In this episode, Beth Cougler Blom talks with Dr. Monty Badami about how we can use an anthropological lens in facilitation to engage in collective sense-making. If we can think like anthropologists, we will have access to the most valuable resource in understanding complex experiences and diverse groups…and that resource is our humanity.
Beth and Monty also talk about:
- creating safety for participants
- reading the room and seeing patterns
- what it means to be human
- reflexivity and ethnography
- using narrative arcs and other frameworks
- friction points, self-kindness and learning from failure
Engage with Dr. Monty Badami
- Website: Habitus.org
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-sumant-monty-badami/
- Instagram: @habituslifehacks
Other Links from the Episode
- Gillian Tett Anthro-Vision book
- Joseph Campbell’s and the Hero’s Journey
- Jack Mezirow’s Transformative Learning theory
- Habitus’s Narrative Arc [image]
Connect with the Facilitating on Purpose Podcast
- Follow Facilitating on Purpose on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube
- facilitatingonpurpose.com
Connect with Beth Cougler Blom
- Give feedback or suggest upcoming show topics or guests at hello@bcblearning.com
- Visit bcblearning.com to explore Beth’s company’s services in facilitation and learning design
- Purchase a copy of Beth’s book, Design to Engage
- Follow Beth on Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn
Podcast production services by Mary Chan of Organized Sound Productions
Show Transcript
[Upbeat music playing]
[Show intro]
Beth
Welcome to Facilitating on Purpose, where we explore ideas together about designing and facilitating learning. Join me to get inspired on your journey to becoming and being a great facilitator wherever you work. I’m your host, Beth Cougler Blom.
[Episode intro]
Beth Cougler Blom
Hello, how are you doing today? I’m pleased to have you here and I’m pleased to present to you this episode, number 37. My guest today is Dr. Monty Badami. Monty is an anthropologist and the founder of Habitus, a social enterprise that uses anthropology, emotional intelligence, and educational psychology to unlock your human potential. I asked Monty to be on the show because I was intrigued by the fact that he’s an anthropologist and also a facilitator.
In this episode, Monty and I talk about how understanding culture not only helps us in our facilitation practice – about what’s going on with ourselves, what’s going on with our participants, but it also helps us in our lives. If we can think like anthropologists, we’ll have access to the most valuable resource in understanding complex experiences and diverse groups. That resource is our humanity.
When you listen to the episode, you’re going to hear that Monty shared with me an image while we were recording our conversation in Zoom. I’ve included that in the show notes for you so you can check it out there, but you may not need to look at it during the episode. I know you’re going to enjoy this lively conversation that I have with Monty about how we can facilitate like anthropologists. Enjoy the show.
Beth Cougler Blom
Monty, so great to see you. Thanks for coming and joining me on the podcast.
Dr. Monty Badami
Absolute pleasure, Beth. You know, I’ve been following your work for a little while and so I’m a massive fan and so it’s great that we actually get a chance to sit down and talk about this stuff.
Beth
I’ve been looking forward to it, and I’m a fan of yours as well. I’ve listened to you on your own podcast and I think another episode of someone else’s podcast that I checked out. So I’ve been excited to have this – what should be an energetic conversation today, I’m thinking.
Monty
[Laughs] Let’s hope so. You’ve got me at sort of early in the morning as I’m starting things up and I think I’ve got you at the end of the day. So we’ll see if we can try and get our timetables to synch, or our body clocks to synch.
Beth
That would be great because it’s probably the worst time of day for me. I always love a morning one, but you’re in Australia, I’m in Canada, and we just make it happen, don’t we? So here we are.
Monty
(laughs) Yeah, absolutely.
Beth
As we get started I have a question for you to just tell me a little bit about who you are and kind of what you do. But my question for you is I guess a little bit based on our topic today: were you an anthropologist who became a facilitator, or were you a facilitator who became an anthropologist?
Monty
That’s a great question. I think I actually believe that all humans are lay anthropologists. [chuckles] I think that anthropology lays dormant within us all. Because we all essentially want to make sense of our existence, our place in the world, who we are, what it means to be human. And anthropology is essentially this – I suppose it’s a formal way of doing the very things that humans do to make sense of our experiences, right? So humans, we are naturally observing, listening, paying attention to, trying to understand what complexity is, what loss is, what danger is, what joy is. How do we keep each other together? As we try to make sense of the rituals, the practices, the people, the symbols in our environment, what we are implicitly doing is an anthropological thing: which is trying to understand what it means to be human. So all I’m doing is I’ve just spent a lot more time in formal education in how to do that and try and share those insights and those meanings with people around me. So, always been an anthropologist. What I found when I finished my PhD was that anthropology lends itself to facilitation.
And I think this was one of the things that you first got in touch with me about. We were promoting our facilitation training, and one of the things we talk about is how can you use anthropology to work with some of the most difficult rooms? What I found was I was in the process of transitioning out of academia and I was exploring all different ways that I could use my anthropological knowledge out in the world. One of the things that came up were things like rites of passage and transformative facilitation, and helping people work together and make sense of change or complexity. And I was like, ‘that’s really cool’. And the more people that I spent time with who did that, the more I realized there was a lot of kind of methods or practices that I thought had some issues with them in terms of – there’s a lot of ego involved in a lot of facilitation. But also there’s a bit of mystification around what happens in these transformative spaces. So I was like, I don’t know. I think that I have something to offer here in helping people codify, unpack, demystify some of the things that people say are magic in that facilitated space, but are actually just inherently human and we can track them and watch how they’ve evolved and emerge and understand the mechanics of them – when we look at human societies across cultures and across time.
Beth
That’s so interesting. So it’s like taking this scientist kind of approach or view to – you’re right – I love the words ‘demystifying’ or getting away from what we think is magic. You know, when we go, ‘oh that person’s an excellent facilitator at the front of the room or in the room, and why is that?’ And so many of us just go, ‘I don’t know, there’s kind of a secret sauce in there or something like that’. So yeah, you’re taking this analytical viewpoint to helping us figure out what’s happening and why it’s so great.
Monty
Yeah, totally, totally. I think it’s important to just set some terms up first for people there that don’t know what anthropology is.
Beth
OK, let’s do that! [laughter] I took it – I should say I took it in first year university, but that’s been a long time. It goes back a few years.
Monty
Yeah, right? Like loads of people have done a course in anthropology. Lots of people have actually done undergraduate courses in anthropology, but because the actual employment of anthropology out in the world is quite rare and quite specialized and unique, we tend not to see a lot of them out there. Or, we see them under the guise of UX researchers, qualitative researchers, design researchers, native title work, that sort of stuff.
Whereas we tend not to hear about like organizational anthropologists or cultural anthropologists or medical anthropologists unless you’re working in those spaces. So I think it’s important to clarify the assumptions around what people know about anthropology and [chuckles] I have a pretty standard spiel. So I generally say I’m an anthropologist. I’m fascinated by what it means to be human. Anthropology quite literally means the study of humans. And so what I’ve studied throughout my academic career and my research was not just the evolution of human biological differences over millions of years, but also like how the evolution of this physical species has moved and migrated to nearly every square inch of the earth. And how we’ve not only survived in all those different places, but we’ve thrived. We’ve thrived precisely because we’ve been able to do things differently.
A big part of anthropology is not just evolution of the human biological species, but the evolution of human cultural diversity and how we have found ways to survive and thrive in these different places, to decouple from one way of doing things when the environment or the circumstance or the social organization changes, and then embrace and imagine new ways of doing things in new environments so that we can have a sort of relative level of success in those places. And it’s that adaptive capability, that adaptive quality, that I think is essential to our humanity. And all these other things that emerge around it: our creative, cultural, communicative processes that enable us to unpack, make sense of complex experiences, to assess whether a way of being in the world or seeing the world is working for us and whether or not we need to change.
Interestingly, I always talk about this sort of heady mix of an ability to do things differently and an unwillingness to do things differently. And we are always balancing those two things. And so interestingly, when you think about humans that were leaving the Fertile Crescent and all the agriculture that they developed 8,000 years ago or so – I’m not great with dates, I won’t lie to you – they would move to different places and try and recreate their lifestyle in different places. Of course it was really hard to do because there were different ecological conditions, different resources, etc. So in order to do things the same way that they’ve always done them, they had to be incredibly innovative and creative to find new ways of doing things [animated]. So it’s like an interesting mix between not wanting to change and needing to change, and how that shows up at for humans when we are confronted with challenging moments or sticky moments or friction points or points of resistance. And I think this is where the idea of working with – I say working with difficult rooms because that’s kind of the soundbite that people like – but working with difference. With different perspectives. With multiple perspectives in a space. To be able to bring about outcomes that work for as many people as possible.
Beth
There’s so many different levels to the difference, isn’t there? I’m thinking about the people in the room, our participants or whatever we’re calling learners or whatnot. But then it could be me entering into that room: what are the differences between me and the group, or perhaps me and a co-facilitator? We have differences between us and, I don’t know, there’s lots of different layers going on there in terms of who’s working with whom and the differences among us. Hey?
Monty
That’s what anthropology really brings to it. We get a very – well I won’t say unique because it draws on a range of different disciplines to inform it – but we have a very specific understanding of space and place, how we create meaning in those spaces, but how those spaces already come pre-configured with meaning. How our sort of cultural assumptions and our biases and prejudices and all of that, they are shaped in and inculcated in our bodies through our lived experience as beings in the world. And how we bring those assumptions with us into a room but then are all of a sudden in a space co-constructing meaning with multiple different worldviews and ways of being. And how do we navigate that in a way that is – I think people like to talk about cultural competency, which I think is one of those myths, right? Like, I’ve been an Australian all my life, but I still don’t really know what it means to be Australian because it’s constantly changing and there are so many different versions of it.
So we don’t walk into a space with that idea of cultural competence. It’s more about safety and cultural humility, psychological flexibility, reflexiveness or reflexivity so that we can understand difference, but situate our positionality – if you will – our position of power – whether that be based on gender or culture or class or ethnicity or a whole range of different things. By practicing that regularly, we can do it in a very fast – a very quick time, which allows that us to be highly responsive to the complex needs of the room. By practicing that, by making that skill set a part of our bodies – which is what facilitation is, right? Like you can’t – you’ve got an amazing book, right? Just putting it out there. But you can’t learn facilitation from a book. You have to learn it by doing. And it’s the same thing with anthropology. So, you know, by doing that, by being in that space and doing those things, we develop that responsiveness that becomes quicker to the point where it almost looks predictive. And that’s what gives us the ability to roll – to work with the room, meeting people where they’re, having that flexible approach to really respond to their needs. That’s what I find helps to create that safety, which for me is the essential ingredient for facilitating diverse groups.
Beth
You’ve said so many words there that I want to jump off from, but I think one of them was reflexive – or it makes me think of reflection – and there’s just all sorts of pieces around noticing what’s happening and reflecting on that, that is coming to my mind. Because of course I’m trying to catch up with where you’ve been immersed in this in your career, and I’m going, ‘OK how does what he’s talking about relate to what I know about being in a room?’ Right? But certainly those pieces around just noticing and reflecting on experiences and thoughts and so on are kind of pieces coming up for me. And maybe noticing – well I was – I should admit I did a little research with ChatGPT as my ideation partner here to kind of prepare for this meeting a little bit. And one of the things that came up was around patterns, and I thought, ‘oh OK I’ll ask Monty about patterns’. So is that a big part of what we can be noticing – patterns in the environment – does that help us become a better facilitator?
Monty
Well I think that we’re all doing it implicitly as facilitators. The challenge is though – look – so there’s a couple of things I’d like to frame up here. So reflexivity is an essential mechanism for us to maintain ethical practice in ethnography. Ethnography is the thing that we do as anthropologists to collect data, but it’s also the thing that we produce at the end of the data collection process.
So we ‘do’ ethnography in the field to get the data, and then we produce ‘an ethnography’, which might be an ethnographic paper, or ethnographic film, ethnographic presentation – and ethnography just literally means ‘ethno’ or culture, and ‘graphy’ to write or paint a picture. So we go to a place, we spend time there, we live in the space, we immerse ourselves in that space so that the meanings are not just superficial assessments. So I can go to Canada and hang out there for a week and go, ‘I know what Canada’s all about’. But if I live there for a year, those superficial assessments may have validity, but there would be layers of complexity that I could get access to by spending more time in that space. And making my awareness of that space, not just a perceptual kind of like cognitive thing, but an embodied thing, you know. Like, learning how to be a man is not an intellectual thing, right? Like I do a lot of work in masculinity. We don’t learn about being a man by reading a book. Again, like facilitation. We learn it by doing it and performing those roles in the space. And so – there’s a lot – a vast amount of information, vast data sources that are not accessible to your kind of more cognitively-grounded, western – it’s not just western anymore – but certainly enlightened, inspired, rational literal processes. Just getting people to tell you what’s going on only gives you access to a certain amount of information.
So that’s an important data point. When they tell you something, it’s an important data point. But we also look for other data points such as the difference between what they say and what they do. The way in which what they’re saying is actually creating meaning in this space as opposed to describing meaning, for example. We often look at explanatory models and say ‘they’re describing reality’, and sometimes what they’re doing is producing a version of reality.
Now the reason why this is important in facilitation is because we have access to vast amounts of data points. I use a sense-making methodology to draw those data points in. For example, we look at the objective, subjective, social, and embodied forms of information that emerge in a space. The ‘objective’ might be if you’re a facilitator: ‘We ran an activity with this many people in this room with these resources’. That’s objective. We were all there for that same thing.
The ‘subjective’ is: each person that was involved in the activity, including myself, had a different perception of that. And there are data points that we can draw on if we assume that there is a consensus in how everybody experienced that. It’s not fair to assume that everybody experienced it the same way. We have to use debrief or creative mechanisms to draw out those different subjective perspectives of even that one event that we’ve run.
Then there’s a ‘social’ form of data, which is as a group we may have had like this collective effervescence of energy. Or in the group, we may have created a certain meaning together that doesn’t exist anywhere else. Now we can have access to some social meaning, or social data points, in that space. An example might be we do a check-in activity where – I don’t want to give all my games away – because if you’re a participant you’ll be like, ‘oh no, I know this thing’s coming!’ But we do a check-in with a Coke can, and we talk about like the symbolism of the Coke can that precedes that activity. Then we get them to shake the can as they do a check-in. They’re like: ‘what’s this? It’s a bit weird’. We capitalize on that, and it gets to the end, and we’ve got this Coke can – we’ve got the objective Coke can, which is a thing that everybody knows, but each person has a subjective story about that Coke can. What it might remind them of their own history and experiences. How they view this can. It might be like ‘sugar is bad’ or ‘I love it when I’ve got a hangover’ [chuckles] or whatever that may be. Then by virtue of the fact that we’ve done this activity together, that Coke can has social meaning. The check-in question might be about hope. And the Coke can now then represents the hopes and dreams of the people in the room. It has social meaning. They’ll never see that Coke can in the same way again.
And the fourth bit is the ‘embodied data’. So what is going on in their bodies? What is their body telling them? How is their body reacting? And we are looking at that [makes a groaning sound] – when you start shaking the can and they kind of move away from the can or –
We have to find ways of accessing those different data points by breaking it down into those different sorts of forms of knowledge: objective, subjective, social, and shared. What that does is it creates those data points out in the space. And us as ethnographers or us as facilitators, or job is to try and find patterns and draw the threads of those different data points together to weave together a story or a narrative or a tapestry of meaning within that space.
That’s the real kind of anthropological method and facilitation method really coming together: being able to get a worm’s eye view of things. This is like a common way of understanding ethnography. Gillian Tett wrote this great book, Anthro-Vision. She said that anthropologists balance having a worm’s eye view on the ground and a bird’s eye view; we’re oscillating between kind of going in and out of the perspective of the people on the ground and these other broader strategic perspectives. That allows us to see patterns that, again, as I said before, allows us to be responsive to things that are coming up in that space in the room. This is what reading the room’s all about. And the more practice we have at that, the quicker our response time will be, to the point that we’re almost predictive. That enables us to have a really dynamic practice in that space.
Beth
Oh my gosh, there’s so much you said there. I want to ask you about how you bring people in to learn about this process, these four elements you’re talking about. So say you and I were working together and you’re bringing me in as a co-facilitator into something that you’re doing. Would you tell me those things to kind of indoctrinate me, so to speak, into the four areas and – I don’t know – what’s that model where that’s how I start out and then over time maybe I’m thinking about it more overtly as I go into the workshop with you. But if we facilitate together 18 times over the next year, maybe eventually I just kind of naturally start to see these things and react to them and I don’t have to think so consciously about them. Like how do you bring people in to this process and help us become more aware? Because I know you teach facilitation so is there a process piece that you kind of work people through if you were working with them?
Monty
I tend to get people to go through our facilitation training. I think it’s really important. Because it just gives us a common language to work on as a team. What you’re talking about is: ‘unconscious/unknowing’, ‘conscious unknowing’, ‘conscious/knowing’, ‘unconscious knowing’. So this process of the embodiment of knowledge, if you will, and inskillment which I think is an essential thing to be aware of. Like I think it’s really important.
You talked about patterns before. One thing to be cognizant of when we are having a reflexive approach is to never assume that the patterns that we see are objective. That these are actually things we are doing to the space as well. Right? So even as I’m analyzing a room, whilst I’m working within that room – certainly I’ve been doing it for a while so I’ve got a level of confidence. I know in my body I’m pretty comfortable and confident with how that rolls because I’ve done it so many times. But that embodied – that intuition and that embodied knowledge only comes with time in the game.
But we still have to trust the stuff that comes up, but through a process of reflective practice and debrief and dialogue – peer dialogue – we can be reflexive about that. So that we don’t assume the patterns are objective and we can triangulate with a different perspective. So the reason why I say that is because I use like a range of frameworks and terms to help us have a common language to engage in that reflective practice and that peer supported reflexivity to unpack that data. It’s not just about training, it’s also about the products we deliver to our clients. Because we can facilitate a program, we can give them robust data that you can’t really get from a survey or an interview or a focus group. And we can give them things that can really inform sort of better – like we think – sense-making, which is that objective/subjective, social embodied – better sense-making creates better idea-making, which creates better decision-making. So the better we are at unpacking the vast amounts of complex data in that space – whether it be in a facilitated space or in a community dynamic or a social dynamic – the better we can equip our clients with making better informed decisions, which are not just about the performative scripts that people will give you in those facilitated space, that are often a reproduction of the status quo or their positions of power.
By having that language, we actually empower our team to have tools to then empower the client. But more importantly it gives us a framework to discuss, to unpack stuff. But I want to be really, really clear. These frameworks and tools are just things that I’ve created or stolen from other people. They’re artefacts and ideas that are like arbitrary that we’ve applied to complex things. And we always have to think about what is not being said, what is left off, who’s advantaged, who’s disadvantaged by these frameworks. And I always say to the people I’m working with, ‘your lived experience is the most important resource you have. I’m just using frameworks to help us have a common language. I want you to draw down on your experience first. Don’t try and fit your experience into the theories or frameworks. Draw the theories or frameworks in to help you explain and communicate your experience. Because that’s the stuff that really matters. That’s the stuff we really value in that facilitated space’.
So long story short, I’ve got loads of frameworks. I got a very specific method of introducing people to that language, but it is all just a way of giving them some structure to unpack their experience. Their experience is a thing that really matters. When we work together, that’s what we do. We use that language to help unpack that experience. Because it’s not just experience. We don’t learn through experience. We learn through reflecting on that experience. And that’s where those frameworks are really valuable to help us develop that in embodied inskillment over time.
Beth
And you probably change those frameworks over time as well. I don’t know when you created them, but let’s say you did some 10 years ago, are they still the same ones today? I bet you’ve been listening and tweaking and making them better and working on them with your team. Those frameworks probably change a little bit over time as well?
Monty
Well, what I love is that use having an anthropological perspective – and it is like a lens – more of a lens through which we see things –just like culture is a lens through which we see things. The anthropological lens helps us to see these artefacts, whatever they may be, whether it be a framework or a game or a resource in an activity, for example. We use them as vehicles to stimulate conversation. The meaning is not the framework. The meaning is how we use the framework to unpack meaning and understand our experiences.
By having that anthropological mindset, the frameworks themselves are incredibly flexible. It took a while to actually develop them, but again, by not being too wedded to the frameworks and being more wedded to the conversations we have around them, they become like a provocation, if you will, to interrogate the lived experience rather than a rigid construct that we need to fit that lived experience into. So I haven’t really had to change them too much. And they’re pretty broad which makes them flexible. Like the sense-making – I mean it’s driven by like a deep kind of theoretical pedigree, but we pull it out in sort of more accessible ways to give us something to work with.
The other frameworks we have are ‘be the guide not the hero’. So it’s not about us, it’s about the participants and our job there is to just hold the emotional space, to support them to go to their edges so that they can learn and grow. We use another framework which is to create healthy cultures of learning and growth, we need to leverage wisdom. We leverage the wisdom of the group. Challenge assumptions – we’ve spoken about that a little bit. Embrace failure – not just as a vehicle to understand friction and tension points – and use tension and friction actually as a moment of great learning and growth and deeper understanding with each other. But it helps us to mitigate certain risks in order to keep, maintain safety. So really contemplating friction and failure points, we can actually create mitigating strategies, but also by embracing failure as a necessary path to success.
Like every – like all of my like banger activities that are just winners, they’ve only emerged because they’ve been stinkers! And I’ve had to go, ‘why did that stink? What did I have to do to fix it?’ through that reflective practice? ‘What was I ignoring about the people in the room?’ So embracing failure is essential.
And the other part – the final – the fourth bit of those dispositions of creating healthy cultures is – apart from ‘leverage wisdom, challenge assumptions, embrace failure’, the final part is: ‘healthy conflict’. How to create spaces where you can have healthy conflict where meaning can be contested respectfully and safely. Where we don’t just make that assumption of it being a community of consensus but created as a community of inquiry where people feel safe to disagree. Those sorts of principles are very flexible.
And we’ve got a range of other things that we use as well, but are really just nudges to support us to be grounded, to look after ourselves, to look after the people around us, to have presence, to hold emotional space, to maintain safety, to take time, to build relationships. And then to remember and recognize that the magic is not us. The magic is what we support the participants to create in that space. Yeah, so they’re mostly just nudges. They’re nudges that are quite useful. But they help us to unpack complex things.
Beth
Yeah and you’ve done a lot of pre-thinking around it too. It’s not like you’re just kind of flying in with this background behind you, but it’s – you’re doing preparation to get there, to be able to do all these things in the room. I mean, there’s so much there, isn’t there?
Monty
Yeah, absolutely. Those frameworks help us. So we have a narrative arc that we use when we are designing workshops, for example. We also use that same narrative arc in our debrief. Because ultimately it doesn’t matter what activity you do, the tools are just vehicles to draw out the people. And once the people are drawn out, once they feel safe and respected to actually reflect on what’s going on for them, then they’ll create more – they’ll give you much more honest, authentic information or data points to work with. Which allows you to draw out those different perspectives to create a bit more meaning – more robust meaning in data points in the space. Which means that if you’re working – if what you’re doing is working towards some sort of action items or outcomes, they will have much more values-aligned imaginations of where they want to go, which will help you to create more viable plans for getting there, for example.
We will use a pretty standard narrative arc when we’re designing the program, when we’re designing the interaction of each individual activity, and actually how we will debrief on each activity. So that we have a little bit of not only confidence in what we’re doing, and we find ourselves in that moment and we’re like ‘I don’t know what I’m doing!’ we can always lean back on that framework and that structure to get us back on course. But also we can communicate what we are doing to the client at any given point. Again it takes away from that mystification, like: ‘I’m just – you just trust the process’ or any of that sort of stuff, which are like thought-stopping clichés, which can be very dangerous at times.
Beth
Tell me more about narrative arc, because it’s something that I’ve talked about, thought about. I know a little bit about it, but just in case someone has never heard that term before, tell us a little bit more in plain language what you mean by that. And is it the same narrative arc that you really apply to everything that you do, or is it just you tweak it as you go? Or what does that look like?
Monty
Look, again, it’s about we’ve got to be flexible. We’ve got to recognize that it’s just a thing that I created and it only has meaning because of the meaning that I’ve invested in it. It only has power because of the power I’ve invested in it – like any symbol or artefact within a culture. But it’s about how am I using that meaningful structure? I use it as a crutch, but I also use it as a teaching methodology and a communication methodology so people understand. Transparency is a big part of how I roll. And it helps me to be transparent about what I’m doing.
Beth
Well, let me ask you another way. If you’re meeting with a client and you say something like, ‘I’m going to use a narrative arc to design this session’, and they go, ‘What?’ [laughs] How do you tell them what that is?
Monty
Yeah, so we have a saying: ‘We connect through stories, we learn through play’. It’s at the crux of how we do things. Storytelling – the human capacity for storytelling is so powerful. It’s not just a mode of information transfer –or a medium through which we transfer information – it’s a mode of being in and of itself. It transforms the listener and the speaker. And while a lot of what we’re trying to help the people we work with do, is to share their stories – to create a safe space where they can share their stories and collectively sense-make, or collectively make sense of a complex experience together. That’s the value that we add. So we like to see this idea of storytelling and narrative arcs all the way through.
Joseph Campbell used the Hero’s Journey as a powerful narrative arc. I need to be really clear. I think he’s kind of cool but methodologically and theoretically I’ve got some problems because he sort of applied a masculinist kind of western, ethnocentric idea to stories. Joseph Campbell with the French structuralists went all around the world and they sort of drew out all the myths and stories from all the different cultures and they said they all have this similar thing going on. Which, you know, was great except they ignored the fact that the similarities that they found was more a representation of their own culture than the diverse cultures that they were working with.
Having said that, the hero’s journey can be quite a useful trope to use because it’s a symbol that has value in with a lot of the clients that I work with. And that journey is like: there’s a status quo where things are normal, and then there’s this line where there is a disruption to the status quo. They down into the abyss of self-reflection where they face all these trials. And as a result of wise old – usually old men like Gandalf or Obi-Jaun Kenobi, and some magical tools like a ring or a light sabre, they’re able to get through the challenges, or the belly of the beast, and they emerge somehow transformed, where their transformation actually helps make the world a better place. That’s the standard hero’s journey.
In transformative learning, there’s a similar process. Jack Mezirow’s concept of Transformative Learning plays with this idea of a disorienting dilemma. You know, that’s why I like to play games that are a bit disorienting. Because even the act of them going, ‘wow what’s this about?’ looking at each other going ‘who’s this weirdo?’ creates a bit of connection between each other. When we look at extreme rituals around the world, that disorienting dilemma puts people into this space of meaning-making as they’re trying to make sense of this weird thing. And in doing so that starts this creative process of collective sense-making.
I like to – my narrative arc does involve a bit of a disorienting dilemma that gives people an opportunity to unpack it together, and then find ways of moving forward together or find ways of moving forward in a way that supports the different perspectives in the room. The narrative arc that we use – um, like when we look at stories around the world – a narrative arc never is just ‘everything happens and it’s all the same all the way through’. They’re not even stories. The greatest stories have a tension point where – and when we look at those stories from a neurological perspective – in those moments of tension – cortisol, the stress hormone, is released in the brain and in the body. And when those stories resolve, that tension point resolves, oxytocin is released. The love drug, right? We know that when people have heard those stories, we have that dramatic – that tension point in the narrative arc, where something intense happens and then is resolved, and the cortisol is released – they will tend be more likely to give to charity. Having a narrative arc with that tension and resolve changes brain chemistry, changes behaviours.
We leverage that science, that neuroscience, in our workshops to create a narrative arc so that the participants and the client knows well, ‘why is Monty – why is…why are Habitus facilitators taking us to this really uncomfortable space?’ Like it’s not just for my own gain or some sort of power thing – which can sometimes happen in facilitation. I’m explicitly linking it to neurological processes and I have a narrative arc to guide them through that. I talk to them about this at the beginning, so they know it’s going to get hard.
Beth
Oh you do; you tell the participants that this is going to happen? OK.
Monty
We talk them through the narrative arc and we prepare them that it’s going to be challenging. But there is a plan. I’m not just shooting from the hip. I actually have a plan. I’ve thought this plan out and this is how it works. And not only that, it gives us an opportunity to get group agreement of, ‘well how are we going to work together as a group when we get to those hard moments? What’s the worst thing that could happen? What’s the best thing that can happen? What do we agree we’re going to do when we get to those moments so that we can support each other through that learning?’
Having a narrative arc is a great metaphor in an activity, it also allows us to communicate with our clients and participants, and it also gives us a framework to lean on. The narrative arc that I use – I need to claim – you’ve probably picked this up, folks, but I’m a bit neuro-spicy, so I’m like – that’s why I talk so much.
Beth
Neuro-spicy, I love it. There’s a new term for me. [laughter]
Monty
And I think that my inability to understand what it means to be human from a very young age was what compelled me to try to understand it. And that’s why I bring that to the work. But I am neuro-spicy, so I can fixate on things, and one of the things that I fixate on sometimes is rhyming words [animated]. So the narrative arc that I created does have some rhyming words and I want to apologize from the start. But my narrative arc kind of works – the way I remember it is: Respect, connect, reflect, project, and direct. There’s another piece which I’ll tell you about in a minute.
‘Respect’ is everything has to come from a place of respect. This is about belonging. It’s about respecting different perspectives. It’s about respecting that people are in different places. People have different triggers, for example. Respecting the space where you do an acknowledgement to country, to acknowledge the space and the land, for example. Acknowledging that different people – respecting that people will process information differently, will take longer to feel safe. So we use a range of methods to do that.
Respect and then ‘connect’ is connecting people to each other, connecting us to the people, connecting the people to the material, and helping them to make connections for themselves rather than us just telling them what it’s all about.
I always like to have respect and connect as the most important parts of the work that we do. We have a saying: ‘slow is smooth; smooth is fast’. Take the time to build the respect and connection before you do anything else. If you’re getting to a place where things are challenging and you’re getting too much resistance to move forward, always go back and work on that respect and that connect.
Because if people feel – we use a systems thinking or a holistic systems metaphor: if people feel safe, if people feel included, if people feel like they belong, then the systems will heal itself. That’s what we’re doing. I will spend the majority of my time setting up safety, respect, and connect before I do anything else.
And communicating that with the people we’re working with helps them understand: ‘well why are we playing all these games? Why are we talking about our feelings? Why are we doing – I thought we were supposed to have a strategy meeting?’
Beth
And why is it taking so long to do this? Right? (Exactly.) You’ve got that kind of tension.
Monty
Yeah absolutely. Absolutely. And then on the basis of respect and connect, we can actually take them into an authentic space of reflection. What’s going on for you? What are you challenged by? What you know? Who are you? Why are you here? What’s it all about? What are you struggling with? What are you proud of? Even what is it that you really want? If we don’t work on that safety and – that’s where we use storytelling and game-play, and debrief, and group agreement, all that sort of stuff, we get them to that space of – if we can’t get them safely into that space of honest self-reflection, they’re just going to tell us what we already know anyway. They’re going to just reproduce the public scripts that we already know, and we’re actually not actually going to get anything meaningful. You could have just written that outcome yourself. And if you’re only there to tick a box and say, ‘we’re doing this’, that’s fine. But they’re not the kind of jobs we take.
Get them into that space of honest self-reflection which allows them to come up with a more viable projection into the future of where they want to be. And by creating that projection into the future of where they want to be, if it is values-aligned and aligned to who they really are, then we can come up with more viable directions on how they’re going to achieve that.
The last rhyming word that I use is ‘affect’. And so our narrative arc is respect, connect, reflect, project, and direct. But ‘affect’ is the thing that holds it all together. Affect is just emotion. We hold the emotional space so that they can go to their edges safely, and learn and grow. We are monitoring the affect of the space. If it is – like we want to give – we play games not to be flippant, but because if they are in a really dark space, a dark reflective space, we want to give them a break. We want to give them some energy. We want to we want to – we talk about lowering the stakes to raise the stakes. We’ve hit a resistance point. So we’re like, ‘alright, we need to lower the stakes and get a bit more playful, have a bit more fun so that we can then get that safety back to then bring them into those deeper reflective spaces’. So we are constantly monitoring, using that sense-making methodology to pay attention to the objective, subjective, social, and embodied forms of information to know ‘how are we driving this emotional space?’ Because that’s our job. That’s our primary job. So that they can the work, they can do the magic. And yeah, that’s our narrative arc.
Beth
I’m thinking about kind of a graph where it’s an emotional graph of some kind, right? Sort of wiggly up and down. Because you’re intentionally maybe pushing them a bit and then bringing them down to play something and then pushing them a bit. I don’t know, do you have – do you have a visual, like (I do have visuals.) … how do you go through this with participants to say ‘this is what’s going to happen to you, just so you know’ (Yeah, right). It makes me think of when I went abroad years and years ago when I was young and went to a different country to spend some time and had that kind of pre-departure, cultural competency training as you talked about. And I literally had a graph around kind of homesickness happening, and you’d crash and then you’d kind of be excited to be there. Do you have stuff like that? Like what are the visuals looking like?
Monty
Yeah. Yeah. We’ve got a range of different ones that we use. So for example, there’s your Joseph Campbell’s standard Hero’s Journey, right? You’ve got your status quo. There’s a call to action. This is all pretty standard stuff when we look at narrative methods of designing experiences: service experiences or user experiences, etc. Where you get called into foreign territory, you have trials. There’s an ordeal, and a climax. There’s usually some special magical implements and wise old dudes who – but there’s a reward from going through those trials. And the return – we come out somehow transformed.
Depending on if we’re working on large-scale community change projects as a result of crisis or trauma, you know, natural disaster, there is a specific disaster curve that we look at. It’s a little bit more uppy and downy and a bit more windy. But it is really about helping people understand that a lot of their experiences – and it is about normalizing those different emotional responses – that a lot of those things that they’re feeling are normal responses to what is essentially an abnormal experience. So helping them – help to normalize that.
The reason why we do that is, again, according to Mezirow’s Transformative Learning principles, when we have that disorienting dilemma the first thing people think is ‘oh there’s something weird with me; what’s wrong with me? I’m the only one that feels like this’ – there’s that sense of alienation. It’s only by giving permission – or supporting people to actually communicate across that and go, ‘well actually I feel a bit weird, or I don’t know what’s going on’ that they can relate their discontent with others. In doing so, others are like, ‘wow I’m not the only one that feels like this; we’re all feeling like this’ – and that actually creates a change in the physiological/neurological state where people are much more open and they are much more susceptible to possibility thinking, which again allows us to go into some of those deep reflective spaces to find out values, align projections, and directions for the future.
Even just going through that process alone unlocks a lot of those things. My facilitator mindset: Be the guide, not the hero. The dispositions: Leverage wisdom, challenge assumptions, embrace failure, healthy conflict. And this is the narrative arc. What it looks like.
Again, it’s limited. And I’m really open with them about it. We’ve got these arrows that move from respect to connect, to reflect, project and direct, but the reality is you’re kind of going backwards and forwards in order to meet the group where they’re at and take them to where they need to go. This idea of affect, which is a circle that is at the centre of these different components – like the idea is that – respect – you might need to go into a bit of playfulness. You’re going backwards and forwards in and out of that affective domain to kind of go, ‘alright, I’m going to lighten the mood a little bit’ or ‘ you know what, I think what this needs right now is a bit of contrast with gravitas’, which is where I will slow the words down, lower my volume maybe. Make each word quite precise. Perhaps even repeat those words a few times. In order to just give gravitas to that experience. Or speed things up, be a bit more playful, like change the energy in that room in order to get them into places we need to go.
The up and downness is more of a going in and out of that affective domain. Like setting up respect, for example, paying attention, using that sense-making methodology to find those data points, identify some patterns, and go, ‘yeah I reckon they’re ready to move to the connect space’. Or you know, you might be doing those two simultaneously. But you’re reading the room before you take them in that reflective space. And you might need to go in and out of that affect to manage that space, to drive where they’re at, to loosen things up, to tighten things up to, to make things a bit more serious, to make things a little bit more funny. That’s the art, I suppose, is really practising that. So this becomes a really nice tool for us to use.
Beth
I like how the affect is in the middle and it makes me think about just people who are new to facilitation or having conversations with clients who don’t really realize that emotion is such a huge part of a learning experience, or a meeting, whichever type of facilitation we’re talking about. I think I was just posting about this on social media the other day that if we thought more about the emotional pieces that we can bring in and kind of be aware of and notice – and all the things you’re saying about the affective domain – like values, feelings, beliefs – we don’t do that enough, I don’t think. I mean, I’m in Canada. You’re in a different country. Maybe you do in Australia. Are you really good at that? [laughs] Or are you actually leading the field, basically, in terms of bringing some of these pieces in where other people aren’t as far along the path as you are?
Monty
I wouldn’t say I’m leading the field. I’d say that I’ve had the privilege of being able to access vast amounts of information through my academic career. A lot of this stuff is not new. I’m just practising it in spaces that may not have heard of it. I think that great educationalists know this implicitly. Whether that translates into public education or even private education is another thing. We still valorize the cognitive and the intellectual. We assume that cognition and learning is separate from emotion, from experience, from privilege. And vastly outdated notions, from my perspective, but when you think about the implementation of education on the ground – I used to teach pre-service teachers and [laughs] really limited. Especially when teaching is so undervalued that you’re often getting – and I mean with – respectfully – a lot of the students I was teaching were people that couldn’t survive in other areas. So they go to teaching as a backup. You’ve got a few, a small proportion, maybe 5% of teachers, who are driven to teach. And they come up to the top straight away. But a lot of others are like, ‘oh I’m going to become a teacher’. A lot of them – the attrition rate on teaching is quite high, up to 50% in Australia, primarily because we don’t equip them with the skills around emotions – the human skills –this is again where I think anthropology really can offer quite a lot to education, to learning processes, and embracing our humanity, embracing the failures, embracing the challenges, embracing the resistance. We talk about resistance is a window into a need not being met. Find the need, meet the need. Rather than just getting furious, get curious. For me, this is how we do things in anthropology. Those friction points are actually where we discover two different cultures rubbing up against each other. Orr two different set of assumptions that are coming into conflict. So, for me, it’s like, ‘ooh what does that mean? What is that about? How can I deepen my learning about myself?’ In order to do that we need to have that emotional presence, that emotional awareness, and that cultural humility to handle diversity, to handle complexity, and more importantly to just really listen.
Beth
I like how you brought in another tagline that rhymed: Don’t get furious, get curious! [laughter]. If we only just remember that it’s great, right? [laughter again].
Monty
Yeah, it’s a big one
Beth
Curiosity, I definitely put that in my book as well. I think I was writing the skills chapter, or whatever chapter it’s in, and just went at the end, and what does this all boil down to? The more we’re curious about ourselves and other people, we’re better off, aren’t we? We notice more and we can do something about it.
Monty
Yeah. Curiosity, flexibility, and kindness. What I would add to that is that kindness that we often forget is facilitators is that kindness towards ourselves. So the hardest lesson I’ve learned [with emphasis] is to not be too hard on myself, right? This is where the reflexivity thing can be really dangerous if it’s not done with some frameworks and support around it. Because I know when I started, I was like my own worst – and was such a critic. I would be exhausted and would be really negative, because I’d given so much in that space, right? When I was starting out I thought it was about me. So there was so much at stake – the success or the failure – there was so much at stake. I would give so much of myself, I would use so much cognitive energy and caloric energy, just watching, noticing, processing, censoring myself, not telling people to bloody get stuffed or whatever when they said something that was really confronted me. Or making constant decisions – like that comes at a high energy cost. Having – maintaining that high energy whilst I’m doing things, what goes up must come down. Then I would be in this raw state as I was reflecting on what happened, and I would just pull myself apart and just be my own worst enemy. All that negative self-talk would come out.
So, the reflexivity, once we can separate ourselves from the process, once we start noticing and acknowledging and accepting the science behind what our bodies are doing, as we’re holding that emotional space and at what kind of cost that comes to us, we can actually plan that reflective practice, we can plan our recovery. We can plan the way that we hold space so that if it’s not about us, then we can just be more present to them and we can just be more relaxed about it. Because it’s not about us. And that’s quite liberating. But it helps us to be a little kinder to ourselves – a little kinder to the participants absolutely – but a little kinder to ourselves. And that self-kindness, using mindfulness to be present to whatever emotions come up, that sort of self-kindness that acknowledges we all make mistakes and in fact those mistakes are a natural part of being human – and those mistakes are actually how we learn and develop our craft.
And then the common humanity or the shared humanity, we have a community of practice. Every time people come through our training, we have a community practice where we all get together and go, ‘that was awful. That was awesome. What did you learn? What did I learn? Well, I didn’t realize you felt the same way’ and that helps us to normalize those experiences so that we can be much more forgiving of ourselves. And take each of those data points of perceived failure or whatever as opportunities to learn and grow in the craft, in service of the wonderful thing that we’re doing in that facilitation space.
Beth
I love that you ended with that – and you said before – we just we can’t just do the thing, we have to reflect on it and, yeah, we’re all going to fail, aren’t we? I mean I make mistakes all the time. Usually I tell the group if they didn’t notice – especially when I’m teaching facilitators, because I go ‘oh do you see what I just did there? [laughs] I made a mistake and let’s all learn from it’. And so yeah, let’s normalize failure – but also the learning – we have to spend the time, don’t we, after to reflect and – I just had one of those conversations today with a client going, ‘OK that thing that I could have been better at, thank you for hearing me and hearing how I reflected on it, and giving me something to think about this year in terms of how I might be able to do that thing better in the future’. So yeah, there’s so much there. (Absolutely.)
Monty, if I want to take us to a close, what are the things where when you’re reflecting on your work and your practice and leading your team, what’s coming next for you? I mean, there’s so much here that you’ve been thinking about for years and decades of your practice, but what’s coming up and what are you most excited about in the future?
Monty
I’ve always had a really clear vision. I’ve been very fortunate in that respect. So Habitus is a social enterprise that uses anthropology, educational psychology, and emotional intelligence to help people just connect with their humanity and realize that there is a powerful capability in that. So we’ve always had a clear idea of what we are doing. We’ve got a range of programs that help people understand some of those cultural assumptions, around race and gender and free freedom of speech and culture and diversity – as like a doorway into these leadership and facilitation techniques that we teach – to support people, to lead and facilitate in a more human-centred way, with a lot of the principles that we talked about.
But it’s always been gearing towards my primary goal which is to make anthropology a household name, right? So I want people to – when they have a human problem or a culture problem – and not just when they have a wicked problem – when they have a little problem – that they would ordinarily call an economist or a psychologist – where they’d be like, ‘hey we need to call an anthropologist to be an important voice in that discussion’.
One of the things that we are doing at the moment is – we teach people how to use our facilitation techniques to facilitate transformative experiences in order to understand what’s really going on for people. We’ve recently run a massive program in my hometown actually, where young people have experienced high rates of youth suicide for a range of different reasons. They’re in this space where everybody was telling them what to think and what to do. And all these well-meaning adults were trying to co-opt the narrative and tell everybody, ‘well you’ve got to do this and you’ve got to do that’. And the young people were like, ‘hold on folks; we know what’s going on for us. We are the experts of this lived experience. No one’s listening to us’.
So we facilitated some programs where they could actually unpack that experience and collectively sense-make, and we taught them how to run those programs for themselves, and we supported them to actually come up with their own change initiatives. As a result of our data collection processes throughout all of that, we were able to support them to produce their own meaningful white paper with outcomes, recommendations, risks, and opportunities – which is amazing! Like 14 to 24-year-old kids – not kids, young people – who are driving change for themselves.
Now we’re actually using that same methodology for a range of other spaces. We’ve got a current project with a group of lived experience workers in the suicidality and mental health space. I don’t know what it’s like for you folks, but whether it be Indigenous engagement or mental health – everybody has to have people with lived experience but they’ve become slightly commodified and exploited. It’s almost like their stories are being colonized for the purposes of the institution or the business. So we are running the same program for them, but training them in the methods of ethnography. So they can actually really embrace these anthropological perspectives as they facilitate, as they design changes to mental health service delivery as they tell their story. So that people can get a sense of that lived experience for people on the ground, but that they take back control of those stories and can facilitate change – not just within a workshop – but within wider structural constraints.
That’s what’s got me excited right now. We’ve just launched our ‘Doing Ethnography’ course, with this particular cohort, where we are training them to see and think like an anthropologist, to have these skills so that they’re not just telling their story and people are deciding whether or not that story is valid. But they have a language, a methodology to actually go, ‘no this is why …’ They’re not just describing things, they’re helping people understand the meaning behind things. And why we need to change in certain areas and why that change is driven by the needs of the people who are experiencing it. So yeah, that’s my jam at the moment.
Beth
Oh that sounds wonderful. I did read that white paper, by the way, and I found it very valuable, even just the way it was presented. I can’t remember the details, but it was. Thank you for sharing that with me. And thank you for – yes – bringing anthropology into our podcast as a ‘household’ name [laughter]. This isn’t a household, it’s a podcast. But I had never thought about the words anthropology and facilitation together, and you’ve helped me make those connections and see what I do and what we do in a new way. Probably there’s some deepening there that we all can do, right, when we come with this lens.
Even as I was in the car with my daughter today, I told her about coming on – having you come onto the podcast – and she said, ‘what’s anthropology?’ [Monty laughs]. And I hope I did it justice. I said, ‘I think it’s the study of humans and their behaviour’. (Boom.) How is that?
Monty
Yeah, boom. Absolutely. Well, sometimes I get cheeky and I say ‘it’s the study of ants!’ [laughter]. Just to mess with people a little bit.
Beth
But what’s at the core of it? I mean, I think maybe it’s on your website I pulled like how can we be a good human? How can we be a good human when we’re designing and facilitating workshops, meetings, whatever it is, and you’ve helped us so much with what’s at the core of our work and I love the pieces around emotion, too. So yeah: How can we be humans with each other and help humans have conversations with each other, and come up with meaningful things to do in their organizations I think is the other piece of what I loved about what you said. Like you’re not there to have run of the mill meetings. You’re really there to help people make meaning and make really wonderful change, right? Like that’s pretty exciting stuff.
Monty
It is pretty exciting. And I suppose the only thing I’d add to that, Beth, is that when it comes to being a good human, you don’t need me. You don’t need theorists or management consultants or new buzzwords. You just need an opportunity to really connect with yourself as a human and connect with the other humans in your life. That’s the resource. That’s the beautiful thing. So the more opportunities we can have to do that, I think the better.
Beth
Absolutely. Thank you so much for being with me today. It’s been a pleasure.
Monty
Thank you. Had a great time, Beth.
[Episode outro]
Beth Cougler Blom
I told you it was going to be a lively conversation with Monty and that’s exactly what it was. [chuckles] I really appreciated just getting to tap into his large brain for a while in this episode. And I love that he shared with us that he’s “neuro-spicy”! He taught me a new word and I teased him afterwards saying that I was just trying to keep up with what he was saying the whole time because he had so much that he was sharing with us. But I just love the fact that Monty’s passion for anthropology and his passion for facilitation really shone through so brightly during my conversation with him.
If you’re not used to looking at the show notes of the episodes, this might be a really good one to go and check them out around because Monty did share so much with us and he’s a fast talker and it might have been hard to take in. We have transcripts for all of the episodes and this one is no different. If you check out the show notes on facilitatingonpurpose.com, you will be able to review the conversation that I had with Monty and really dig into the pieces that he said again and help it land for you. Because I know he shared with us a lot and that would be just a great way for you to go back and really remember and retain the things that he was sharing.
One of the things that I wanted to just draw your attention back to was that Monty said in facilitation we have access to vast amounts of data points and that he uses that sense making methodology to try to understand those data points and make sense of them. He talked about the objective, the subjective, the social and embodied forms of information that emerge in a space that we’re in when we’re facilitating something with a group. Our job as facilitators – or one of them anyway – is to recognize that we have all of that data at our disposal. And then we can try to find patterns and draw the threads of those different data points together to weave together a story or a narrative or a tapestry of meaning within that space. I’m just reading Monty’s exact words back to you here. Remember he talked about the worm’s eye view and the bird’s eye view and our need to go back and forth between those two perspectives to see the perspective of the people on the ground and then the other broader strategic perspectives.
I know I’m going to be thinking about what Monty has said for quite some time to come and maybe it will help me pay a little bit more attention even when I go into my next facilitated situation. I hope you enjoyed Monty as a guest and his passion for both anthropology and facilitation today. I want to thank him for being with me on the show.
On the next episode of the podcast, I talk with Kerri Price. Kerri has been working as a facilitator for about 25 years. She’s worked with groups of all shapes and sizes across almost every sector. Now she works with other facilitators to help them level up and be the best facilitators they can be. We talked about one of Kerri’s favourite topics to talk about for the next episode and that is how can we encourage creativity and innovation in the groups that we’re working with as facilitators? I hope you’ll join us next time on the podcast. We’ll see you then.
[Show outro]
Beth
Thank you for listening to Facilitating on Purpose. If you were inspired by something in this episode, please share it with a friend or a colleague to help them expand their facilitation practice too. To find the show notes, give me feedback, or submit ideas for future episodes visit facilitatingonpurpose.com. Special thanks to Mary Chan at Organized Sound Productions for producing this episode. Happy facilitating!
