There’s the force of life energy. There’s a level of human life that is a source of where life energy comes from. The word needs is an effort to put a tag on that.
There’s lots of people doing nonviolent communication follow her, a rote kind of thing, which is powerful in itself. You can do rote things powerfully. Sometimes Miki does it when you can’t even tell she’s doing it. It’s just a great, smooth thing. It does delve farther into the thing, ...
I can’t quite comprehend how your mind works, your mind, body, whatever. NVC, nonviolent communication, Miki, is one of the, if not the in my opinion, leading practitioners and trainers. She’s embedded in it. She’s a master.
I’m wondering why you wrote "Universal Human Needs," Audrey.
She tried to do her thesis both with a rational academic discipline and with emotion, trying to model what would sociology look like if it did take...Here’s an example of a sociological study if you did take emotion seriously. That’s my quickie summary.
She’s going, "Wait a minute. You’re talking about the dynamics of society. You’re not including emotion? There’s something fundamentally wrong with this."
Anyway, I have never read the whole thesis. I talked a bunch with Miki about it, and I’ve read pieces of it. What I got in essence is Miki was looking at the founding men, they’re all men, of sociology, Marx and Veblen and these guys. None of them dealt ...
It feels like I could summarize it in two minutes, but you’d probably scream, "No, no, no." Those things should come out of your mouth rather than mine.
There’s the two things that I see particularly connecting Audrey’s world is your PhD thesis and your stories on willingness as the foundational thing. The bringing of emotion into sociology and the interesting way you went about trying to do that in your thesis is what I want.
In terms of getting to know you, the two points that I’m thinking of, there’s the big thing of nonviolent communication which is a major, major piece of your life.
I’m wondering if it’s closer to that.
Did you read the material on rough consensus, Miki?
The group can take that on, also, but the facilitator is the source of that.
...the idea of this as a trust-building thing is also of interesting tool. There’s so much that I didn’t realize before today that is fundamentally about the transformation of relationship. It’s not just problem solving. It’s a way in which the problem solving activity is, as you might put it, ...
I was saying, Audrey, the trust dimension is fundamental...
The link to trust is a very interesting one for him.
Dynamic facilitation, and other things. There’s a number of things that fit well in there, but I think the logic of convergent facilitation is particularly comfortable within the way of thinking that Audrey is expressing. That’s an invitation, in case you don’t recognize it. [laughs]
I’m realizing, Miki, that your convergent facilitation is a precious resource for the second diamond.
It’s nice to see something tagged on for such a thing that is actually creative. Here, there’s all sorts of things that get stuck onto bills that have nothing to do with it and are horribly destructive.
This process has been tagged on to the legislation for the pact?
What is CPTPP?
I can understand that, and that’s different from the president deciding he or she is going to do the first three-quarters of this process, or they’re going to directly insert a proposed bill into the last quarter of the process.
People in the government are not necessarily convening that, although [laughs] I recognize they are also citizens and could do this, but they also have the power...
The beginning, the first diamond happens only when there’s some energy from civil society to do it?
The official deliberations, the ones that are confined to government, are happening in the convergence part of the second diamond?
This second part, the second diamond, is not visible in the vast majority of reports that are coming out of Taiwan.
Right. It’s the point in the middle of your bow-tie here. [laughs] The point in the middle is where there’s a very explicit digestion of what has come out of the pol.is thing. That digestion is an informational input into the further deliberation that results in what finally comes out.
