Training on Facilitative Leadership
Shortly after his administration began, Pres. Obama issued a document stating his commitment to open government and transparency. In May, the administration invited recommendations to their new website “Open Government Brainstorming”. The organizations who have been involved in the planning of this include NCDD, National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation, America Speaks, International Association for Public Participation, and others. Anyone and everyone can post suggestions on this website. Here’s my recommendation on “Training for Facilitative Leadership”.
In order to create a program of dynamic public engagement, elected officials and government staff need training in the process and skills required to be successful – and this is a great opportunity to develop such trainings.
In order to support effective public engagement, leaders from federal, state and city government need to learn best practices for engaging the public, to understand:
* Facilitative leadership: they are the conveners of a process, whose purpose is to gather wisdom from many people. They need to identify and include the stakeholders who have a stake or interest, to help solve a problem that no one agency can solve by themselves. Government officials shouldn’t feel the need to have all the answers.
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Nay to Robert’s Rules of Order!
For those of us trained in participatory meetings and consensus building, attending a meeting based on Robert’s Rules of Orders can come as a real shock. Here’s a case where the structure itself doesn’t maximize, and may not allow, inclusive conversation, and the decisions apparently arrived at may not be supported by everyone. It feels constraining to me to define people’s comments as proposals, when we might just be thinking out loud. Sometimes we need to hear ourselves think, or hear other’s thoughts, and see what the range of opinions could be, before we’re ready to think in terms of a “proposal”, yea or nay.
At a meeting I attended last week, soon after an idea was put forward, the moderator asked “Does anyone object?” Moving too quickly to objections doesn’t allow for divergent thinking – it prematurely calls for convergent thinking, when the full spectrum of ideas hasn’t been discussed. Some moderators may allow for longer divergence, but there’s something in the paired structure of proposal and objection that sets up the convergence. As well, anyone who does object to the idea is put on the spot, because their response is set up in advance as an opposing idea, instead of just voicing an opinion, or exploring options. People who have reservations may hesitate to express them at that point, especially if there’s a sense that they are going against the majority view.
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