Seeing the Landscape Clearly

I was on a conference call on Friday evening with a board for a non-profit professional association that I am a part of. Not how any of us wanted to spend our Friday evening but everyone knew that we had been stuck as a group for some time. This was the only time we could all meet. Stuckness seemed to manifest in the larger association as decreasing membership, low attendance at meetings, and lack of energy between meetings, even with a concerted effort by the board to focus on great programs for the members. Stuckness showed up on the board as confusion, frustration, and lack of a clear direction. We brought in two facilitators--colleagues trained in working with groups.

What happened in two hours amazed everyone. The first fifteen minutes of the call was marked by the facilitators trying to make a connection to the group. Long silences, reluctant agreements, and "deadness" interspersed with "Are you still there?" I was surprised at how I wasn't willing to jump into the conversation.

By the end of the call, there was a visceral feeling of connection to all the participants on the call as well as the facilitators. I felt better about this group than I had in months. I sensed that no one wanted to be the first to hang up. We had covered much ground.

In thinking about what made the difference on this call, here's what I noticed:

• The facilitators asked us to dream together of what we could create for this non-profit. This sparked a new energy to begin again. Even when we felt we had failed together in the past. This dream became the "new land" that we wanted to inhabit together.

• Just as important in articulating the dream as a group was voicing our fears and skepticism. We stumbled on "ghosts" that had been hanging over the group--events in the past that colored our interactions in the present. One ghost was a reminder of how past boards for this non-profit had been successful. One ghost was a reminder of how we had each denied being stuck, no one wanting to call out the elephant in the room. Yet another ghost pointed to our disappointment and frustration in being ineffective, not enough to get the job done.

• The facilitators normalized our experiences by recounting how similar associations they had been a part of had struggled with the same issues of dwindling membership and low attendance. Having gone through this, they could see a natural ebb and flow to these groups. What we were experiencing was not out of the ordinary.

• The more we told the truth of our experiences on the board, the more connected and supportive we could be with each other. With each truth-telling, another piece of the landscape could be filled in. The fog began to lift and we could see the shape of the hills and valleys.

There is a difference between seeing the landscape clearly and wallowing in it. What groups need when they are stuck is to see the landscape clearly. I suspect there was a fear in this group that if we saw the whole picture, it might just scare us all off the board. What happened is that it brought us all back to wanting to be on the board. How ironic and how wonderful.