Teach-in tonight at 7:30

[Joe Cooper]

Howdy all,

Facilitation team is hosting a teach-in on facilitation, consensus, and the General Assembly tonight at 7:30 at City Hall Plaza. Everyone is encouraged to attend. We'll be covering facilitation of smaller group meetings to help our working groups work more efficiently and effectively, accessibility techniques to help insure our General Assembly is welcoming to all, and guidelines for recognizing what makes good and bad proposals. We'll also be holding a mock GA, wherein new facilitators can get some practice handling difficult situations. The teach-in will probably last one and a half to two hours, depending on the number of participants.

I'm hoping that a few experienced facilitators will be on-hand to provide varied insights into handling difficult situations. We don't have a huge amount of formal conflict resolution and de-escalation training in our group, but we do now have a pretty broad spectrum of experience of successful and unsuccessful instances where we've had to deal with problems, and that experience is valuable. It becomes more valuable when we distribute the lessons learned to all of our people. So, this is likely to be a useful teach-in, even if you have already facilitated a bunch of GAs and have no real weak spots; you'll get the chance to see how others respond in difficult situations, and share your own experiences and results. I'm personally looking forward to learning some new things.

This is also a trial run at the idea of a mock GA for teaching purposes. We'll be doing a larger scale one in the future, with scripts and planned roles, etc., which we'll record and make available for folks in other occupations who may still be having problems within their GAs that we've resolved.

[Nolan Darilek]

We don't have a lot of conflict/de escalation experience in our group,
something that I think would have been helpful last night. I'd like to
make getting that a priority somehow.

Back in November we had folks doing anti-oppression training and I wish
I'd taken it. Does anyone know how we might be able to have that as a
regular teach-in?

Facilitation and process are great tools, but sometimes the latter
breaks down in a major way. When that happens, I don't know what tools
we have to keep people from doing what I did and walking away either out
of concern or fear.

[Joe Cooper]

Last night had no process and no facilitation...the person who stepped up to facilitate decided to invent a process on the spot, rather than following (or even attempting to follow) the one everyone is familiar with and can be expected to follow reasonably calmly. I left the moment I saw the meeting was being run according to the whims of one person, and that those whims were not conducive to productive discussion or decision-making. 

So, there was no opportunity for facilitation and process to break down last night, as there was effectively no facilitation or process.

In short, last night was an example of why we keep holding these teach-ins. There is an expectation in our group that the handful of experienced facilitators are going to drop everything and be available for every GA and every IA, and that simply isn't a realistic expectation. We all have jobs, other projects we want to work on, etc.

We attempted to reduce the number of meetings to four per week in recognition of this lack of volunteers in facilitation nearly two months ago, and two days after it went into effect a proposal was brought up and passed to go back to seven meetings per week (with the alternate days being "Informational Assemblies", but they still require facilitation, just not a full team; last night was effectively an informational assembly, and we saw what happens when an IA is un-facilitated). Hopefully some of the people who were there last night will attend our teach-in tonight and feel empowered to step up in the future, so meetings like last night do not happen again.

Part of stepping back is allowing bad things to happen, so that there can be recognition of a hole needing to be filled. Many of us are trying to step back from facilitation, because of frequent complaints that we're facilitating too often (and because of other projects, and many other reasons)...so, I guess last night turned out to be an example of what happens when no one steps up to fill that gap. Hopefully the hole will be recognized and new people will step up, making Occupy a stronger and more diverse organization.

OK, I ranted a little bit. Sorry about that. And, I'm sorry you witnessed a crappy meeting. I didn't think it would devolve into an ugly meeting. I though it would just peter out into nothing after a few minutes. It dropped from about 25 to a dozen people in the ten minutes I was there, and I figured it'd just keep going until no one was left. I guess I should have realized that another option would be for the dozen people remaining to get really frustrated and angry because the meeting was unproductive and divisive and provided no meaningful container for the conflict.

On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 12:06 PM, Nolan Darilek <no...@thewordnerd.info> wrote:

We don't have a lot of conflict/de escalation experience in our group, something that I think would have been helpful last night. I'd like to make getting that a priority somehow.

Back in November we had folks doing anti-oppression training and I wish I'd taken it. Does anyone know how we might be able to have that as a regular teach-in?

Facilitation and process are great tools, but sometimes the latter breaks down in a major way. When that happens, I don't know what tools we have to keep people from doing what I did and walking away either out of concern or fear.

[Lainie]

What I don't understand is why there are some people who only participate when there is no (or minimal) facilitation. I appreciated that people who I have never heard speak before were speaking, even though things were contentious. How can we encourage full participation within the facilitation model? Is it just pointless to wish for that?

Also, I have to give props to Shanta, who seemed to keep his head about him when things got hairy. 

I want to step up as a facilitator, but I just haven't had the time to attend training, and I very rarely can spend more than a couple of hours at a time on any given day. Also, I fear I am too much of a hot-head to remain neutral. Working on that. :P

--
"There's more than one way to tell each other things, and there's more than one way to listen, too. And if you've never heard a tree telling you something, then I'd say you really don't know how to listen just yet." -Ida B (via Katherine Hannigan)

[Joe Cooper]

Lainie, that's a really interesting observation, and I hadn't really thought of it from that perspective before. I've also noticed it about IAs with minimal facilitation and no stack. I'm pretty sure the "get on stack" element and time limits are part of the issue there, and they lead to some folks being unwilling to participate. Perhaps it feels like there are "gatekeepers" and some folks are so used to being shut down by gatekeepers that they may not be willing to talk to one. It may be challenging, also, to know how to speak in the right time and place, if you just want to get something off your chest (which is why special topics are lightly facilitated and mostly used as "group therapy" sessions). There's also a bit of an inertia effect...when one person who never speaks starts chiming in, several of their friends tend to join. These are things we ought to be trying to resolve; we want dissent, and we want different views. We don't want only the opinions of a bunch of people who think alike.

That said, I'm not generally willing to participate in completely unstructured meetings, so I left last night, and I very rarely make IAs. I just don't have the free time for meetings without a clear purpose. The group therapy special topic meetings sometimes have a useful purpose for the health of the group as a whole, but it's not really how I'm inclined to activate for the occupation. So, I'd like for us to have more people on facilitation team who enjoy and find value in those group therapy sessions, so that they can continue to happen when they're needed, and so that they can be channeled into a safe container for conflict rather than opening up wounds and picking at them. When they happen without experienced facilitators, they tend to devolve into shouting matches and accusations and grandstanding, which isn't good for anyone.

We'd love to have you actively involved in facilitation team. It's been my experience that most people can learn to be neutral, though sometimes it takes a couple of GAs with someone having your back in order to be able to self-police on the neutrality question. Even some of our best occasionally fail at neutrality, as well, and we usually get past it without any major hiccups...we just talk about it after, and remind folks not to do it again. It becomes easier when you step into the "observer" role a few times, and you may even find it helps you to grow into a more even-keeled person. I've certainly grown as a person since I began facilitating.

[Joe Cooper]

BTW-I'm going to try to arrive around 6, for the welcome wagon, and then meet up with any facilitators who can help out around 6:30, so we can plan a bit of the mock GA stuff and make sure we have a checklist of things we want to talk about.

I know Spencer will be there, if a little late, and I believe James and Maryann have said they could be there. Natalie planned to attend, but can't be with us due to some new legal troubles.

[Jonathan Schultz]

Up in DC, occupy tampa did a really informative deescalation teach-in. I'm still out of town for a few weeks, but anyone interested should ask em for their notes or help and ideas.

[Nolan Darilek]

Here are some of my thoughts on what happened. Note that this is kind of a dump without structure. I'm still processing lots of it and don't know if I'm capable of arriving at meaningful conclusions, but maybe something I say will spark something in someone else.

I felt very defensive and somewhat concerned during the yelling and screaming, so I turned away and made a remark along the lines of "I guess one good thing to come out of this is that more folks will come down off the steps." My intent in making that statement was that there was a lot of misinformation and mistrust being thrown around, and I felt like some of that might be mitigated by having these folks, some of whom I'd not seen at GAS before, come down and join our process. This sparked a huge rant from Azurra about how many of our homeless occupiers were putting in lots of effort, more than were many others, and that they should have our support. I later learned that this wasn't a direct response to what I said and that there were people gathered around me listening, but at the time I very much didn't appreciate being the unintended target of that and getting it pretty much directly in my face.

For the record, she and I talked/hugged it out. I'll admit to still being a bit upset about my perception that I was yelled at for basically trying to find a positive, but that isn't to say she owes me an apology or anything. Sometimes we may misunderstand each other and sometimes we may genuinely be mean, but I think that taking the time to hear each other out calmly before opening up on anyone, directly or indirectly, is just as much a part of our process as are GAs.

But it seems like folks feel disenfranchised by our processes somehow, even though we run teach-ins, even though we didn't have a GA last night at all until someone stepped forth and offered to facilitate, and this after several aborted attempts. I don't know what else to do about that. I recognize and have recognized that I'm coming from a place of privilege where I *am* used to my voice being heard, at least about some issues. I don't know if we're dealing with a real issue that we've created, or one of perception.

Azurra also seemed opposed to the notion of GAs/process in general. I wonder if there's some way to support both camps while disenfranchising none. If people want to go off and do their own thing without GAs then let them, but encourage them not to disrupt those of us who do want a process. Then people can go yell and vent, and they don't end up driving off those of us who do want to help but are averse to that kind of environment. Seriously, one day someone's going to yell at me at an occupation, and if I don't shut down and turn away, I'm going to yell something horribly cruel back just to shut them down, because *I don't fucking like being yelled at, period*.

And I think that right there is why I have a bit of lingering upset. If someone thinks that GAs are boring and not helpful to them then fine. I won't tie them up and demand that they participate. But I'd hope for the same respect in return, and when our process was disrupted and I spoke up in defense of it, I really felt like I was left no path other than to give these disruptive elements the ultimate power to drive us apart--that, or just learn to be OK with people who use yelling/intimidation to achieve their ends. And I'm sorry, but I'm not sure I'm ready to do that for the movement just now.

Anyhow, just some thoughts. I'm planning on being at tonight's teach-in, though I'm not sure I'm cut out for facilitation.