Dear Holding Space alumni
When I first launched my “Holding Space” peer learning programme a year ago, a pedantic woman literally on the other side of the world who I had never met and who has never since engaged with me commented on my LinkedIn post saying something along the lines of “I noticed that you seem to use Holding Space and facilitation interchangeably. But in my experience the two things are actually very different…”
While I rolled my eyes at the time at another facilitator gatekeeping skills and policing language, I'm actually very grateful for now because it made me interrogate and solidify my beliefs. For me there is no need to delineate between space holding and facilitation if you are doing both things right. As Adrienne Maree Brown describes so beautifully in Emergent Strategy we are constantly in our work as facilitators holding space for change to occur - within people, within systems, within the process. And when I am holding space for people I am always facilitating to some extent. That might be in a very light touch way, that might be in a way that is co-created, that might be in a way where the role and responsibility is shared and distributed, it might just be for one person…. but I am constantly facilitating because I believe that is what we all need to be doing to some extent even if we don’t consider ourselves facilitators. And this latter point is important. Yes I’ve had lots of seasoned facilitators join ‘Holding Space’ in order to be connected to one another and have space to process their work collectively, but there has also been just as many people who wouldn’t feel confident calling themselves ‘facilitators’ joining and if anything they are far more frequently holding space in communities, networks and movements, but are going unrecognised and undervalued for the work that they do.
For me the capacity to hold space, and the skill of facilitation, are some of the most important things we can foster in a time when we need a whole new way of being to emerge in the world, and I’m so privileged to have worked with so many of you that feel the same. If we allow our families, our communities, our workplaces, our movements to repeatedly follow patterns of being, thinking, relating and creating that mirror the status quo we are not truly changing anything. Facilitation is what gives us the chance of having just enough structure and support to be able to flip the script and write new possibilities. A long term member of the Holding Space community, Amy, recently spoke of inviting ‘little acts of rebellion’ through the way she facilitates - making it okay for people to self-manage, to move through the space as they need, and to challenge her too. Another member, Thembi, said that the Holding Space programme had reminded them of the massive variety that exists within natural ecosystems, how the same goes for humans and how it’s our job as facilitators to keep all of those unique beings in balance… but capitalism doesn’t want us to engage with that level of nuance and complexity. Facilitation is the key to stepping away from harmful and oppressive structures and creating processes and experiences where we adapt, slow down and treat every individual as equally valuable.
And with the amount of change that is required in the world we can’t rely just on expert facilitators or mediators or coaches to facilitate groups and hold space for people. Andrea J Ritchie says “As existing systems collapse, facilitation becomes governance”, and if this is the case now is the time that we get to design this together. We don’t need facilitators that replicate the culture of gate-keepers and decision-makers to date, we need facilitators that believe that everyone is capable and that the skills they have can be accessible to everyone. Which is why I designed the Holding space programme: to bring facilitators and potential facilitators together to explore to what it means to facilitate and to support one another to lean into this role with more confidence.
It might sound strange but I didn’t choose to be a facilitator, it chose me. Right from when I was little I couldn’t help but notice when someone was struggling to articulate themselves in a space. I’d automatically find myself stepping in to offer structure and support. I didn’t know why and I didn’t know what I was doing. But as people responded to the ways I did this I learnt what worked and what didn’t. I delved deeper into what good collaboration and good conversations looked and felt like for and with different people. I started to pay attention to the dynamics I could feel within a room. I started calling out abuses of power within spaces and attempted to level the playing field in decision-making processes. And when I was invited last minute at the age of 21 to stand in for a chair that was ill at a strategy day with 30+ university vice-chancellors and made them all laugh with a ridiculous warm up I’d made up on the spot I realised that maybe I had a talent for bringing people together. Following my autism diagnosis I realised that maybe facilitation had just ended up being an extremely intense special interest from a young age because I had struggled so much myself to feel heard, understood, or connected within groups.
I never paid for an extortionate facilitation qualification because I could never afford to. But also because I never had time. People needed me to facilitate now. It was a skill so many groups realised was lacking as soon as they experienced me holding space for them. And after nearly 15 years of facilitating, probably averaging about 1,000 hours of active facilitation each year, I think I’m finally confident enough to say that it’s possible I’m an ‘expert’ (even though I have no official papers that confirm that). But that doesn’t make me more of a facilitator than anyone else. We need as many facilitators and space holders as we can get.
If you have a desire to help people have better conversations you are a facilitator. If you have noticed and intervened when someone hasn’t spoken in a space you are a facilitator. If you make suggestions to friends about how you might decide your plans then you are a facilitator. And if you are a facilitator you have a responsibility, you have power and you have the potential to change the face of humanity.