Listen and lead to improve your work.
Whenever you work on a team to facilitate teaching and learning at a workshop or event, you should try to make decisions by consensus. Building consensus about the big picture should be your default and desired decision-making process. While decisions made on individual pieces of work will be made by the people developing them, everyone should feel like their teammates are aware of their work and supportive of it, even when that support comes in the form of questions meant to improve the work and move it towards consensus approval.
However, sometimes you’ll need to choose between equally appealing or viable options; there might not any clear consensus on how to proceed.
Likewise, you might find yourself facing a choice with no ideal solutions.
At times like those, it’s helpful to have an agreed-upon decision-making process already in place.
At the Mozilla Foundation, we use something called DARCI (dar-see) to help with situations like these. You can learn more about the framework here. In a DARCI scheme
- One person is the decider (D) and makes decisions when there is no clear consensus on what to do next.
- One person is accountable (A) accountable for moving the project ahead and supporting its team.
- Several people are responsible (R) for the work of the project.
- Other expert stakeholders are consulted (C) about the project's progress and invited to give feedback.
- Other key individuals in the organization or community are informed (I) of the work’s progress so they can share, amplify, and use it.
Usually the decider and accountable roles are occupied by different people so they can help one another see different ways of looking at - and leading - the project.
Even if you’re working through this curriculum independently to improve your facilitation skills, as you take on more challenging work in teaching and learning it’s likely you’ll be on a team of facilitators preparing for a larger or more complex event than you might tackle on your own.
When you join a team, it’s important to have a decider (even if you don’t adopt the whole DARCI framework). It’s not important that you are the decider every time, but it is important to have someone stewarding the vision of the project and keeping your work aligned with it. Setting up a decision-making process is just as important as setting group norms through something like a code of conduct or set of contributor and participation guidelines.
Most often, you and your team won’t need a decider - you’ll reach consensus by addressing your learners’ contexts and needs. However, when you run into a blocker or obstacle, it’s vital to have someone in the decider role who can be trusted and empowered to move the group ahead.
When you serve as the decider, keep your vision and values in mind when you’re called on to make a decision. You’re here to keep the work of the project aligned with its purpose and to short-circuit potential conflicts between teammates by taking responsibility for difficult choices. You and the persons serving as accountable are also there to serve as clear and accessible points of communication and “truth” for a project, so don’t be afraid to be clear and direct That’s what your team wants and needs from you in this role.
When you serve in another role, like accountable or responsible, listen to your teammates and work to find consensus before going to a decider. Is there a choice that’s clearly better than the others, even if it’s not yours? Is there a choice that is most in-line with your group’s values? With your learners’ needs?
When you’re preparing to facilitate on your own, by default, you are the decider, as well as accountable and responsible for the project. In situations like that, it’s good to have a few critical friends or trusted readers who can serve informally in the consulted role. If you find yourself facing a tricky choice on your own, do what an effective decider does - listen to people you trust, weigh their feedback against the needs of your learners and your vision and values for the project, and then make the best choice possible for the people you serve.
Don’t think of what’s easiest; don’t think of what you’ve done before. Think of what your learners need and what you can do to meet their needs in accordance with the vision and values of the project.
As we move through the rest of this curriculum, we’ll talk a lot about iteration, or revising our work in response to testing it with learners. Iteration depends on a willingness to listen not only to people, but also to data, evidence, and results. At a foundational level, iterating means listening.
When you serve as the decider, you’ll have to listen to your own expertise, experience, vision, and values in addition to your teammates’ suggestions, your learners’ feedback, and the results from all the testing you do from brainstorming to delivering and reflecting on a learning experience.
We’ll work at this. For now, keep these things in mind as you think of how to show up and listen in the decider role:
- Listen for consensus that is strategic and in line with your project’s overall vision, even at the cost of your own ideas about specific steps and tactics.
- Listen without interrupting others or monopolizing conversation. You need the contributions and expertise of your teammates and learners to improve your work. Try to speak only 1/nth of the time, where n equals the number of people in the conversation.
- Listen for challenges to assumptions, expectations, and the status quo. Remember this idea: a good teacher (or facilitator) has dissidents, not disciples.
That’s not exactly all there is too it, but if you can practice those things in an intentional, obvious way, you’ll build trust across your team and trust in yourself as a decider.
Leadership follows listening.
Do the work you need to do feel comfortable that you have made the best decision for your project and community of learners, even if that decision makes you uncomfortable and asks you to stretch and grow in new directions as a facilitator.
Eventually, you’ll find activities and approaches you can repeat with different audiences of learners and you’ll learn what kinds of things you need to add, change, or cut from event to event.
Always be hungry for information about your facilitation and plan to gather it in as many ways as possible. Talk with your teammates if you have them. Survey your learners before, during, and after your facilitation to hear the needs and wants they voice. Look at what people respond to positively and keep it; look at what they respond to negatively and decide to change or drop it; look at what they don’t really respond to at all and ask what activities or lessons might work better there.
Leadership in facilitation looks like this:
- Listen to gather all the information you can.
- Decide what’s best to do based on that information.
- Explain your decision clearly.
- Help others do their best work in alignment with that decision.
If you can find ways to repeat this process between and during events, you’ll become a more responsive facilitator who is comfortable making decisions and changes because they are made on the solid ground of a consistently reflective and needs-fulfilling facilitation practice.
Review the DARCI roles above. Use them as a mentor-text or inspiration to compose and share your own decision-making process. This might be a code you follow or a framework like DARCI that your team adopts in its work. Use this template to capture and share your thoughts.