Reading the help that takes over the room
Different Currents Under the Same Surface · Article 4 of 5
This is the fourth article in a five-part series. The first three articles are here.
A facilitator I worked with was running a study group revisiting one of my courses. She had taken the course three times, in three different formats, and was the most experienced person in the room. After one of the sessions, a participant came to her privately with feedback. The course had too much content. It needed more lightness, more ease, more fun. Could she deliver the material more like another trainer the participant had in mind. Then the participant proposed a specific change to how the sessions would run, and the facilitator, working hard to honor the feedback, agreed to it on the spot.
The next session met in a structure shaped by a conversation most of the group had not been part of. The other members had not been asked. They were now inside a change that one person had requested and one person had granted, and no one else had touched.
This is one of the harder currents to read, because it almost always arrives wearing the language of contribution. The participant is offering something, and what they offer is sometimes thoughtful, sometimes correct, sometimes useful. What is moving underneath is not always a contribution to where the group is trying to go. Sometimes it is an unacknowledged bid to shape the room, and it can come from three different directions. From a peer beside you, from someone with power over you, and from inside you, the facilitator. Each one looks a little different, and each one asks for a different response.
When it comes from a peer
In its most familiar form, this current shows up as a participant who jumps in with the next concept before the trainer has reached it, or corrects a small detail the trainer was about to handle, or layers a more elaborate framework onto a moment that was about something simpler. In their own experience they are helping. They have something to offer and they want to bring it. That the trainer was already going there, or is deliberately choosing not to go there, is not visible to them.
Sometimes this is enthusiasm, and you can work with it gently. Other times it carries an edge, and the participant is communicating something, often without knowing it, about who they think knows things in this room. When I have a clear arc planned and a participant keeps arriving at my conclusion before I do, what I notice is that they have not extended me the benefit of believing I would get there. Underneath is an assumption that without their input I would have missed it. That assumption is sometimes shaped by who they read me as, sometimes a matter of personality, and often both at once, in ways that are hard to pull apart.
The same current can take a quieter and more consequential shape, the one the study group started with. Instead of jumping ahead inside a session, the participant brings you a critique of how the whole thing is run, and brings it to you alone. The request can be entirely reasonable. The difficulty lives in how it is being decided, with a change that affects everyone settled between two people.
What tends to help
With the participant who keeps jumping ahead, the work is to reclaim the focus of the room without making the person wrong. You can interrupt directly:
“I am going to interrupt you, because what you are bringing is something I am planning to come back to later, and I want us to stay with where we are for now.”
Or you can let them finish and then decline the content:
“Thank you. We will come back to that. Right now I want us to stay with the question I just put on the floor.”
If it keeps happening after several rounds, I get more explicit about the kind of participation I am asking for. I might say that if they want to answer the question on the floor they are welcome to raise a hand, and that if they are bringing something I have not invited yet, I am going to ask them to hold it for now. The work is to make clear what the focus is in this moment, without shaming anyone for their eagerness.
With the private structural critique, the work is different. The risk here has nothing to do with whether you polled everyone first. Sometimes a group does want you to make the call, and making it is part of your role. The risk is deciding by default, simply because one person reached you when no one else was in the room. So the move is to get clear about why you are choosing what you choose. If you judge that the change serves the whole room, you can decide it deliberately and own that choice. If it is the kind of change the rest of the group should weigh in on, you bring it back to them and decide together. What you are avoiding is the third path, where a change affecting everyone gets settled between two people without anyone having discerned whether it serves the room.
When it comes from above
The current also runs downward, through structural power. A facilitator I worked with delivered a keynote, and afterward the person who had hired her gave her a harsh and sweeping assessment of how it had gone. She spoke from the position that holds the power in that arrangement, and the power let her present her read as the simple truth of the event rather than one view of it. She had done the hiring. She had a firm picture of how the talk should have landed, and she delivered it as a verdict.
When a verdict arrives like that, the first work is to stay curious rather than certain. Some of what she said might be accurate and worth taking in. Some of it might have little to do with the facilitator’s actual work, and more to do with the hiring person’s own worry and disappointment finding a target. You cannot know which is which from inside the sting of the moment, and that is exactly why the discernment matters. Sorting the part that informs your work from the part that was only ever the other person’s feelings looking for somewhere to land is the task, and it usually takes some time and distance before you can do it honestly.
What tends to help
Here the work is largely internal, at least in the moment. There are two ways to lose your footing while you sort it out. One is to take the whole verdict in, treating an assessment that may have been mostly the other person’s overflow as an accurate account of what you did. The other is to wave it all away as nothing but their issue, which can lose you whatever small piece of it was worth keeping. The steadier move is to hold it lightly until the heat passes, then look again. Sometimes you will conclude that the verdict was largely a discharge of the other person’s own feelings, and naming that for yourself is what keeps you from carrying it as truth. Sometimes you will find a usable core and keep it. Either way, the discernment comes before the conclusion, and arriving at it does not lessen the weight of having sat through the delivery.
When it comes from you
There is a third direction this current runs, the one I have to watch most carefully in myself. It runs in the facilitator. A question came to me recently from a facilitator mediating a workplace conflict between a man and a woman. The facilitator was noticing strong gender dynamics in the room and wanted to name them, partly for reasons of integrity and partly in the hope that raising awareness might help the man in his future interactions. The two people in the room had named a different goal. They wanted the workplace conflict resolved.
The trap I have to watch in myself, and the one I named with this facilitator, is the gap between the facilitator’s intention and the clients’ goal. Addressing a dynamic that is getting in the way of the work the clients came to do is part of the job. Bringing your own teaching agenda into the room because you can see something the clients have not asked to look at is the wisdom-bringing trap in facilitator form. The first serves what they came for. The second replaces it with what you think they should be working on. From inside, both can feel like the same wish to be helpful.
What tends to help
The question I ask myself, when I notice my agenda has moved out ahead of the room, is a simple one. Does what I want to bring serve the work the people in front of me came to do, or does it serve what I have decided they ought to be doing instead. The first is facilitation. The second is the trap, and the fact that it is dressed as insight is exactly what makes it hard to catch.
Back to the study group
Two of these directions were already present in the room we started in. The participant who brought the private critique was the current coming from a peer. The facilitator who agreed to it on her own, sure she was honoring good feedback, was the current running inside her, the wish to be helpful moving out ahead of the group’s right to decide together. The same scene held both at once, which is part of why it was so hard to see clearly from the inside.
The current does not announce which direction it is coming from. Part of reading it is noticing where you are standing when it arrives, and how much power you hold in that particular room, because that is what tells you which response the moment is asking for. The same words, the same offer of help, can call for a different response depending on whether they come from a peer, from someone with power over you, or from inside your own wish to be useful.
Reflective Practice
If you are facilitating
- When a participant brings you a structural critique privately rather than in the group, what helps you carry it back to the group rather than acting on it alone?
- Where in your own facilitation are you most likely to mistake your teaching agenda for the work the room came to do, and what helps you notice the difference?
If you are a participant
- If you have brought feedback to a facilitator privately, what was the impulse underneath that choice, and what might have been different if you had brought it to the group?
- If you have noticed yourself arriving ahead of a facilitator with the next concept, what is the assumption underneath about whether they would have gotten there on their own?
This article is the fourth in a five-part series on the currents that move underneath the surface of difficult moments in groups. The final article looks at the most charged of the five, the person who has come to argue, when the argument turns out to have little to do with what is happening in the room.
If reading this stirs questions about how to hold these moments in the rooms you facilitate, you may also be interested in Equitable Facilitation, a deeper training in this work, beginning in July.