It Is All About the Process
When I think about the groups I have assisted to reach consensus over the years, two instances stand out. In 1993, I was appointed by the U.S. State Department as the sole American delegate to the United Nations International Labour Organization (ILO) Tripartite Conference on Structural Changes in the Banking Industry. Once I arrived in Geneva, I was elected to be chair of the conference, and, in that role, I “facilitated” a process in which representatives of twenty-eight countries and twenty-eight non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as well as twenty-eight banking representatives from around the world worked to reach agreement on twenty-seven initiatives related to working conditions in the banking industry. Most of my facilitation work was not undertaken during the formal sessions, where translators sat in glass-enclosed boxes and delegates in colorful garb from every corner of the globe delivered plenty of long-winded speeches. Rather, my real work was done in the halls over a coffee or in a restaurant over fondue.
Ten years later, I was appointed by the mayor of my small town in Maryland to fill a vacancy on the town council. This village of Victorians and farmhouses lying in the foothills of the Appalachians about sixty miles west of Washington has fewer than two hundred residents who comprise two groups: the “real” residents who have lived there for most of their lives and the “come-heres” like me who have been living in town less than twenty years. On the town council, I helped guide members of both groups through the thorny process of revising the archaic thirty-year-old planning and zoning regulations, which allowed for pigs and cattle to be herded down a main street that had long since become a commuter transit road.
A previous election had grown nasty with personal attacks over the issue of “speed bumps”— the farmers disdained them because they impeded farm equipment, but other residents heralded them as necessary to slow down the ever-increasing flow of traffic. And, in revising the planning and zoning regulations, tension also arose between farmers who wanted freedom to sell large tracts of land to developers, land preservationists who wanted to see the land placed into conservation easements, and residents who wanted to maintain open vistas and avoid a dotted landscape of “little boxes” and McMansions. Much of my work was done during late nights at the Ruritan (which is similar to a grange or an agricultural cooperative), over kitchen tables, or walking the village’s paths and alleys with my dog as town residents corralled me to tell me their views.
Looking back, I think that building consensus within my small town was more difficult in many ways than building consensus among the many nations represented in Geneva. And, in examining both of these experiences, I realize that it is the process, the how, more than the substance or the what, that links these two seemingly disparate sets of deliberations. It is the how of consensus building and of facilitation that holds both lessons and promise — for me and, I believe, for other conflict management professionals as well.
Two recent books deconstruct the processes of consensus building and facilitation, each from a different perspective, each for a different audience, and each with a different result. The first, Breaking Robert’s Rules: The New Way to Run Your Meeting, Build Consensus, and Get Results by Larry Susskind and Jeff Cruikshank, is destined to become a classic in the conflict management literature, perhaps even to the same degree as Getting to Yes. It is practical, clear, well written, and contains a series of useful checklists and tip sheets for the practitioner, manager, or leader. Dispute resolution scholar Carrie Menkel-Meadow notes on the jacket blurb that “no one should ever go to a meeting, of any kind, anywhere, again without a copy of Breaking Robert’s Rules.” She is not far from the truth.
The second book, The 9 Disciplines of a Facilitator: Leading Groups by Transforming Yourself by Jon and Maureen Jenkins is, in contrast, convoluted, prescriptive, pitched at a niche audience, and sometimes annoyingly detailed. For example, on page 23 the authors tell readers about the city where they live in The Netherlands and describe the possibilities for an evening’s entertainment — cinemas, a theatre, an opera house, jazz clubs, restaurants, etc. On page 38, they report how “local brandy and beer flowed” when they worked to implement a community development project in Peru, and on page 39 they describe how they once worked for a small company of ten consultants who met every Friday at 4:00 p.m. at the local café. Sometimes it is hard to tell whether 9 Disciplines is a travel guide, a memoir, or a series of workshop notes and PowerPoint presentations cobbled together into a book.
Some Rules Are Made to Be Broken
Susskind and Cruikshank have strong reputations as experts and authors on consensus building. Susskind is the Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at MIT, the head of the Public Disputes Program at Harvard Law School and the founder of the Consensus Building Institute, and Cruikshank is an experienced editor and author who collaborated with Susskind on Breaking Impasse, published in 1987. In Breaking Robert’s Rules, the authors quickly capture the reader’s attention by “eavesdropping” on three hypothetical meetings between parents involved in a children’s soccer league, managers and employees at a small engine manufacturing company, and members of a religious congregation trying to decide whether to operate a day care center. The vignettes define the book’s vast target audience, which is “people who need to work together, often under difficult conditions, to solve tough problems” (p. xv) — which is pretty much everybody.
Part One offers a simple and practical definition of the consensus-building approach (CBA). Importantly, the authors define consensus as not only reaching agreement but also as implementing that agreement successfully. Implementation as a component of consensus is a key concept that has been missing from most of the literature. Practitioners such as I have often seen groups reach consensus but fail to implement the agreement. Similarly, practitioners often witness stakeholders agree to “live with” an outcome, thus allowing the group to claim it has reached consensus, but then leave the room and undermine or perhaps even sabotage the supposed group consensus. Having been sandbagged this way myself in several interventions, I now define consensus at the beginning of my work as an agreement that everyone in the group can live with and which everyone will support and not sabotage. Breaking Robert’s Rules acknowledges this important distinction and makes a tremendous contribution to the field by defining and addressing both the decision-making and implementation components of consensus.
The authors explain the history of Robert’s Rules, which were created by Henry Martyn Robert in 1876 when he served as a general in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in San Francisco during the Gold Rush. Robert, who “didn’t much like confusion,” decided to develop a set of procedures to run meetings, which have since become standard operating procedure for many, if not most, meetings in the U.S., particularly formal business and government meetings.
In pointing out the pitfalls of Robert’s Rules, Susskind and Cruikshank note four problems that should trouble any practitioner who aspires to an interest-based approach:
The majority rules, so you can end up with an unhappy minority;
The rules do not necessarily result in a “wise” decision because good outcomes do not always emerge from parliamentarian roots;
The outcome may lack legitimacy because it may be the result of procedural maneuverings and backroom deals; and
The rules put a great deal of power in the hands of those who are procedurally savvy, or, as the authors note, “if you don’t understand the rules, you will lose” (p. 13, emphasis in the original).
Susskind and Cruikshank break down their CBA into five steps:
convening;
assigning roles and responsibilities;
facilitating group problem solving;
reaching agreement; and
holding people to their commitments.
They succinctly set forth three models of leadership: the leader as savior, the leader as process manager, and the leader as convenor (or facilitative leadership). And in less than three pages (36–38), they also offer six “foundations” or principles for CBA:
clarify responsibilities;
clarify mission;
engage in joint fact finding;
generate agreements that leave everyone better off than if no agreement had been reached;
take back to constituents and absent stakeholders a written version of any draft agreement; and
anticipate what might go wrong and plan for it.
For the practitioner, manager, or leader, these prescriptions are useful and succinct, and chapter five (“The Importance of Facilitation”) provides an easy-to-follow synopsis of the facilitation process and the tasks of the facilitator.
Having set forth the theoretical underpinnings of their approach, the authors of Breaking Robert’s Rules then introduce a simulation involving the hypothetical town of Blaine, which is in the process of planning a bicentennial celebration. This illustration is effective because it allows the reader to see consensus building in action, providing real-life examples of impasse and resistance. For instance, some of the stakeholders in Blaine are “traditionalists” who want a historical focus to the celebration while some are “modernists” who argue in favor of a community/diversity focus. Some want historical dramas, some want street fairs. Issues of race and diversity arise. Some members of the Blaine Bicentennial Celebration Committee want to bring questions to a vote, while others crave consensus first, and several even question the role, authority, and usefulness of the facilitator. The scripted “excerpts” from the Blaine simulation are realistic and bring to life for the reader the theories and principles set forth in the book.
The book also includes helpful checklists, templates, tip sheets, and procedures. Each chapter ends with a shaded box of “Key Terms and Concepts.” Part Two sets forth five essential steps in the CBA. Appendices discuss how to convince others to use the approach, suggest ground rules for a CBA process, the steps to being a good facilitator, and how to build consensus in the workplace. For managers, leaders, conflict management professionals, and involved citizens, Breaking Robert’s Rules is an invaluable resource.
One of the questions that remains open is whether those who are comfortable with or tend to benefit from the use of Robert’s Rules will be willing to embrace a new way. If the book has a weakness it is this: it does not address the resistance that one will surely encounter when trying to introduce a CBA. Although Susskind and Cruikshank offer some useful “cue sheets” on how to convince others to use CBA, it remains to be seen whether the movement toward a new model of group decision making will take hold and germinate.
Conventional organization development theory would suggest that one could — and indeed, should — expect resistance from long-time users of Robert’s Rules. Such resistance could range from simple inertia to acts of outright sabotage directed toward any attempt to introduce a consensus-building model in arenas that have long been the domain of parliamentary procedure. Diagnosing the reasons for such resistance (lack of knowledge, loss of power, etc.) and developing ways to manage the resulting tension could go a long way toward advancing the authors’ mission, which is nothing short of revolutionizing the way business, organizations, communities, and governments make decisions.
Some Disciplines Are Hard to Follow
The 9 Disciplines of a Facilitator, unfortunately, is a far less effective examination of the modern art of facilitation than Breaking Robert’s Rules. It is not directed toward the conflict management professional, per se, but seems also unlikely to be useful for the manager or leader. I doubt that it will resonate with those who work in business, public policy, or government. Instead, it seems geared toward a small niche audience — those who seek self-exploration and self-actualization, either individually or as part of an encounter-type group. Although it is ostensibly about facilitation, the book is part self-help, part group therapy in its approach.
I hold a master’s degree in social work and before I began making my living as an attorney and law professor, I practiced as a therapist. I now make room for yoga and meditation in my personal life. And I truly believe that certain facilitators have “gifts”— of presence, of spirit, of humility, of intuition, of fluidity, of energy. So, I eagerly opened the pages of 9 Disciplines hoping for an exploration and celebration of those soft skills, those intangibles that explain “self as instrument” (a phrase borrowed from the field of organization development). But as I turned the pages, my enthusiasm turned to disappointment and eventually disbelief.
The book’s husband-and-wife authors Jon and Maureen Jenkins describe themselves as having expertise with “micro-level social change” and “international change processes.” They lived in a community of the Ecumenical Institute (EI) in Chicago from 1968 to 1988, during which time the institute built a model called the “New Religious Mode,” which was an attempt to understand the vows and practices of traditional religious life as applied to contemporary life (p. vii). The authors note that the model developed by EI “provided inspiration” for 9 Disciplines. This may explain some of the problems I perceive with the book — it feels like it has a not-so-subtle agenda.
The problems start with the introduction. The authors set up a paradigm of three developmental paths, each of which in turn comprises three disciplines:
relationship with others (detachment, engagement, and focus);
relationship with self (interior council, intentionality, and sense of wonder); and
relationship with life (awareness, action, and presence).
The authors’ definitions of their terms lack clarity and are full of jargon: detachment is “maintaining one’s autonomy in the face of the desire to be comforted in one certitude or another” (p. 4), while engagement is defined as “developing the capacity to care, to commit, and to be generous with who and what you are, without knowing what the outcome will be” (p. 5). Focus is explained as “the only place where you can hold Detachment and Engagement (sic) together”; it is “concentrating the will so that the moment is fulfilled and the future is also fulfilled, like two lenses that merge into one clear image.”
I gave up and moved on to “Disciplines Regarding Myself.” After weaving Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, and Bill Clinton all into one paragraph (later in the book Harry Potter, Peter Senge, Karl Marx, Martin Luther, and Sitting Bull all appear in one sentence), the authors define “interior council” (perhaps they mean interior counsel?) as “paying attention to and choosing the most creative and enabling from among the voices that guide your day-to-day life” (p. 6.) They contend that “leadership is a profoundly draining activity” and that sometimes the only resources you have are the “ones you carry in your head,” your “internal mentors.” I was uncertain that I understood their meaning or how these concepts explained the gift of facilitation.
But I knew for certain that I parted company with the authors when I read their description of intentionality as “the capacity to increase control over what you want” (p. 7). In most, if not all, models of facilitation, it is not the role of the facilitator to control outcomes. This is the biggest weakness of 9 Disciplines: it depicts facilitators as crusaders, promoters, and cheerleaders for developmental and micro-level change. This became even more apparent when the authors defined “awareness and action” as “finding the locus to transform the situation so that you can carry out your convictions.” Facilitators, I believe, are not in the business of carrying out their own convictions. This is a clear example of the process–substance dichotomy I mentioned earlier. Facilitators, like mediators and consensus-builders (including Susskind and Cruikshank), have a clear stake in the process of an intervention, and may — and indeed probably should — have strong convictions about process issues, tools, and techniques. What bothers me about the Jenkins book is that it seems to be advocating something beyond process; it seems to suggest that it is acceptable for the facilitator to have a stake or conviction about the issues involved in the conflict or meeting itself.
I am uncertain about the authors’ true agenda, but to me it seems that 9 Disciplines may be masquerading as something it is not, that it is less a book about facilitation as a neutral, interest-based process than it is the authors’ manifesto of their world view. I cannot put my finger on it — perhaps it is that the authors are imprecise in their language and unfocused in their writing, or perhaps it relates back to the genesis of the book which springs from the EI and its mission to expand the vows and practices of traditional religious life into other realms.
The authors also resort to unsupported statements to make their points. In the introduction, they write that “the failure to develop effective leadership in the public, private, and even voluntary sectors has been well documented” (p. 27). But there is no citation for such a sweeping generalization. What about Nelson Mandela? Martin Luther King? Lech Walesa? Then, in another chapter they state that self-organizing systems are “better.” As an example, the authors take us to The Netherlands (again) where “traffic that organizes itself has been running as a very successful experiment” (p. 20). According to the authors, in the absence of traffic signals or signs, “People pay attention because they are not being told what to do by the signs.” Paint me as a skeptic, but how do the authors know this and what does it have to do with facilitation? Their model of social relationships and globalization is similarly simplistic — perhaps a good read of a book or column by New York Times columnist and globalization expert Thomas Friedman would help. We are told that in the “old world” we went to the general store and had long conversations about community activities and that in the “new world” we are alienated because a “municipal agency cleans the streets and we hire professionals to build our homes and places of worship” (p. 25). Whatever truth such a statement may or may not contain, it hardly furthers the field of facilitation.
The book, in the end, seems to be more of a prescriptive amalgamation of random thoughts, stories, opinions, and games. There are indeed some useful ideas about self-actualization scattered throughout the book, and it might do well as a companion handbook for some type of experiential transformative workshop tailored to a particular audience interested in championing micro-level social change. But while the book’s premise is intriguing, its promise to explore and honor nine disciplines of facilitation is never met. As a facilitator, let me offer my own nine principles for consideration: humility, respect, presence, acceptance, transparency, fairness, flexibility, honoring group self-determination, and energy/spirit.
Some Books Are Made to Last
Viewed through the lens of current thinking and scholarship on conflict management in general and facilitation in particular, Breaking Robert’s Rules makes an important and long-lasting contribution, while 9 Disciplines misses the mark. I predict that Breaking Robert’s Rules will become part of the “canon” of conflict management literature that practitioners, managers, leaders, and ordinary people turn to time and again, one of those books that readers mark up and plaster with yellow tabs, only to realize one day that the spine is broken and the pages are spilling out from overuse. It is a book I will take with me when I facilitate for the United Nations, when I try to resolve town disputes, or when I attend any other meeting. Why? Because, sometimes, we all need to set aside the discipline, take a deep breath, and just break the rules — for success, for a change of pace, for fun.
