Dear Lisa
In a recent Holding Space session you articulated a really important line that we must tread as facilitators: How do we tell the difference between people being/feeling unsafe versus people feeling uncomfortable? And how do we respond to expressions of those things accordingly?
When I first began my journey as a Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) practitioner 10 years ago I assumed that safety in and of itself was the aim, especially for those who experience marginalisation and multiple forms of oppression. But as I’ve developed my practice I’ve realised that it is through the capacity to experience rupture and repair within a collective space that the real transformation often occurs for people. Cultivating a space and set of relationships where that’s possible is hard, and when we are so disconnected and disembodied as a society, we facilitators are taking on a lot when we take on the question of safety.
When others have asked me about designing ‘safe spaces’ a lot of what people are looking for is a set of boxes they can easily tick for all spaces. While this is possible to an extent it ultimately lacks the nuance of the cultural context you might be working within. What’s more is that unless people know the intricacies of all the trauma they’ve experienced in their life, and you have full control to dictate how everyone else behaves, no space will ever be undeniably safe.
There has been a lot of talk within the field more recently around ‘Brave spaces’ instead of ‘safe spaces’ and it reminds me of the safe uncertainty matrix we used to use in our work at Collaborative Future. But to even get a group of people with relatively similar levels of experience, needs and intentions to agree on their range of tolerance when it comes to what safe uncertainty looks like is a lot. So sometimes other structures need to be available for a facilitator to be able to confidently navigate different people’s needs and vulnerabilities - but when working with a diverse range of people how do you decide what to legitimately centre within that?
In a recent DEI workshop I ran a white middle-class CEO chose not to engage in an exercise because it required them to share their beliefs without being able to hear people’s reactions to what they were saying, or to pitch what they were going to say in response to someone else’s standpoint. What they were experiencing at that moment was a fear of being vulnerable. A loss of power and control. The exercise wasn’t giving them an opportunity to perform what the rest of the group wanted to hear; it was asking them to tap into their authentic self and express without the security of other people’s validation. In this scenario, as a facilitator, I tend not to worry about the discomfort a person with obvious power and privilege is feeling, and I don’t believe they would be legitimate to say they were to claim they felt ‘unsafe’. But I do worry about the defensiveness that might ensue and the backwards steps they might take if they are not held with care.
Which is one reason for why I always make things optional. We should encourage autonomy and self-determination when we facilitate - there’s nothing worse than dragging someone through an experience they don’t want or aren’t ready to participate in. The flipside of why flexibility and making things optional for participants is a useful facilitation tool is reclamation of power by those who are oppressed or who have been harmed in the past.
In the work I do I can’t provide trigger warnings for every bit of challenging content. I can’t stop someone from saying something potentially ignorant or harmful. But I can make it possible for people to protect themselves. When an autistic person opts out of an exercise because it’s overwhelming them, or a black person doesn’t join a break out room full of white people because they don’t want to be exposed to the vibes that might be present, that is something to celebrate: people who have likely had choices taken away from them in the past are reclaiming their freedom to choose. When people invoke the ‘ouch’ protocol, and choose not to explain their feelings, they are putting a boundary up in the conversation as well as saying ‘it’s not my job / I don’t have the spoons to educate this group’. And in that moment they are reclaiming their power over their time, their body, their mind.
Both of these scenarios don’t rely on me having to rapidly make a judgement in the moment about who’s needs are legitimate, but instead it treats all people as adults that can determine their own range of tolerance. Holding space for people to do that, and then in an ideal world circling back around to them after the experience to see what they took away from it, would be my top priority as a facilitator trying to tread this line. Of course there have been times when I’ve held spaces where no matter how flexible I made that space, someone still felt like they had to push themselves beyond their limits, or I came away feeling that there should’ve been a greater level of protection to avoid certain harms from occurring.
With that learning I am then able to take a pre-emptive approach to harm reduction - I can make active choices about who should be part of the space or not, I can spot the red flags that demonstrate to me there might be people who cannot hold themselves through discomfort or protect themselves from retraumatisation, I can give people a heads up to prepare themselves for the conversations that might occur. As a result of past experiences I can also now decline work when I know that a group are simply not ready to work collectively and navigate vulnerable topics together. With ‘collaboration’ and ‘co-design’ being a trend in many previously siloed institutions and sectors that are powered by capitalist and white supremacist culture there is more potential for harm than many of those commissioning or funding these processes will ever realise.
As a society we are not yet putting enough value and impetus on the work required to be in relationship with one another. And when we as facilitators make our work small or ignore our instincts around what’s actually possible within a dysfunctional group, we devalue the sacredness of collective spaces and processes. This might sound lofty but entering into collective work more consciously has the power to change so much within our society - and everyone’s experiences within that process affect whether change continues to gain momentum or comes to a grinding halt.
Facilitating collective work within western and capitalist societies in particular is so much more than just helping people talk to each other. At every moment we are inviting people to embody something that actively goes against the individualist cultures they’ve been raised in. And when we understand that we can start to be more strategic and thoughtful about who we invite to engage in that way and how we choose to hold space for them.
Which brings me to the final thing I think we can do as facilitators learning to tread this line of safety and potential for harm. In a society where vulnerability is scary, certain forms of harm often go unchallenged, and punishment is normalised, the biggest opportunity we have is through modelling a different way of being - in particular in relation to how we respond to mistakes, take accountability and find opportunities for repair after rupture.
This is particularly hard to get right because in some spaces people can be quick to blame the space holder as it’s easier than addressing the ways that the group chose to show up. Sometimes participants might go as far as being actively disruptive for the facilitator because they have a deeper conflict which the facilitator isn’t being paid or equipped to address. But it is through demonstrating our humanity and our fallibility that we can start to get people to experience facilitators as people who are just trying to do our best with the knowledge and time that we have, and to make it possible for others to step into accountability themselves as a result.
That said, I also spend a lot of time with facilitators who take on too much responsibility too quickly and blame themselves whenever anything goes wrong. Acknowledging when we fuck up is nuanced, and it relates to power and privilege. The reason why many people, especially facilitators within social justice spaces, go into this work is because they are deeply invested in change and transformation so they often hold themselves to high standards. It’s important to remember that we are just humans within the process and to extend the grace we might show the people we are facilitating to ourselves also.
Through working with regular supervision, and getting support from co-facilitators I’ve been able to hold myself more steady when things go wrong, and that is ultimately what has enabled me to make braver choices about the spaces I hold, how I hold them and how far I ask participants to go.
Lisa is Implementation Lead for Wellbeing Economy Alliance, and this conversation arose out of an exercise we did during the Holding Space series called ‘Min Specs’.