What are we really being paid for?

Within hours before a recent complex participatory event officially began, the client kept coming to the external facilitation team lead, asking for extra info about the process we were about to facilitate.

It took me a while to realise what was going on. I knew he wasn't an overbearing micromanager of any sort.

Then it dawned on me: the client – a highly competent and confident manager – was coming to the lead facilitator for a series of ‘grandma hugs’. Not for the reassurance that the event would work well – for reminding himself that he was not alone.

In these times of volatility, leaders are under even more pressure than in the ‘old normal’. And even more lonely.

When they hire consultants or facilitators, they believe, and say, that they are buying solutions.

But now that the notion of solutions has expanded – from linear, clear, time-bound measures to ever-evolving solutioning within the changing context - clients are actually hiring us to bear the burden of complexity together with them.

Burden-sharing partly happens on the rational level: finding new points of reference in a shifting environment; co-developing new metrics that better measure progress towards aspired futures;  designing principles that can guide future decisions; finding ways to include all that impact or are impacted by the change intended. And many more.
I am realising that, as a collaborative change facilitator, I spend more and more time with the client before the workshop actually happens: co-sensing, co-questioning, co-exploring the contextual complexity of the issue at hand.

The sharing of the burden also happens energetically: as if some of the burdens is passed from the client on to the facilitator.
At the workshop itself, holding space for a variety of interests brought into the room by (sometimes highly polarised) stakeholders, is no small thing.

I sometimes see myself as the centre-fire that willingly receives the tension, and, in an alchemical way, sends it back to the group in a way that fosters understanding and connection.
To me, empathy practices of nonviolent communication do the alchemical magic.

To be able to be the centre-fire (or the lightning rod, if you will), I need to constantly nurture my inner capacity to hold multiple stories, perspectives and possibilities about (divisive) issues with ease and trust in Life.
More than ever we, facilitators and consultants, need to take good care of ourselves – to be able to take care of our clients, and the issues they live with.

Two things are key: regular personal practice, and community support.

• By personal practice, I mean any regular regenerative activities (doings or nondoings) intended to re-source us: from journaling to martial arts to compassionate inner dialogue to walking, meditating, praying ... There are always sources of power available that we can tap into -  within and without.
   
• And it takes a community: human and non-human beings that have our backs. In tough times like now – when the old, known ways of perceiving, thinking and doing are collapsing – it is so nourishing to have communities of people who explore the same questions that are animating our own lives. Either locally or virtually; ad hoc or lasting ones.

Community is my word for 2022.