Differences Between Facilitators and Other Leaders
Most natural leaders and facilitators share some important skills, but not all effective leaders make good facilitators. Some leadership roles and skills undermine the capacity to be good facilitators.
Teachers and trainers may be tempted to see their role as fostering growth and development by dispensing wisdom to the group. By contrast, effective facilitators recognize that the group must come to its own conclusions based on participants’ exchanges.
Good meeting leaders stick to a defined agenda. However, effective facilitators must keep their focus on the overall goal of learning rather than accomplishing an agenda.
Good public speakers may be tempted to use their rhetorical skills to sway people to their points of view. But good facilitators help people understand all points of view, including their own.
7. Moving from Dialogue to Action
Dialogue is useful for information-gathering, analysis, relationship-building, and decision-making. Dialogue is also a method of social change.
While dialogue ideally leads to action, dialogue organizers and facilitators cannot mandate action. The goal of dialogue is to create greater understanding, which in turn may motivate participants to take action personally or collectively with others. It is important that participants “buy into” the idea of action themselves rather than feel morally coerced into it.
Though dialogue planners and facilitators cannot mandate action at the outset of a dialogue, they can create the space for it to happen. This chapter explores how to maximize the possibility that dialogue will successfully move toward real change.
The issue of standardized school tests provides a useful example of how dialogue might lead to actions that bring about social change. For immigrant students and their parents, standardized school tests designed for English-speaking youth may not accurately test intelligence or comprehension. If immigrant students and their families are isolated from other immigrant families, they may see this as an individual problem rather than a community problem (see Levels of Social Change). If a school decides to hold a dialogue on immigrant issues and school tests, people may recognize collective patterns and problems with the testing. Communities are nested within larger state and national structures and policies that affect educational funding and testing.
How and when does dialogue effectively translate into structural change? What is the “tipping point” for transforming an issue? [12] Does it require a critical mass that need to participate in a dialogue process in order to build relationships across the lines of a conflict and understand more deeply the issues involved? Or does it require the involvement of key community leaders in a dialogue process? What other tools are needed in addition to dialogue to bring about social change? An old saying states: “If the only tool you have is hammer, everything looks like a nail.” The same holds true for dialogue; it may not always be the most appropriate tool. Yet in most instances, dialogue is an ideal first tool.
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Developed by Marie Dugan and adapted with permission by John Paul Lederach in “From Issues to Systems” in the Mediation and Facilitation Manual (Mennonite Conciliation Services, 2000).
Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King both taught that dialogue should be tried first, before any other strategies. When Gandhi became determined to end British colonialism, he invited and engaged in dialogue with the British whenever he could. But he also understood that at many points along the journey, the British representatives were not interested in true dialogue but sometimes were just trying to dissuade him from pursuing change. Yet Gandhi kept to his principles. He pushed for change through a wide variety of nonviolent tactics and strategies, but took every opportunity to engage in dialogue with those who opposed him.
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