Opening the black box: facilitation in a changing world

Rosa Zubizarreta
I am a tremendous fan of your work, Oliver, as you are one of the few in the field of democratic innovations who has engaged deeply with the key role of group facilitation. At the same time, even as we celebrate the current growth of work in this area, I think it’s valuable to reflect on why facilitation seems to have been so neglected in the first place. Alfred Moore suggested that this has to do with facilitation not seeming to square with Habermas’ normative theory of communication, while Claudia Landwehr attributed it to deliberative democrats’ “lack of interest in leadership”. I’m curious as to your perspective on this.

Oliver Escobar
Some of these explanations are plausible. Facilitation didn’t have enough space in some of the theoretical foundations of the field of deliberative democracy, which are grounded at a very abstract level or on macro-structural considerations. And when you’re looking at things from such an abstract level, then front-line practices are not necessarily in focus. Yet for me, there are a few other factors as well.

The field of deliberative democracy is very diverse, and I don’t want to oversimplify it, but I think it’s fair to say that deliberative democracy studies haven’t always paid enough attention to structural forces, the way structural inequalities work, the way hierarchies of power and knowledge work, and how privileges shape political arenas. There have been some notable exceptions, such as John Dryzek’s Democracy in Capitalist Times.

This is changing; the field engaging with structural inequalities much more now. Yet because historically it hasn’t, facilitation has been somewhat invisible. For me, the role of facilitators is to alter power inequalities and disrupt unhelpful cultural norms that people and institutions bring into the room. A key part of facilitation work is to address how structural forces shape group dynamics and the impact of deliberative processes.

For me, the role of facilitators is to alter power inequalities and disrupt cultural norms that people and institutions bring into the room.

The second factor is a broader sociological point: in contemporary times, a lot of work has become invisible. A lot of the things that happen around us, it’s as if they happen by magic: think about the food-industrial complex, and how people connect with food on the shelf of a supermarket and the black box of everything that happens before that, all the in-betweens, all the intermediaries. In almost any aspect of contemporary life, you will see that many professions are rendered invisible, and they tend to be the in-between professions. When I did my PhD, I became fascinated by that backstage work that creates our world as we perceive it, but that is often not accounted for. It’s as if these things just happen. Unpacking such black boxes opens all kinds of questions about ourselves and the societies we’ve built.

Rosa
A metaphor I included in my dissertation work is facilitators as the ‘essential workers’ of democratic innovations. And while it can be fun to play with metaphors, there’s also a distressing aspect: people whose work we depend upon are rendered unseen and unheard.

As for structural inequality, and the role of facilitators in disrupting the practical manifestation of these structural forces – as you’ve written about so eloquently, if we didn’t have a facilitator in the room, that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have power dynamics: we would just have uncontested, uninterrupted power dynamics that mirror the power dynamics in the broader world.

If we didn’t have a facilitator in the room, that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have power dynamics.

For both of us, our affinity with facilitation is connected to our activist backgrounds. In the activist realm there’s an enormous emphasis on capacity building; realising that as humans, we need to develop facilitative skills to be able to organise and effect social change. So it’s interesting to see that some academics tend to discount facilitated mini-publics, noting that they are interested in broad-scale public deliberation instead. Of course, broad-scale public deliberation is important – and from my perspective, can benefit tremendously from greater societal literacy, in precisely the kinds of practical knowledge skilled facilitators are developing.

For this it’s key that we don’t see professional facilitation and lay facilitation as some kind of zero-sum dynamic, but as positive developments that can contribute to one another. When we open up the realm of what facilitators actually do, we quickly move away from this view of machine-like facilitators who are just there to enforce norms and to make sure everybody has a chance to speak, into a much more relational perspective. I see that as another aspect of the black box – we don’t pay much attention to care work in our culture, because it’s that messy human stuff that we can’t control – which leads to some wanting to dispense with human facilitators as much as possible and have AI facilitators instead.

Oliver
One of the concepts that I find helpful is from sociologist Erwin Goffman. He shows how every realm of social life, family life, and private life, is made up of “interaction orders”, meaning that we interact according to explicit or implicit rules and norms that guide behaviours, what is possible, what is acceptable, what is imaginable. I draw on that when I study participatory spaces, trying to understand how different interaction orders are constituted, and what are the explicit and tacit rules of the game.

Yet when I design processes, I often encounter someone who says, “Well of course that happened that way, because you designed an artificial space. You created a space in which that kind of thing was possible.” My answer is that there’s no such thing as a ‘natural’ space of interaction; all spaces of interaction are in a sense artificial (i.e. constructed), insofar as they are emerging interaction orders shaped by culture and all kinds of societal dynamics. So a lack of purposeful design doesn’t mean that a space is more ‘natural’ than an alternative space designed to foster more egalitarian, deliberative, respectful, or solidaristic dynamics.

There are perhaps exceptions: spaces that already have a history, a community that knows how to talk to itself, a grassroots space or communal space, or tribal space, where there is a culture of that kind of egalitarian conversation. But in many spaces in the public sphere, ‘free flow’ is not really free, it is a local manifestation of broader structural forces. For example, rhetorical skills, and other key resources for deliberative participation, are unequally distributed in society. Therefore, the underlying assumption I work with is that an ‘artificial space’ is as legitimate as a so-called ‘natural space’ because some kind of force shapes all spaces of interaction.

Rosa
Indeed – we need to be intentionally egalitarian, empathic, and creative, by design. I see this as one aspect of decolonisation work; constructing spaces where people can have more egalitarian conversation by design. Whereas if we lived in an Indigenous culture where the existing cultural norms were that whenever difficulties come up, we have a ritual of sitting in a circle and listening to each person uninterruptedly, then we might not need to create a different interaction structure.

We need to be intentionally egalitarian, empathic, and creative, by design.

Oliver
So much depends on the context that we live in. Since you mention ritual, we are now in my favourite territory, political anthropology. The field of deliberative democracy is rediscovering something really basic: discursive practices such as dialogue and deliberation belong to humanity as a whole, rather than to any one part of the world. That’s why the decolonising agenda is really important.

I am interested in developing a history of deliberative democracy that starts in ancient practice well before Athenian democracy, in many parts of the world, and there’s some really insightful anthropological and archaeological evidence to support that. This is not a Western practice. That needs to be said.

Yet it’s clear that we’ve built many societies where we no longer place those rituals at the heart of the public sphere. Instead, the political economy of mediatised public discourse tends to prioritise rituals of polarisation, oversimplification, posturing, shallow exchange, confrontation and factional monologuing. These rituals shape our public sphere and are reinforced and monetised by the media in many mainstream spaces. Our toolkit of discursive resources often becomes so narrow that our collective imagination about what we can do with one another through discourse is narrowed as a result. Our media landscape is so impoverished and so limiting, and that becomes another example of structural forces at work.

So until new rituals become widespread, we need people who can help us to try and reimagine those rituals. And I think that’s where facilitators come in, and their role poses a significant question: how do we render this work more visible so that it can be both supported and scrutinised? We need to do both these things because there are powerful questions about power that we need to keep asking.

Rosa
The good news as I see it is that Indigenous knowledge and Western science are starting to converge in some areas. Both Western research on prosociality and Indigenous science focus on “self-transcendent states” – supporting humans in shifting beyond narrow self-interest. We also know that social psychology and the brain sciences have been shedding new light on how high-quality listening results in people feeling understood, acknowledged, and seen. This opens up space for humans to learn and grow. This means that the ‘soft stuff’ that we do as facilitators, mediators, and process designers is starting to be validated by ‘hard sciences’. Given the technocratic forces continually at work in our society, these convergences are cause for celebration – we can all benefit from a greater understanding of the work involved in bringing out the best in humans.

About the authors
Professor Oliver Escobar holds the Chair of Public Policy and Democratic Innovation at the University of Edinburgh. He works on the theory and practice of participatory and deliberative democracy and is involved in democratic innovation across various policy and community contexts.

Dr Rosa Zubizarreta, PhD is a professional facilitator and organisation development consultant who recently completed a dissertation at Fielding Graduate University. She is currently a Democracy Visiting Fellow for the academic year 2023-2024 at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center.

Acknowledgements from the Editor
This piece is part of the Digest’s curated conversation series, where practitioners, scholars, advocates and critics meet to converse on the topics that matter to them in the theory and practice of deliberative democracy.

I’d especially like to thank members of the Democracy R&D Network; the idea for this series came about through an open space workshop at the DRD Conference in Copenhagen, and it was through the Network that I was able to reach so many people. I’d like to acknowledge and thank all the people who came forward to take part in this series and the collective effort that has gone into the careful planning, recording and editing of each piece.