“What you just said might be true, or everything we know might be a lie and our universe is really a simulation being run by some super-computer of an advanced civilization.”
And/Both Create a Sandbox Where Everyone Can Play
One of the best things about facilitation is bringing learning out of a bunch of individuals, and enabling them to share what they know with one another. Most ideas can play nicely with other ideas if we allow them to.
When it’s clear that the learning being shared can add to the learning you’re hoping to accomplish as a facilitator, we encourage you to “And” relentlessly. If you notice a false dichotomy that participants are struggling with, a carefully placed “both” can keep them from flinging sand in one another’s eyes.
“Folks, may I suggest something? Perhaps the leaders of the advanced civilization controlling our universe are both ‘a huge pile of jerks’ for taking away the dinosaurs and ‘benevolent all-healing gods’ for giving us guacamole.”
How Both/And Looks in the Moment
Hopefully you don’t need convincing that multiple truths and realities exist--about any and every concept--even when they seem to contradict each other. And maybe the above helped you recognize the power you have to create space for these multiple realities, or to demolish them, all with your choice of conjunction[3]. Having the ability to identify the “But” statements that can be “And” statements is an important skill. As soon as you’re comfortable with that distinction, you can move into choosing your language intentionally, and, in turn, helping participants understand that multiple truths and realities can exist together. Here are a few things to think about that might help you do just that.
Your reality being true doesn’t mean my reality isn’t
It’s easy for us to fall into the trap of believing that our truth is dependent upon it being universally true. Sam is constantly arguing that the entirety of The Matrix trilogy has merit, and has a hard time believing that when literally every person he talks to thinks the latter two films are worthless. He can be right (i.e., all three films can add worth to his life), and everyone else can be right (i.e., the second two movies are, to them, a festering waste of film, money, time, and Keanu Reeves). Both parties are right, and Sam is delusional.
We see this come up again and again in facilitation: if my reality is this way then your reality can’t be that way. “If I am experiencing what you said as problematic, and you didn’t, we can’t both be right.” Instead of discussing the core of the issue, we talk about who is “really right” as if there is an absolute reality we are close to, and need to find. The Both/And concept allows us to stop having that conversation and move into having the next phase of the conversation, which is “tell me about your reality, and then I can tell you about mine.” This is particularly important with social justice concepts, when you’re attempting to affirm many different types of experiences and understandings of self, some of which are less part of the dominant narrative than others.
And my reality being true doesn’t mean it’s true for you
At some point, far too late into his adult life, Sam realized that he can appreciate all three Matrix films, while everyone else hates them. In fact, he now celebrates that he might be the only person in the world who likes all three films (“More metal plug-shaped Keanu Reeve nipples for me.”).
Creating space for Both/And means recognizing that disagreeing is okay, healthy, even desirable, and can lead to learning for everyone. As a facilitator, your first hurdle is getting over your own But/Or thinking when it comes to something a participant says. Your second hurdle (often higher, more wibbly-wobbly, and likely to send you sprawling) is helping participants get over their But/Or thinking in response to what other participants say.
A phrase we use, that you are welcome to think of as the penicillin of facilitator interjections, is “Thanks for sharing your perspective. It’s always nice to see how many different perspectives people have about this.” Then, when another participant shares a contradicting or directly retaliatory view, you can use it again. “And thanks for sharing your perspective! It’s always nice to see how many different perspectives people have about this.” And you can rinse and repeat until your participants evolve into an anti-confrontational resistant superbug.
Enabling participants to have coexisting--instead of competing--unique perspectives amongst one another is as important as recognizing when their perspective and your perspective can coexist.
Important Both/And Concepts
There are innumerable situations in which Both/And will come in handy. Instead, we’re going to highlight a few of the most easy-to-But/Or concepts we can think of, and all of them come from a fountain of perpetual controversy: the perspective, process, and goal that is social justice. It is our hope that in seeing how these highly divisive concepts are unified, you’ll be able to extrapolate this out to just about any situation you might experience in your facilitation.
You can be both privileged and oppressed
We often talk about privilege and oppression as if they were the two positions of a light switch: you can either be oppressed, or privileged--no in between, no other options. This, like all Both/And-able concepts that are But/Or-ed, creates unnecessary conflict, demolishes nuance, and prevents understanding and empathy. Every person has many identities, and experiences those identities in unique ways, depending on location, time, and the rest of who they are. Not only can a single person experience both oppression and privilege, most of us do! Being able to accept and present that reality, being both privileged and oppressed, helps others see the complexity of both issues, and creates some wiggle room for a productive dialogue.
You can be doing good (or trying to) and causing harm
We often struggle when our intentions don’t align with outcomes, and participants in a training will be the first to latch onto just that. As facilitators, it’s easy to focus on the harm someone causes, and we might be able to enable more learning for everyone if we also acknowledge the good (whether manifested or intended). And we, as facilitators, often do the same thing. For example, if we are silencing, forgetting, or even purposefully excluding particular marginalized voices, perspectives, and identities from the conversation, this is doing harm (it’s reinforcing the erasure and marginalization these perspectives experience in society), and it might be doing good (we might recognize that trying to talk about everything all at once will lead to confusion, and instead focus on accomplishing a small, specific win instead). Sam may be doing a great job facilitating a workshop about lesbian, gay, and bisexual identities and completely ignore (or not leave time to discuss) asexuality. Whether intentional or not, this may cause harm while simultaneously doing good: participants may have a vastly more comprehensive understanding of LGB identities but have no more understanding, empathy, or connection to asexual identities.
As facilitators, we have to make choices like this all the time. It happens when we decide what we are going to be discussing or not covering, what concepts we are prioritizing and what concepts we just may not get to. These are difficult choices, and many of us are aware that we’re doing some amount of harm (even if it’s just in way of not doing good), while we’re doing good. Keep this in mind, and use it as your source of empathy, when helping participants recognize they are often doing the same thing.
Keeping Your But Out of Conversations
This concept can be difficult to unsee now that you’ve seen it--like many others in the book (we hope!). It undermines a foundational component of our communication that we may not have realized we were communicating. You might, for a short while, find yourself stumbling over basic sentences in conversations with others (e.g., Someone asks “How are you?” and you reply “I’m well, but today--oh no. Is that an and? Hm… ‘and’ today…? Hold on a sec! Can I try again?”), to the utter confusion of those others. In fact, it’s not uncommon for us to get an email from someone we trained, days or weeks after the training, like the followi
ng email Sam received:
We understand. This concept had--and has--a similar effect on us.
You might also find yourself glowing with pride when you pepper in an “and” where previously you would have unwittingly inserted your “but.” We’re guilty here, too.
We’re not sure which one leads to more social awkwardness: the cursing yourself for saying “but,” or the “my kid is going to Harvard” pride when you nail the “and.” What we can say for sure is that both are likely to lead the other person in the conversation to think you’ve had way too much caffeine.
This technique is something that will take time to utilize without awkwardness, and that’s okay! Curse yourself, pat yourself on the back, do neither or both, and keep reading. Now that you’ve stumbled upon the ground-shaking glory that is “and is greater than but,” you’re ready for something even more powerful: the “Yes, And…” rule.
The “Yes, And…” Rule
“Say yes, and you’ll figure it out afterwards.”
– Tina Fey
There is an indispensable rule of improv comedy that also works wonders with facilitation: the “Yes, And…” Rule. Any improviser you meet will know it, and many will explain it to you with glee[4]. At this point, the rule is less well known in the facilitator world, and we hope to change that. Using the “Yes, And…” Rule (YAR!) in your facilitation allows multiple things to be true at the same time, it allows you to disagree without destroying someone’s reality, and it encourages participants to add their voices to the learning.
The way it works is simple: if someone says something, you agree and build onto it. Or you can think of it in the negative: when someone says something, you don’t disagree, but instead find ways to see their truth, and add yours to it.
In improv, this leads to more energetic, complex, and funny scenes. Imagine a scene with two improvisers, where one person wants it to be set in orbit, and the other person is imagining it will take place on a beach. The first improviser might say, “It sure is cold out here in SPACE!” The second improviser can say, “No, it’s not, but it sure is hot on this BEACH.” (Womp womp...) Or, they can YAR and say “Yeah! And I thought we were spending the day at beach, so I’m bummed I only packed my bikini. But good thing I have this SPF 100, considering we’re FLYING DIRECTLY INTO THE SUN.”
The YAR can be tricky in improv, where we often have a particular narrative in mind and don’t see how easily we can add it on top of someone else’s. And it can be even trickier in facilitation.
You have a goal, or an intended outcome for the time with your group, and to get to that goal, people need to say certain things. Improvisers only have the simple goal of making people laugh, though that might not be too different from our goals as facilitators, which we’ll explain at the end of the chapter.
First, let’s make sure we’re on the same page with what this rule is, isn’t, and why we love it so.
Why no “No”?
The simplest reason is that “No” often shuts down dialogue. If it’s important to engage the people you’re working with in dialogue, to open up the conversation for more exploration and more idea sharing, a “No” in the room might signal to everyone that they should keep silent.
Think of the contribution a participant makes to a discussion as children’s artwork: it may be crude, incomplete, lacking in expertise, unrepresentative of reality, and sometimes downright offensive, and there is almost always something beautiful about it. If you tell a kid “This sucks. You suck,” they’ll never paint again, they’ll never get better, and it’s simply not true: just the fact that they are painting is courageous and beautiful. Saying “No” to a participant can feel like telling a kid their painting sucks.
That’s not nice. Let’s play nice with others.
If you want people to share their ideas with the group, you need to treat them with the same tenderness, understanding, and sensitivity that you’d treat a kid who shows you their (terrible, ugly, is that racist? I think it’s racist) paintings: acknowledge the good you see, encourage them to keep working, and maybe share with them something you’ve been working on. The YAR is a super easy trick to do all of that in the moment.
How “No” looks in action
“No” shuts down someone’s thought without inviting further feedback. Consider the following exchange:
Participant: Abstinence-only sex education is the best way to prevent teen pregnancies.
Facilitator: No, that’s incorrect. Comprehensive sex education is best for preventing unwanted teen pregnancies, and abstinence-only education has more negative than positive effects.[5]
In this instance, the participant is likely to either disengage or start arguing--neither of which is ideal. And we’ve forced this ultimatum before learning so much: we don’t know why the participant believes what they believe (e.g., what source?); we don’t know why it felt important to them to share (e.g., are they motivated to lower teen pregnancy rate, or are they more motivated to end comprehensive sex education; and in both cases, why?); and we don’t know how other people in the room feel about what the participant said (e.g., is this participant the only one who believes this, or is the facilitator the only one who doesn’t?).
Knowing all of the above information would allow the facilitator to connect with the participant and have a more productive conversation. They could enter the conversation through a point of connection, and then create a space where the more accurate/inclusive/sensitive information is learned. And even if they don’t use the information in that moment, it will offer them more perspective in the future--it’s one of the many moments in a training when the facilitator can learn from a participant.
If the facilitator’s goal in this moment is to help the participant see that abstinence-only education is not an effective way to prevent teen pregnancies, then creating an argument, or pushing the person out of the discussion, won’t likely do this. The facilitator can attempt to teach the participant, but facilitation works wonders to achieve learning in controversial situations, as we discussed before. And in this particular moment, YAR is the key to creating more learning, instead of more controversy.
Walk the plank into YAR
A lot of concepts in this book don’t feel natural at first. If a participant says something you’re uncomfortable with, or that you don’t think is right, it’s tough to say the “Yes” part of the “Yes, And…” Rule. We get that, and we experience it on a regular basis, and even with all that discomfort and difficulty, we are still diehard “Yes, And…”-ers. Being a YARer comes with a set of expectations.
If someone presents a reality to you, you will validate that reality. If someone shares their opinion with you, you will validate their opinion. You’ll validate their thoughts and beliefs--however ridiculous, offensive, or just plain different they may be from your own (or from “reality”)--even if it just means you’ll validate that they have them. You are willing to accept that someone else’s worldview is different from yours, or from the “ideal” in the sense of the training goals, and that you can build on their reality instead of demolishing it.
This requires discomfort (both yours, and your participants’). It requires courage (you have to be willing to explore things you may not have wanted to, nor been prepared to, explore). It requires patience (it is often the least direct path to learning). It requires you to harness the power of subtle language (particularly the difference between “But” and “And”). And it requires trust (in the process of facilitation, because though indirect, the learning that’s achieved will be more powerful).
A kid will show you their painting of your house--where the trees are blue and the people in the house are yellow and the sky is green and you’re not sure (but you’re pretty sure) the house looks like it’s on fire--and you’ll say “Yes! That’s a painting. And I love that you made it, even if I would have painted a version of our house that wasn’t a dystopian hellscape burning down with us inside.”
How “yes” looks i
n action
When you’re in total disagreement with someone, starting with “Yes” creates a healthier dynamic. Think back to the previous chapter on the energetic difference between “But” and “And.” When you say to someone, “Yes, and…” what you’re also saying is “I hear you. I see what you’re saying. Your voice is valued.”
Even if what you say next is totally different from what they think, they’ll at least feel heard. For facilitation to work, it is important for participants to know they are being heard. This enables discussions to foster more genuine curiosity, instead of predatory listening[6], where folks are just waiting for their turn to attack an idea that’s put forth, instead of truly considering its merit.
The YAR also helps you model one of the prickliest parts of great facilitation, which we’ll discuss in the last chapter of this book: it will enable participants not to see you as the sole expert who has all the answers, and instead recognize the knowledge and expertise we all bring with us to any setting.
Let’s revisit the example from earlier, this time replacing the “No” with a “Yes, and…”
Unlocking the Magic of Facilitation Page 5
