Facilitating dialogue to work through differences and conflict

CONTEXT:

A charity whose purpose is to be a platform for intelligent giving for donors, has approached Tribe to support them with creating a space for employee dialogue on a key foundational strategy that the organisation had been adopting since it was founded 20 years ago. The organisation provides donors with free access to data, tools and resources to guide philanthropic decision-making. During a brand strategy meeting, it became evident that employees had differing views on whether or not the organisation should continue to adopt a ‘complete neutral’ stance on how it evaluates charities. The leaders of the organisation recognised that the discussions around the topic of neutrality were highly charged and they were fuelled up by the polarization that existed and was becoming more evident in the larger society. Therefore, they decided to create a safe and courageous space for employees to surface their concerns and different views around the topic of “neutrality” as well as everyone to hear and recognise these different perspectives fully. We were asked to facilitate these dialogue sessions.

INTERVENTION:

We held several meetings with members of the leadership team to best design the employee dialogue sessions. Our aims for the session were to;

• hold a safe enough space for all the emotions and views to surface
• create personal awareness around this topic, shed light on some dark corners
• create a shift in the system from being stuck to being more fluid
• enable new wisdom to emerge

We ran 3+ hours employee sessions using the Lewis Deep Democracy approach which enables every voice, including the minority voice to be heard. We knew the session would bring up emotions and could possibly become sensitive and tense. We acknowledged this consciously with the group by allowing everyone to check-in and expressing their concerns coming into these sessions and also creating an alliance around what would make it safe for them to have these dialogues. Using the deep democracy approach allowed us to lean into these tensions as it surfaced during the sessions and surface the wisdom that was not evident for the team before. All sessions ended with acknowledging individual and group awareness and learning from the session

RESULT:

The sessions allowed the employees to fully express themselves and their views on the topic of neutrality. More importantly, it allowed everyone to listen and acknowledge that there are many different perspectives and there is not one truth or one right way to address this issue. Many employees views on the topic shifted and there was more fluidity in the system  as a result of all the views they have heard (i.e. one employee who had very strong views around ‘the need for the organization to clearly define what neutrality means’, ended the session by acknowledging that she is not normally comfortable with uncertainty and indicating ‘maybe it is time to learn to stay in the grey zones’). Furthermore, as a result of being able to openly share allowed for the anxiety and tension in the system to dissolve (i.e. an employee who checked-in to the session by sharing how he was feeling coming into this session with a metaphor; ‘I feel like I am standing at the edge of a cliff and I am alone and I could fall’ and then at the end of the session checked-out by saying ‘I am still on the cliff but all of you are with me, I am not alone and we can walk together’). The leaders indicated that as a result of these conversations, they felt in a better position to better decide how to continue to create impact for good.