I find that people are endlessly fascinated by other people –particularly by the rich, the famous and the powerful. The work I do with wealthy families seems to pique that innate curiosity. To outsiders, these families seem mysterious and fraught with extraordinary complexity, and so I am often asked how I do what I do to effect change in these seemingly impossible situations. To understand “how” I do this work, it is important to understand “what” I do. My role, quite simply, is to help families collaborate more effectively. This collaboration is often called “family governance” in professional circles.
What is governance?
Governance can be seen, quite simply, as the way groups make collective decisions for their common good. As with any group, families must first determine what that common good is and then develop informal and formal agreements that will guide their collective actions to attain it.
This sounds like it should be simple. In reality, it rarely is. Family governance always involves working with individual perspectives, collective structures, a great deal of power and anxiety, genuine care, personal hurt, group process and family culture. All of these factors are in play in any family I work with. Despite this personal and familial complexity, I find it important to note that governance – which is “a method or system of management” – is not therapy – which is “the treatment of disease or disorder, as by some remedial, rehabilitating or curative process”. (For more about this distinction between governance and therapy, click here.)
Part of this work in family governance – developing collaboration – involves consulting, advising, teaching and “coaching”, but when I am working with the family as a whole, I am doing the work of a facilitator. This is where the most critical work in governance is done. To understand what is required to do this work well, it is useful to differentiate between four types of facilitation.
Basic Facilitation: This is the kind of facilitation most people are used to – the sort that exists in most business meetings. Good basic facilitation results in productive meetings. Bad basic facilitation results in boring and pointless meetings. Great basic facilitation results in creative and exciting meetings. This kind of facilitation has the following characteristics:
- Skill level: Basic
- Skills required: Designing an agenda, convening the meeting, encouraging participation and eliciting points of view, fostering innovation and creativity, arriving at decisions and allocating responsibilities, and timekeeping.
- Theoretical Underpinnings: Meeting theory and best practices
- Focus: Education or information exchange, high attention to task and low attention to process or group dynamics,
- Suitable for: Simple education or information sharing, operational decision making when basic alignment as to objectives already exists.
- Overt conflict Level: Low
- Covert conflict Level: Low to Medium
- Facilitator’s required capacities: Emotional maturity, capacity to put aside self-interest, awareness of basic group process.
- Commentary: Basic facilitation is useful when information must be conveyed or when decisions are simple and straightforward. The problem with simple facilitation in family situations is that the dynamics in the room can quickly and dramatically outstrip the skill set for simple facilitation. This means that advisors that take on basic facilitation must know that, if necessary, they can control the room through the agenda and be assured that the content being discussed is either not open to real comment or debate or is inherently non-controversial. Ironically, this almost always dooms the meeting to being ultimately ineffective and inconsequential. They must also be highly confident that the content will not flood the stress responses of any participant in a way that will cause the meeting to go off the rails.
Simple Facilitation: Simple facilitation is actually more complex than it sounds. It is called simple facilitation because it deals with a defined set of issues or concerns in environments with relatively uncomplicated personal dynamics. The facilitator is seen as an outsider and the group is, within reason, well-behaved and willing to be led. This is the kind of facilitation one sees in most corporate and organizational retreats or strategy sessions. To be effective, these meetings must have high participation and result in solid buy-in. While the issues may be complex and have systemic implications, they are not so complicated that technical expertise and a bit of creativity cannot solve them. The emotional issues may be sensitive, but they will not derail the process because they are manageable by the individual or the group as a whole. Here rational solutions can be found to the group’s bigger questions. Good examples of these kinds of facilitated meetings include broad mission, values and strategy conversations.
- Skill level: Late Basic to Intermediate, depending on levels of conflict and the technical complexity of the issue involved.
- Skills required: Process design, identification and management of group exercises to use in that design, fostering full participation and engagement, basic understanding of and accommodation to diverse learning styles, encouraging creativity and innovation, awareness around group patterns and energy levels.
- Facilitator’s required capacities: Design ability. Large repertoire of group and facilitative techniques. Ability to create a “safe” environment and foster innovation and creativity. A bag of tricks to be able to address common facilitative problems (minor conflicts, participants who dominate or disrupt, inappropriate humor, blaming the facilitator, etc.).
- Theoretical Underpinnings: Facilitative theory and practice. A solid but not expert level understanding of group process and dynamics. Basic family dynamics theory.
- Focus: Developing strategy, creativity, alignment and buy-in.
- Overt conflict level: Low to medium
- Covert conflict level: Low to high
- Comment: Simple facilitation requires a professional or an experienced and skilled amateur level understanding of group function and dynamics. It also requires personal skill sets and observational capacities of the visible processes of the group. Finally, it requires solid abilities in the design and understanding of the techniques of group experiences. In families, simple facilitation requires some understanding of family dynamics (anxiety structures, triangles, cutoffs, framing, narrative, etc.). In obviously healthy families, this kind of facilitation can be effective, but if things get out of hand it can again quickly outstrip the ability of the facilitator to address the dynamics in the room.
Complex Facilitation: This is the kind of facilitation I most frequently practice with families. Complex facilitation involves situations where there is substantial implicit or explicit relational conflict and/or complex sets of interlocking issues that have created widely diverse interests and points of view. In these situations there is almost always a lack of clarity or a sense of “stuckness”. Communication is impaired and most participants are operating out of well-worn roles and “scripts”. Participants feel the stakes are often quite high (though the stakes of failing to find a way to collaborate are almost always higher). Previous attempts to collaborate have either stalled or been sabotaged by defection or non-participation. In most complex facilitation, competition to control the discourse both overtly or covertly is substantial and anxiety within the facilitative gestalt is often sky high as well. Often verbal communication is coupled with a great deal of coded or sub-textual communication that has developed over the long history of the group. Ordinary facilitators find themselves responding to the ostensible dynamics only to discover that there are a host of dynamics of which they are only dimly aware. To be effective, this level of facilitation requires extraordinary sensitivity to not only what is being said but what is not being said. Complex facilitation requires tremendously robust structures that are designed to be highly adaptive to the room dynamics. Structures must be tied to family culture and the varied capacities of the participants and be specifically designed to foster clear and delineated agreements based on candor of the various stakeholders. This kind of facilitation requires a movement beyond creating merely “safe” space to developing “generative” space. Complex facilitation is appropriate when families must work together to address systemic issues that are fraught with interpersonal dynamics, interlocking issues and multi-layered or conflicting interests. While a great deal of what follows is going to seem like a lexicon from another planet to many, complex facilitation involves the following:
- Skill level: Late Intermediate to Advanced
- Skills required: Adaptive process design, attention to emergent and legacy patterns, significant attention to both verbal and non-verbal cues and triggers, capacity to identify early stress reactions, deescalation methodologies, capacity to confront, deflect and distract power dynamics, ability to challenge maladapted conflict strategies in productive ways, skilled use of advocacy and empowering techniques, group state management techniques, teaching self-awareness skills, thorough knowledge of kinesthetic and self-management interventions.
- Facilitator’s required capacities: Ability to sustain mindful awareness of his or her own internal states and attention to multi-dimensional room dynamics. Hyper-vigilance to emotional individual and group states. Ability to simultaneously observe and participate in process and content. High tolerance for ambiguity and cultural dissonance. Ability to see and work with morphic fields, trans-personal dynamics and causal patterns. Keen awareness of projection, introjection, transference and counter-transference in self and others.
- Theoretical Underpinnings: Polarity and paradox management, trans-personal dynamics, post-modern constructivist social theory and intervention techniques, understanding of basic psycho-dynamic and therapeutic issues, deep understanding of sophisticated group and family dynamics.
- Focus: Process, state management and participant self-awareness, foundational agreements regarding fundamental polarities and paradoxes, alignment and buy-in; complex systemic alignment, attunement and decision making, skill building, generative engagement, curiosity and learning.
- Overt conflict level: Low to medium, occasionally medium to high between individuals or factions within the group
- Covert conflict level: Low to high
- Comment: Complex facilitation for families requires a rare skill set of personal self-awareness and awareness and understanding of individuals, groups and families. Holding the degree of relational and intellectual complexity in the room requires a kind of radical openness and attention both to the individual moment and the overall arc of the facilitative process. While doing facilitation is not therapeutic, having a thorough understanding of therapeutic processes is useful. Facilitator must be fearless, creative and willing to risk. The facilitator must be porous without being weak, connected without being enmeshed, empowered without being dominant, supportive without being coddling. In short, the ideal facilitator is operating from a still point poised at what appears to be the intersection of order and chaos in a way that keeps the creative tension between those two forces in full play but in rough balance until they are authentically resolved in constructive ways.
Extreme Facilitation: In cases where there is substantial personal or familial group dysfunction and overt persistent or dramatic conflict, groups need highly structured and highly facilitated experiences by teams comprised of mental health professionals and skilled group facilitators.
- Skill Level: Advanced
- Skills Required: All of the above plus dispute resolution techniques, deescalation methodologies, threat assessment, therapeutic interventions, individual coaching and therapeutic work, qualifications to use formal psychological assessment instruments.
- Facilitator’s required capacities: All of the above plus the ability to work seamlessly with other professionals who share complementary skill sets.
- Theoretical Underpinnings: All of the above plus substantial psychological training and practice by at least one professional, an understanding of legal and juridical frameworks, negotiation and mediation theory and practice.
- Focus: Reduction of hostilities, separation and settlement. Recovering basic group functionality.
- Overt conflict level: High (constant)
- Covert conflict level: High to the point of destructive to self or others.
- Comment: These situations require teams often including therapists, group facilitators and individual coaches as well as outside advisers such as mediators or legal counsel. The best outcome in these situations is often some form of separation and/or formal or legal settlement.
In closing, it is worth noting that much of what passes for family facilitation by well-meaning but inexperienced advisers involves skill sets associated with basic facilitation. These advisers tend to hold business-like meetings with families. These meetings provide opportunities to monologically share information, perhaps do some education, and even attempt to arrive at some action items. These advisers create an agenda, convene a meeting, answer questions, create some next steps and close the meeting. These tend to convey information to people who are bored and disengaged. Most of what is covered in the meeting is forgotten in a week and commitments made at the meeting have little follow-through or buy-in by the participants. Clients and advisers wonder why, with all of this information, these meetings aren’t effective and why the participants are not involved or interested in what seems to be vital to their future well-being. There is also the risk in these meetings that the adviser has misjudged the family dynamic and there is an emotional outburst that sabotages the meeting to the detriment of all concerned. Most advisers, aware of the emotional risks, attempt to hedge the downside by designing a tight and highly rational, but ultimately lifeless, agenda.
Some advisers, recognizing this, attempt to do simple facilitation by helping the family talk about values or a mission statement. They approach this work as they would a corporate retreat. In healthy families this can be marginally effective, but rarely results in any kind of lasting change. This is largely because advisors don’t understand how values actually function from a psychological and family dynamics perspective and have little appreciation for how families operate in ways that are different from businesses (e.g. the family mission statement is often a weakened version of a business solution imported into a family context in ways that rarely work). At these meetings, people nominally agree on some inspiring verbiage, but once the meeting is over, behavior and motivation isn’t really affected in ways that support the longer-term well-being of the family. Simple facilitation approaches are simply not commensurate with the complexity of most family situations. Indeed, in families that have substantial issue or relational complexity, these kinds of meetings are potentially dangerous to the advisor. If the meeting goes off the rails, the advisor is blamed and the relationship jeopardized. The advisor here is well advised to distance him or herself from the outcome of the meeting by encouraging the family to bring in an outside facilitator.
Calling in someone skilled in complex facilitation is likely to address real issues that are keenly interesting to the individuals involved and are likely to create much more durable outcomes that guide and shape family interaction over the longer term. When properly designed, family gatherings bring clarity from complexity, coherence from confusion, collaboration from conflict and commitment from complacency.
— June 17, 2013