Facilitation and Self-Leadership

Tomomi Sasaki and I sat down to talk in-depth about her journey of self-awareness and inner work as a facilitator.

We met at an advanced facilitation masterclass I ran for Google at their Sprint Conference, way back in 2018. She tweeted at the end of 2020:

I've been facilitating workshops for about a decade. The first few years were ferocious, needs-based learning. Workshops took a tremendous amount of energy to plan and run, and after each one, I'd faceplant onto the nearest sofa.

Once things became manageable, I plateaued. I worked on plenty of facilitation assignments (and did a bunch of public speaking about lessons learned) but I was coasting and I knew it.

Then @kaihaley and the @GoogleDesign Sprint Conference gave me the gift of a full day training from @dastillman, and I started to think of facilitation as a practice. (you can listen to my conversation with Kai Haley here.)

Building a practice sends a different kind of signal into the universe. This gives me watershed experiences that blows apart a door I didn't know was there. Behind each door is a whole new landscape to explore, and new friends to explore it with.

It happens consistently, once or twice a year. I don't know what's behind that cadence but it is an amazing thing. You *think* you know the edges of the land and then... ah hah! It gets me every time.

It had been a while since we’d connected, but when I read that twitter thread, I knew we had to sit down to talk about her journey to thinking about facilitation as a practice and what that meant.

Tomomi is a designer and partner at the independent design studio AQ, and a frequent collaborator of Enterprise Design Associates. She's also a top-notch facilitator and, as you might have learned by now, a very reflective practitioner, and in this episode she gives some invaluable advice about how to improve at the skill of facilitation - beyond tips and tricks.

I loved it when Tomomi said that “The insight for me was that I need to take care of who I am and what I'm bringing into the room as a facilitator because that's part of what's going to happen in the dynamics.”

Tomomi is essentially saying in her own words what Bill O'Brien, the late CEO of Hanover Insurance said, that “The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener.”

When we facilitate, when we lead a group, we are noticing the system...and what we choose to respond to, focus on or call out will shift what happens in the system. The question here is...how do you affect change in a complex system...that YOU are part of? 

Many people treat learning and change like a purely technical challenge: They have a deficit in performance and the assumption is that they can learn better ways of doing and apply them.

Similarly, we think we can apply a pattern or tool (like a facilitated workshop agenda, exercise or the like) and get a reliable result - like a baking recipe. But any bread baker will tell you that the weather, the flour and your mood can shift how things go. Dough is alive.

There are two challenges with this mechanical, recipe, way of thinking...one is that people and systems of people are complex...so, the likelihood of things going exactly according to plan without any need for adaptation and improvisation is...unlikely. People, like dough, are alive.

The other issue is that many people think it’s new and better ways of doing that are needed...where it’s actually different ways of thinking, different mental models and assumptions...which will naturally lead to different ways of doing.

Some folks (Chris Argyris and Donald Schön) describe this as the difference between single-loop and double-loop learning and others even point to triple and even quadruple loop learning...the core of which could be self-awareness, or seeing how we ourselves can affect the system. This is the transition from facilitation and leadership as “doing to” or performance to “doing with” and presence.

The way you show up internally will change what happens in the session.

https://organizationallearning9.wordpress.com/single-and-double-loop-learning/

As Tomomi says later in our conversation, 

“I think what struck me was that in facilitation, we think so much about the participants, and the first question you basically asked in the master class was who are you? Until that moment, I hadn't really thought about that, and I think that's why I was getting so burnt out. You give and give without really an awareness of what you're doing to yourself or what you need to be. Then the realization is that, oh, that's where your strength comes from, it's where the practice needs to be built on, because you can't change that much, right?... So, might as well work with what you have. “

I care deeply about this idea. I think that facilitation and leadership more generally, is about expanding your range of capabilities - your ability to show up, on purpose, as the occasion calls for it. Tomomi suggests we can’t change *that much...but we can try to grow. I have a free course on Exploring and Expanding your roles as a facilitator, which you can find here.

There is so much goodness in Tomomi’s reflections. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

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