Spirit of the Facilitator…The Dance of Dissonance

Linda Garrett, Center for Creative Learning

I facilitated a Team Spirit Session the other day that did not go as I had planned…what a surprise! The session was intended to be a preliminary overview & initiating session for a group of educators who had been working together for more than a year to start a charter school. Several of the members had had some exposure to the Team Spirit process, but the group was growing and needed a model to help them maintain the spirit that they naturally possessed as a group of innovators. Since I was a member of this team, I was intending to facilitate as well as participate in the session.

As many teams will do (especially highly intuitive ones), this team decided to wander off the path to explore things that were not on the initial "agenda". At the end of the session, I was feeling a great deal of dissonance, both as the facilitator of the process and as a member of the team. I struggled with the inner turmoil and felt a deep desire to push the dissonance aside by ignoring it or by deciding to abandon the process. Yet I knew that I needed to dig deeper to find what treasures lay buried beneath the surface of my dissonance. Here is what I found…

Lesson #1: Trust the Process.
It is sometimes difficult as facilitator to let go of the agenda because it may seem to participants that you have no control of the process. Well, maybe you don't. I am learning to trust the deepening that happens from allowing the discussion, and my initial plans, to wander. A spirited facilitator can let this wandering happen, flowing with it until it is ready to reconnect to the main stream, wherever that may be.

Our wanderings took us off, and time ran out before we could completely re-enter the stream. As a result, members floated away in a very disharmonious state. It would be a week before some of this dissonance would be resolved. Or would it? I was extremely uncomfortable with leaving in the middle of this dissonance, my own as well as the incompleteness I felt in the group…

After I could let go of my ego telling me that I should have been able to close the session in a better way, I began to see that this, too, was an important part of "trusting the process." Perhaps the team would learn more about the concept of dissonance if they were left to spin in it for a while. Perhaps individuals would resolve their own dissonance in ways that could not happen in the group. Perhaps I needed to learn something new so that I could shed light in a different way.

Lesson #2: Team Spirit isn't about the spiral and activities.
The real Spirit of the team, and the place where high performance exists, comes from deepening our connections to each other. It also comes from exploring our work and our relationships to each other in new and expanded ways. While my heart knew that we had completed what we were meant to complete for the day, my head still wanted to complete the agenda. (Sometimes it takes awhile for my head to catch up.) This was the cause of my dissonance.

As a result of this experience, I shifted my thinking about how to offer the series of modular Team Spirit sessions. Rather than moving through the spiral facilitating each phase with an experiential activity, I would need to be a much more fluid guide. The activities, after all, are only intended to ignite the spirit of the team by taking discussion deeper and to places it might not otherwise go. The order is not important. Moving quickly through some phases and getting hung up in others, we improve the spirit of the team by opening it in new and unbounded ways.

Lesson #3: Be willing to dance with dissonance.
We all know the concept spirited teams are like good music, requiring both consonant and dissonant tones to create harmony and we learn most from our dissonance if we are open to exploring it fully. How much easier the concept is when it doesn't come too close!

When I see dissonance in others, I can usually think of a dozen ways to blend it, moving into harmony. When I experience dissonance in myself and when I am really ready to take it on, then I find myself in the true dance of leaning. This is where the spirit really soars…whether I am a facilitator or a team member, because in face I am always both. When I am a truly spirited facilitator, there is no separating the two.

Dancing with dissonance means inviting it in as a partner to my own learning, not just watching it happen within others. We can only reach high performance - as a team, as unique individuals, and as spirited facilitators - if we are willing to be fully in the dance. Learning to meet dissonance head on, to learn from it and then to let go of it is essential to the spirit of the facilitator as well as the success of the team.

Linda Garrett is owner of the Center for Creative Learning in Boise, and works as a "creativity consultant" with businesses, schools and individuals. Linda is a Team Spirit Associate and will be offering a Team Spirit certification in Boise, ID August 4-7, 1998. Linda's book, Random Acts of Abundance will be published at the end of 1998. Call Linda at 208-345-4235 or lindag@primenet.com.>