After the first session with the team in which the extent of the overt and covert opposition was so immediately apparent, I had come away saying I felt like I had done a major workout. After the second session, I felt like I had been in a wrestling match in Meaning…. I had the most enormous headache! There were times when I had literally felt like I was making absolutely no sense whatsoever. My colleague who I was co-facilitating with experienced the same thing but she sounded completely coherent and clear to me as did I to her so…..what exactly was going on?
There were more rapid paced conversations brimming with competing model clashes all colliding with one another in the room than I could shake a stick at. There was also lots of direct and relentless questioning of me, which at times felt like interrogation. I was being asked to defend my credibility. We were riding the waves of the most turbulent breakdown imaginable.
The experience evoked a strong memory of a prisoner in the very first dialogue I ever participated in, in a UK prison some 15 years ago. His name was Matty and on first meeting him he was charming, open, funny, warm. My enquiry at that dialogue was about domestic violence. I wanted to learn more from a different perspective having only previously worked with women who were victims and this group of men was keen to talk about it. Matty began to challenge the guys who were talking very openly about their experience of being perpetrators of violence, their shame and guilt, what triggered their violence etc. He said something along the lines of “You should never use physical violence, you should never hit a woman...” I was silently following him and had made all kinds of assumptions about what he was actually saying….. So I was chilled to the bone when he turned and looked directly at me and followed this up with “You don’t ever need to hit a woman because you just mess with her f*****g head.”
Why was I remembering this so strongly in that moment of reflection about this team intervention? Maybe it was because the experience in the session with this particular team had felt like there was lots of ‘head messing’, lots of rhetorical questioning in Meaning – off the scale Meaning. There was definitely Opposition in it all but when it began to be expressed there was an accompanying heady mix of high politeness. The group kept closing things down. They were persistently using Meaning as power aggressively. Our interventions to shift and change this required painstaking patience, resilience and confidence over many months. Just noticing it, being able to name it and beginning to explore its impact through facilitating dialogue about it was the major outcome of this particular session.
Thankfully it wasn’t all turbulence and strife. There were also loads of other amazing things that happened in the session that day and we certainly continued laying the foundations for what was to come. It was as though we were in the process of preparing the ground for more solid work to come and as we did so we were seeing, experiencing and understanding more and more about what was lying beneath the surface of the dynamics in the team. There was so much to work on and with that came the challenge to pick out just exactly what to attend to first. I kept reminding myself that this was a process that would unfold over the course of a year and today was just day 2 of that work with the team. Together, we rolled up our sleeves and got on with working on the story and structures that were leading to so much negativity in their interactions with one another.