In our last Community-Led Research Collaboration workshop we reached the point in the process where the group was ready to start generating some shared ideas. In the past I’ve found this is often the type of conversation that gets derailed by power dynamics, especially when the promise of resources are on the line. Although I knew working with this group would be different based on how much space they held for each other in the first session, I still wanted to be sure that ideas could emerge at a pace and in a way which incorporated everyone’s voices and beliefs.
So there were a few things I proactively did as a facilitator to cultivate the fertile ground for the seeds of ideas to be planted.
Solo preparatory chats
While I generally offer detailed agenda’s to the groups I work with so that people can prepare themselves to be in particular types of headspace, it’s also valuable to shape the plan with the participants themselves so that the translation process between what is being asked during the session is easier.
Quite often I find that people who are used to engaging in collaborative processes, or perhaps even running them themselves, will steam ahead with their responses to an exercise or prompt while someone else in the group is still trying to catch up with what we’re even supposed to be doing or thinking about.
So in the build up to the group space I offered people a chance to have a 1-2-1 with me to talk through some of the things that were percolating for them and think together about how they might bring that into the collective space. This also helped me to provide examples when introducing exercises to the group - for instance when explaining the ‘How might we’ structure I spoke to some example conversations I’d had with quieter members of the group in preparation for the session. This grounded the exercises in things that were top of mind for more than just the loudest or most confident voices in the room.
Connection building warm ups
The society we live in breeds a scarcity mindset. So even if everyone arrives at a collaborative process with the best intentions, our stress responses and self-defensiveness can still creep into that space and affect the level of openness we bring to the conversation.
When I participated in the Queer musical story-telling research one of the facilitators did a yarn based exercise where each participant shared their story while holding a ball of yarn, and whenever they said something that resonated other participants would grab a thread. Building on this technique I invited this group to revisit the values we’d laid out at the start of the process and spend one minute sharing what that word meant to them. By the end most people had spoken into the group and everyone was connected multiple times by this ball of yarn, providing a physical reminder of the connections and experiences that we share.
For me this warm up also promotes deep listening, self-awareness and physical processing. Giving participants an embodied experience of things you want them to be able to easily access for the rest of the day is a really important way to kick off this type of work.
Solo imagination practice
Before talking about limitations or constraints, or developing specific ideas in response to those, I wanted the group to expand their thinking and imagine possibilities. So I invited everyone to draw their ‘utopia’ for the community research ecosystem. Using metaphors to describe how resource flows, power is shared, and knowledge is developed and utilised, each person drew a picture that represented what they dreamed of.
I’ve written before about how sometimes drawings help us to articulate what’s most important and can translate much more easily than words. But the physical act of drawing is often something that evokes the child in us, allowing us to be more playful, and activates our brains in a way that is more embodied.
Non-verbal ‘how might we’ process
As we drew close to defining some ideas I held the group back a little bit longer. I’m sure there were people in the space who were already overflowing with ideas that they wanted to share so no doubt this next step would’ve been painful for some. But for others it was deeply liberating and inclusive.
The ‘how might we’ process is a design-thinking approach to ensure that you don’t narrow too fast into specific mechanisms, but instead ask broader questions so that the intentions behind the ideas you develop are clear. In this instance rather than discussing the ‘how might we’s’ out loud though I invited the group to take an approach similar to a game of ‘consequences’. Each person writes a ‘how might we’ at the top of an A4 sheet, and then it gets passed to the next person who writes a response. The how might we is passed multiple times around multiple people until everyone in the room has contributed a thought to each ‘how might we’ and read what others have contributed.
During the process I suddenly became really nervous and unsure whether it was leading anywhere. Partly because I no longer had verbal cues and content to sense how it was going as the facilitator, and partly because it felt a little limiting for the complex questions the group were posing to one another. However, I reminded myself of all the times that a room full of people have managed to make a lot of noise and say a lot of words without saying much at all - and that perhaps this silence might lead to more thoughtful ideas that better reflect everyone in the room.
Trusting in people as well as the process
But because I’d broken my own patterns of knowing, when we came to transitioning into the group conversation about what next, I completely lost my thread as a facilitator. I had a mild autistic meltdown and had to leave the room for a minute to work out what I was doing and why. When I returned the group proactively demonstrated care and held the space with me as we worked out how to approach the final stage of the day. Each of the groups facilitated their own conversations about ideas for 30-minutes which allowed me to rest and be ready to listen when they returned.
The ideas were all brilliant and captured so much of what different people in the group care about. And as I wrote up the notes from the day and had more time to reflect on what everyone had contributed it was so amazing to be able to visually see each person reflected in the words they had written.
I’d invited a group to trust me in the process, and in return I was reminded to put my trust in the people I’m facilitating. I don’t need to know and manage everyone’s experience perfectly, I just need to show up authentically and know that people will show up whole-heartedly in return.