The Words On the Page
There is much more to a pop-up book than the words, but the words are still important. Similarly important are the actual words you get from your group. This is square one of reading a group: directly asking people how they feel about something, then listening to them when they tell you.
There are two parts here, and it’s crucial we do both of them: the asking and the listening. If you’ve ever been to a comedy show, you’ve no doubt experienced a comedian directly asking a group how they’re feeling (“How’s everyone doing tonight?”). And if you’re lucky, you’ve experienced a great comedian who actually listens to the response, instead of just moving on with whatever they planned to say next (“Whoa--I heard that groan in the front row. Sounded like someone got punched in the gut by the cold outside.”). If a group knows you’re actually listening, they’ll be more likely to speak up.
While facilitating a training, we can do the same thing. We can ask questions like “How is everyone feeling about…” or “Show of hands if…” or “Nod if…” or (Sam’s personal favorite) “Snaps if…” (because he was a bad snapper as a kid, but is now awesome at it, and clearly over-proud). The words your participants use when they give you answers, when they tell you how they are feeling, or what they are struggling with, are the first cue to use when reading them as a group.
Here are some ways you can get more words on the page:
1. Entry surveys. If possible, have the group fill out a little survey before your training to get a sense of their wants, experiences, dispositions, and identities. This is part of what we call “front loading.” Demographic data of the group are words on the page. Questions they have for you before the training starts are words on the page.
2. Ask the group check-in questions throughout the workshop. Ask them what they think about things. Ask them how they feel. Ask them to rephrase points you made, or someone else in the room made. Ask them to reflect back on the first half of a workshop aloud. Process the process. Ask them whatever you need to know--just, you know, shut up once you do (see above section).
We love index card check-ins. You can pass out index cards and use them to check in with the group whenever you need to know what they’re thinking, but you’re not sure they will say it aloud. For example, we use them after intense activities to give participants a chance to write down how they are feeling, then we will read them at random and allow other participants to nod or snap if they’re feeling similarly. Index cards are a low-risk, in-the-moment, anonymous way to get more words on the page.
3. Use responses to questions and activities as launching points for discussions. Nothing will tell you more about where someone is on a subject than their responses to your discussion questions. A great prompt to see if someone understands something is “Recap what we just talked about in your own words.” And after someone answers a question, you can present what they said to the rest of the group (e.g., “Did anyone else have that same thought?”) to get a sense of where they are with the material being discussed.
The Moving Parts: Examining Body Language and Energy
Just like the structures that come out of the pop-up book as you turn the page, examining the moving parts of your group can add to your impressions of the story. When we think of moving parts, we think primarily of body language and energy.
Body Language
The way people are sitting, where they’re looking, and what they’re doing with their hands are all important parts of the story. Body language is the sum total of all the non-verbal cues you can discern from a person or group. Reading body language is nuanced, and we are not going to get too into the depth of it here, but Google “Body Language TED Talks” or find a good book if you want to learn more. For our purposes, here are a few non-verbal cues we look out for:
1. Crossing arms and legs might mean someone is feeling threatened, or needs to put up their guard. In a training, this might be because they are feeling targeted, or just uncomfortable with the subject.
2. Physically turning away from someone, whether it’s another member of the group or you as the facilitator, might indicate someone is attempting to disengage from that person.
3. No eye contact, or staring off into the distance, might mean that someone is bored, but it also could mean someone is processing. Processing is good. Bored is less good.
4. Phone usage can feel like a personal affront, like an intentional way to ignore what you are saying. When someone isn’t paying attention to you and is instead more interested in what is happening in their lap or on their little screen, it can be hard not to feel like they are checked out.
For all of the above, the best way to understand what’s going on is to set clear intentions in the beginning of a training (e.g., “We expect everyone to engage in the discussion”), and then check in with the participants if you sense their body language is telling you something otherwise. Occasionally, you’ll be misreading a person’s nonverbal cues, and a verbal check-in can clarify what you’re seeing. Cell phone use, for example, use can be more compulsive than purposeful at times, in which case you’re best off not to take it personally.
Energy
Energy is about movement as much as it is about a lack of movement. If you turned a page of a pop-up book, and nothing poked out, you’d be quick to notice there was a problem, and tug at the right part of the page to fix it. Low energy in a group, while sometimes less obvious, can also be shifted with the right tug.
When a group is energized, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are dancing around and laughing (though if that’s the energy you accomplish in your trainings, count us in). An energized group is engaged in the material, attentive to whomever is speaking, and actively learning from the training. In reading the energy of a group, there are a couple of things to keep in mind: (1) How long are you going to be together? (2) What were they doing before the trainings and what will be happening after?
If you’re working with a group for longer than an hour, you need to be sensitive to their attention spans. Even with less than an hour you can quickly lose people, but with longer trainings it will be more and more important to make intentional decisions to positively influence the energy of the group. With long trainings, managing the energy of the group can be as important to accomplishing the goals as knowing the material you are discussing.
And what the group was doing before you were together, and what they’re doing after, can be just as important to their energy as the actual training you are in together. If they just came from a draining, exhausting, or boring experience, keep that in mind. If it’s early in the morning and people are just getting caffeine in their bodies, keep that in mind. Or if it’s the end of the day on Friday, and people are excited to be done with their week, keep that in mind.
Beyond that, energy can be a hard thing to explain. For us, knowing the energy of a group is sometimes simply a feeling in our gut that says “These people are into this” or “These people are about to pass out.” Other times, you can tell the energy is low by the tone in participants’ voices (if everyone is starting to sound flat) or a lack of effort in transitioning from one activity to the next (everyone groans as they stand up, or turn a page).
If you’re noticing the group’s energy is low, hope is not lost.
A few tips for recharging your group’s batteries:
Take a break and encourage people to get up, walk around, and stretch. If your training is a long one (several hours plus), take 15 minutes. If it’s a short training, take five. If you’ve ever been falling asleep in a class and knew if you just stood up and stretched how much more awake you’d be, you’ll understand how helpful it can be.
Rearrange the room and the people in it. Switching the configuration of the room can create new energy: swap the seating arrangement (e.g., if you were in a classroom style, change it to an open circle, or small pods) and ask participants to sit by someone new.
Change the type of interaction you’re using to eng
age your group. If you’ve been lecturing a lot, move to facilitating a conversation, or teaching a topic where there can be more back and forth between you and the group. Put people in small groups or in pairs to get everyone participating.
Consider bringing movement into the training itself. For example, instead of asking if people agree or disagree, have them show you: make a values statement and have the participants stand up and organize themselves on a spectrum from strongly agree to strongly disagree.
Tone and Quality of Voice: The Message Behind the Words
How someone says something can be as important as what they’re saying. One of our favorite examples of this is the famous “I never said she stole my money” inflections. This sentence can be emphasized to mean seven different things, by changing which word is emphasized:
I never said she stole my money.
[someone else may have]
I never said she stole my money.
[I didn’t say it and how dare you accuse me of doing so]
I never said she stole my money.
[but she tots did]
I never said she stole my money.
[but someone else did, and that person is a jerk]
I never said she stole my money.
[I gave it to her, just, not, entirely willingly]
I never said she stole my money.
[but she stole someone’s, and for that she’s a jerk]
I never said she stole my money.
[she stole my heart. I gave her the money. I <3 jerks.]
In facilitation, try to pay as much attention to the how as the what. And, as always, if you’re unsure of what someone is trying to convey with their tone, check in. Find your own style of checking in and figure out what feels natural to you.
The best “checking in” advice we can give here is to name what you observe (e.g., “So I heard you say that she stole your money...”) and then explain why you’re circling back to it (“...but how you said it made me feel unclear about why you wanted to share that with us. Can you tell me a bit more?”). It never hurts to ask someone to rephrase something before you react, to make sure you’re reacting to what they actually want you to be reacting to.
Choose Their Own Adventure
If you’ve never read a choose your own adventure book, the premise is simple. At different points in the story, the author gives the reader the ability to decide where it’ll go next (“Turn to page 13 if you get this reference; turn to page 89 if you want to see Sam and Meg stop using this analogy”). In reading a group during a workshop, it’s great if you can create opportunities where they have the ability to choose where the story goes next. Nothing will tell you what a group wants more than giving them control over where the training goes next.
The simplest way to achieve this is by asking. You could take a vote (“Raise your hand if you want to spend 5 more minutes on this”) or ask for submissions (“What should we talk about for these last 5 minutes?"). Asking where the group wants go to is also a helpful component of frontloading, if you have the chance to hear from the group before they form.
Another way to let them choose their own adventure is to listen when they’re trying to tell you they already have. If folks keep asking questions about a certain subject, they’re choosing their own adventure. Cover that subject. If nobody seems engaged by whatever you’re talking about, ditto. If someone seems triggered, angry, or confused, that likely warrants switching to a different page and addressing those concerns.
Remember, facilitation isn’t about plotting out a course and etching it in stone, but about letting the winds and currents nudge you around on your journey toward a common goal.
The Book is Right In Front of You. Start Reading.
Remember that listening more and talking less is the first part of reading a group. Good facilitators have provocative questions ready, ask them with curiosity, and are ready to get the answer from the group in order to move the conversation forward. They ask a question and wait. They are comfortable with silence. They don’t fill in their own blank spaces, they pause, they guide; they help the members of the group, if at all possible, get to the ideas and answers themselves.
And once you’re listening, remember there is more to hear than just the words. Listen for tone and body language, and create opportunities for people to provide written feedback. Your group is trying to send messages to you in countless ways; it’s up to you to learn how to read them.
Spend a lot of time intentionally practicing this. Learning to stop talking is tough, but it’s not a step you can skip. Then, once you’re listening, you’ll find that the group you’re facilitating, in general, wants to be read—and they’ll do a ton of little, sometimes-invisible things to help you. You just have to know where to look.
Both/And > Or/But
“That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”
- Arundhati Roy
Let’s consider two situations. In both, someone is facilitating a training with a group, and their goal is to help the group understand humanity’s effect on global climate change. One participant is struggling with the material. For this example, let’s do our best to empathize with that participant.
In the first situation, the participant in the training who is struggling pushes back. They say, “I don’t understand how you can think the planet is warming. We just had a terrible blizzard last week.” The facilitator, confident that the material being covered is factually true, sensitively responds, “I appreciate you sharing your perspective. A lot of people share that concern, but extreme weather is actually a symptom of climate change.”
Now consider an alternative situation, where everything is the same, except for one word being changed: the facilitator responds, “I appreciate you sharing your perspective. A lot of people share that concern, and extreme weather is actually a symptom of climate change.”
You may have already had a feeling in your gut in response to that simple word change: the feeling of “and” and the feeling of “but” can be dramatically different. If you felt it, then your gut has already taught you what this chapter is all about. If the message didn’t make it to your gut just yet, no worries--we’ll do our best to work our way from your head down.
And vs. But: Unpacking the Difference
“And” and “But” serve similar functions grammatically. And, generally speaking, we can exchange one for the other without noticing much of a difference in meaning. But when disagreeing with someone, the difference between “and” and “but” grows to a canyon.
Whenever someone makes a statement, connecting your response to theirs with “and” builds on what they said; connecting your response to theirs with “but” negates what they said. “And” recognizes their truth, and adds yours on top of or alongside it; “But” negates their truth, and replaces it with yours.
“Meg is wonderful, but she smells bad.” Meg might be wonderful, but that is diminished by the fact that she smells bad. “Meg is wonderful, and she smells bad.” In this sentence, Meg’s wonderfulness isn’t diminished by her odor--heck, it might even be part of her charm (“Meg is so busy being wonderful she ain’t got time to shower--I respect that.”). What we’re doing with the “And” is allowing these two ideas to have their own merit, to exist alongside one another, instead of putting them on opposite ends of an ideological tug of war (the classic hot-button controversy of “wonderful” vs. “smell bad” you’re always hearing about on cable news).
Manifesting Polar Bears
Facilitation requires so much attention to so many competing things, it can be easy for us to accidentally create a throwdown we had no intention of throwing down. Sometimes, something as small as saying “But” when you could have said “And” will trigger a fight or flight reflex in a participant, where you turn them into a hyper-protective mama bear whose cub is her idea. We’ll call this manifesting polar bears.
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bsp; If you want to steer clear of polar bears, your best bet is to avoid poles. We are really good at internalizing two ideas as competing, polar opposites, when often they’re better understood as two distinct ideas, and not actually in competition at all.
Do your best to be intentional about which ideas, or what material, you’re discussing are actually polar opposites, and which can happily coexist.
But/Or Create a Hunger Games of Ideas
If there really is one absolute truth--a winning idea that needs to emerge as victorious--creating dichotomies and forcing people to choose one concept over another is necessary. Responding to participants' statements with “but” and “or” are great ways to create that competition.
Sometimes allowing for multiple perspectives won’t help. It may create more confusion than clarity, or the ambiguity is occasionally too difficult for participants to hold, and without anything concrete to anchor them, all the learning drops out. We understand this. We simply encourage you to pick your ideological battle royales.
Unlocking the Magic of Facilitation Page 4
