by Marco Bertaglia
Why does facilitation matter?
I see citizens’ assemblies as the way forward to cope with the many crises we face. The most effective format for dialogue to happen is supported by facilitators, who are confronted with a field where cooperation is culturally hampered.
The vast majority of us have been deprived from birth of what we need biologically to thrive, including full acceptance of what is alive within us. Socialised into right/wrong paradigms, we soon learn that some parts of us are not welcome. Babies know that without the care of other people we would be dead. To survive, we learn to detach from what is alive in us so that we can belong. We learn to function in terms of right/wrong, good/bad. We develop rationality. We learn to expect certain behaviours within systems based on duty, punishment and reward.
A key consequence is that we are less able to listen with curiosity, openness and compassion. We are prone to polarisation, wanting to prove our point rather than seeking solutions that work for all. Most of us activate a trauma response to ideas we perceive as incompatible with our views. We defend our ideas rather than listen to what has nourished the lives of others. Most of us want a competitive advantage over others, and very few of us have learned to work cooperatively.
Some of us have little confidence in ourselves, less ability to speak up, uncertain that our contribution will be received with care. Many do not trust that what they have to say matters. Under patriarchy, this is particularly true for women, and it can be true for most minorities.
Citizens selected by sortition to participate in assemblies come from all walks of life. Indeed, inclusiveness is a goal of dialogic democracy in order to harness the full power of collective intelligence. We are concerned to ensure that the voices of all those who have been systematically excluded from decision-making are heard. I see this as requiring explicit arrangements to compensate for all the barriers to mutual listening that most of us carry with us. I see here a key role for facilitators, who can enable or jeopardise the outcome of direct democratic deliberations.
What can go wrong with facilitation?
The issues I am seeking to describe here are those that I have experienced in real life situations. I will not give the context from which I extrapolate these experiences in order to protect real people, for each of whom I have great compassion, knowing from personal experience how extremely difficult our role as facilitators is.
My experience with assemblies began about six years ago, building on my previous experience both as a trainer in nonviolent communication and as a mediator, group facilitator and co-chair of high-level institutional meetings. In this section I draw from assemblies where I was not the facilitator, but rather either a participant or an observer, in civil resistance movements, associations, or institutional or academic “pilots”.
In about two-thirds of the cases, I experienced little or no introduction to how the facilitator intended to take care of the process. In most cases, I did not see the facilitator offer any guidance on how people would ask to speak, how they would be given the floor, and how the facilitator would intervene and with what aim. As a result, in many instances I saw a percentage between 15 and 30% of people speaking between 20 and 40% of the time available, with at least one or two people or 10-25% of participants speaking less than 10% of the time or not at all. In well over two-thirds of cases in my experience, people who seemed more comfortable speaking in public did most of the speaking.
We are collectively experimenting, in niches, with a new way of opening up to a dialogical, deliberative democracy. We are finally trying together to include voices that have been excluded for so long. For the first time, citizens can say that they can be heard. In groups where citizens finally have this opportunity, some people may have an immense unfulfilled need to be heard, to be seen. I have seen many cases where people use more than their fair share of time, even when everyone is given an equal opportunity to speak, often to satisfy their need to be heard—sometimes more than once—distracting from the topic at hand or the purpose of the meeting. I saw facilitators listening to the end of such monologues, without interrupting, to signal at the same time interest in the person, concern for their needs, and concern for the whole and the purpose at hand.
I have seen several threads opened by participants without any of them being closed or acknowledged as still open. I saw some participants withdrawing from contexts where others seemed to speak more easily, and only in less than 25% of the cases did I see the facilitator highlighting what was happening and inviting contributions from people who were less engaged.
In almost all the cases I observed, when the facilitator tried to ensure a balanced contribution from all, the most common solution was to divide the time equally and let everyone speak, which I am convinced is not the most effective way to include all voices in a limited time frame.
I have heard facilitators take a suggestion or idea from a participant, as a contribution to addressing a question or issue, and respond with their own view (judgement) of the idea expressed, with phrases such as ‘very good idea’, rather than helping the whole group to agree, disagree or converge on the idea, exactly as expressed, or modified to include nuances, other perspectives, or changed altogether as a result of the dialogue.
I hope to see a shift towards facilitation that cares for the whole and embodies a focus on human needs, values and desires, with the intention of helping groups of people converge on solutions that work for all. I would see great hope for society if we could learn to do this.
Facilitation that effectively cares for the whole
I find inspiration in Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication, the work of Miki Kashtan and of Dominic Barter. I see facilitation as connected to more than just techniques. This section relies on Miki Kashtan’s Convergent Facilitation,.
I see the role of a facilitator as infusing the group with the intention to co-create solutions that work for all. I envision a world in which love and care for the whole are creatively brought to the forefront.
There is a huge gap between the vision and the present reality. A facilitator in a citizens’ assembly is therefore called to compensate for all that the structures of domination have firmly established. We are working for change within a field where these structures and effects have not yet been transformed.
Among the aspects I hope we keep in mind as facilitators, I consider most important an awareness of power dynamics, privilege and the pervasive effects of patriarchal conditioning on all of us. For example, I wish facilitators to be mindful that women have endured millennia of little or no agency, of their voices not being heard. At the same time, facilitation is concerned with the inclusion of male humans beyond right/wrong.
I am very keen to imagine a strong focus on being aware of the present moment, staying connected to one’s own intuition and values, and caring for all participants, for the whole and the collectively agreed purpose.
I want to clarify what I mean when I say I value that “all voices be heard”. I am not suggesting to divide time equally among people. I am not encouraging that all people speak one after the other, without deciding on what is said. In the case of citizens’ assemblies, I deem paramount that deliberations do come to actual proposals, often within severe time constraints.
I wish facilitators to bring clarity about how specific proposals will be heard, and strategies implemented, how much resonance or divergence assessed before other threads are opened. I see it as important that facilitators begin by stating the purpose of the meeting, its expected duration, verifying if all are aligned.
In doing this, as in many other cases, I see at least two things as important:
- questions are as often as possible asked in a way that they require a yes/no answer;
- extreme precision is used to tell what the facilitator is desiring as a response.
I always like to hear at the very beginning how the facilitator is going to elicit responses, how people are going to ask for interventions and other key agreements. In my experience, being in a facilitated group is a completely new experience for most citizens.
I experienced the usefulness of brief mirroring of what people express. A skill of facilitators that I see as fundamental is the skill to interrupt, in such a way as simultaneously caring for the person being interrupted and for the whole.
Eliciting open-ended answers, rather than simple yes/no, may result in a longer articulation of what a person wants to say. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it takes more time.
Convergent facilitation aims at togetherness. Before converging on a specific “what”, the first stage is to gather criteria, the non-controversial essence, by answering the question “What is important to everyone in the group? The aim is to elicit answers that give the why of what people want. The facilitator listens to what each person says and then translates it into the essence, checking with the whole group to see if there is disagreement or if the identified essence is noncontroversial. To do this, facilitators need to be well versed in the art of empathic listening. In my experience, and I say this with great compassion, this may well be the bottleneck of available skills and experience.
The second phase invites togetherness. Now that we all have a list of agreed criteria, i.e. what is important to all in its essence and what is non-controversial, the whole group looks at all of this to come up with proposals. The core question of this second phase is: “Does anyone have a way forward that addresses all the criteria on the list? This is followed by a third phase, where the aim is to arrive as a group at a decision that everyone can accept as their own.
A plea for the future of citizens’ assemblies
Empathic listening, connection to self, awareness of power dynamics, clarity and precision with words, concrete requests are elements I see as fundamental for facilitators. In the face of so much conflict aversion, I also think it is important to be able to stay with conflict and dissent and see them as resources.
I believe that facilitators need to engage with right/wrong training, relearning presence and connection to what is alive in each moment, being able to face a field of consciousness that carries millennia of patriarchal conditioning towards scarcity, separation and powerlessness, and relearning to trust in the possibility of togetherness.
One of the key ways I believe we can do this is by creating spaces for systematic observation and mutual feedback among facilitators to learn from experience and increase effectiveness. In imagining this as a mechanism for learning together, I am connected to the hope that Citizens’ Assemblies can truly help to bring about a new world of interconnectedness and peace, which I believe is our deepest collective dream.
Marco Bertaglia has been a group facilitator, mediator, and trainer in Nonviolent Communication for 25 years. He was also an academic and an EU Official, worked at the EU Commission in Brussels, and at the Joint Research Centre, which he left in 2019 to be the national coordinator of Extinction Rebellion, Italy. In 2021, he founded the intentional community Comunità rigenerative to seed ecovillages in abandoned places in the Italian Alps. Passionate about facilitation and togetherness, he aims to recreate community and embody Gandhian nonviolence in all of life.