Navigating Organizational Optics: Shadow Facilitation (2.3)

When Image Outweighs Honesty

Introduction

This post addresses two shadow pressures where organizational survival instincts clash with process integrity, the need to:

• make the organization look good; protect the image and emphasize a positive narrative over honest and often messy dialogue (pressure 2 of 9)

• affirm success to external stakeholders; downplay weaknesses to maintain funding or political support (pressure 7).

These pressures often lead to spin over substance, risking group cynicism and flawed outcomes. Your role is to navigate this tension, protecting the integrity of the dialogue while managing necessary optics.

The post introduces six tactics that provide a playbook, from pre-emptive planning to in-the-moment balancing acts.

Overview of the 6 tactics

Pressure to make the organization look good

Tactic 15:  Have honest conversations in early planning about how much reality key stakeholders can stand. 

Tactic 16:  Draw on data and the evidence base, separating facts from opinions. Check!

Tactic 17:  Bring the long view:  short-term pain, long-term gain, growth and stability.

Tactic 18: Leaven need for change: lighter themes, recognition.  Celebrate achievements.

Pressure to affirm success to external stakeholders 

Tactic 19:  Set a strategy with lead organizers for fielding input from key stakeholders. 

Tactic 20:  Be realistic about balancing pressures, aligned to purpose.  Do what you can. 

How these pressures show themselves

Pressures to make the organization look good may apply at design, session planning and facilitation stages in a facilitation spiral.  If they occur at one stage, they will probably occur in many different dimensions.

Motivation to make the organization look good may be to avoid having to change, or to present a positive face and spin to stakeholders including funders.  The mechanisms are the same.  

Design stage

• Time to receive an evaluation report about a programme or the organization may be scheduled late in the afternoon, when people are tired and less focused.

• It may be designed as a ‘briefing’, one way flow only, rather than an open exchange. 

• Time allocated may be too short.

  

Session planning stage

• Organizers may try to pack the session with presentations, limiting time for participant feedback.

• They may cherry-pick highlights that put a more positive spin than the full picture. 

• Suggestions may be to provide participants with only an executive summary of highlights, rather than the in-depth evaluation where wisdom waits. 

  Facilitation stage

• Rather than supporting a clear focus on results and change in the weaker areas, organizers and key participants may try to shift the group’s attention onto related but not central topics, such as issues with procedures, partners, new policies, context changes.

• Participants may raise clear and pointed questions that are deflected by senior managers or lead organizers. 

• Sometimes difficult questions or topics may be deferred or ignored until time runs out. 

The critical last and closing stage of the facilitation spiral can experience similar political pressures to polish the image. Transfer to regular work place streams and measures for change is typically beyond the scope of direct influence and management of an event-specific facilitator.

The two pressure points covered in this post are closely related.  The same facilitation tactics may be useful for each. 

Upfront strategy and nimble in-the-moment responses - 6 tactics in a dynamic strategy

To counter the manifestations of these pressures, you need a mix of upfront strategy and agile in-the-moment responses.  Six tactics below are grouped by the primary pressure they address. 

Make the organization look good: protect the image, emphasizing positive narrative over honest and sometimes messy dialogue.

Photo by Cesar Cabrera on UNSPLASH

A major event or significant process is an opportunity to showcase and celebrate an organization’s achievements. To do that without balanced attention to areas that need work creates fissures in the process.  In some large organizations, pressure to make the organization look good may come from within.  Organizing leads may need to present the most positive face possible to senior managers.  Participants may use limited interaction time with senior people to shine as individuals which may reduce opportunity for consolidating group results.

How to counteract this pressure?

Tactic 15: Have honest conversations in early planning about how much reality key stakeholders can stand. 

The time to lay the groundwork for managing this pressure point is during early planning.  The parameters set then are the frame for subsequent decisions about coverage and methods. 

Even if the decision is made to limit the time and scope of discussion on themes that raise questions about organizational capacity and reputation, be prepared for participants to push back. 

If the evaluation relates to people’s experience as staff, some may be unwilling to let topics important to them be brushed aside or minimized.  As part of session planning, decide who in the room is best placed to answer certain types of questions or feedback that relates to organizational image and optics.  Brief those people on the possibility that they may be directly called on to respond to specifics within their areas of responsibility and expertise.  Call on them.

Tactic 16:  Draw on data and the evidence base, separating facts from opinions. Check!

The tendency of many internal organizing leads is to want to protect the organization, even from those others who work in other parts of it.  Your role may be split between support to them and responsibilities to the wider group and process. 

• Consistently use data and the evidence base to guide your advice, recommendations and decisions about process. Get familiar enough with the terrain of the event or process that you can effectively link points and ensure an accurate shared context and knowledge base.

• Where fact-checking may need to be rapid and continuous, establish a "quick research" function on the extended facilitation team. When uncertain or questionable information is introduced, that person is tasked either independently or at the request of facilitation team members to check the facts. The person checks original references and accuracy based on trusted source documents and "in the teachable moment" contributes findings to the group to reinforce trust. Call on the fact-checker to make pithy updates on questioned points.

• Some people elide facts and opinions.  Take time to invite and request references and sources when information is provided as "fact". A flexible role that may expand and contract in different processes is to brief people accurately, to seek the best knowledge base and practice to draw on it as a basis for group work and decision-making. This role is for a full facilitation team, not an individual.

• Where content is potentially contentious, for example security sector reform or anti-terrorism measures, or even when two "camps" hold opposing positions on an important topic or decision, a strong facts base is an imperative.  This includes facts about the political landscape. Yet some information sources may not be able to be made public. Some processes demand more nuanced and subtle shadow facilitation.   The Chatham House Rule (recognition of points but no attribution) is an important process norm in such situations.

• If you are mainly a process facilitator without a substantive knowledge base in the subject area of a meeting or exchange, pair with a co-facilitator who has that through the facilitation spiral. Share the responsibility for contemporary accuracy in evidence base and sources.

Fear of honest dialogue is often overblown.  Consider this case where grantees openly recommended changes to funders, and the result was higher approval from stakeholders.  

Case Example:  The UN Trust Fund on Ending Violence Against Women organized a Global Grantee convention in Sarajevo in 2019.  Representatives of Member States and partner organizations such as AWID (Association for Women in Development) and the EVAW section in UN Women were invited.  The stakeholders were treated the same as the grantee participants, with equal opportunity to engage and contribute. 

Some funders saw the forum as an opportunity for grantees to connect and exchange, and deliberately adopted “listening and learning” mode.  Most contributed the stakeholder perspective when appropriate in largely grantee exchanges, or when invited. 

Grantees had much to say about how the Trust Fund could improve and reorient their work to women’s rights organizations, more flexible funding, and accompaniment along feminist principles.  They were not shy about criticizing funders and stakeholders for funding that was too rigid, too short-term to effectively achieve results in the area of ending violence against women and girls, too fixated on detailed reports rather than programming which absorbed limited staff and volunteer time, limited psychosocial support for the people engaged in this challenge.  

The evaluation feedback was analyzed according to group represented.  The full group of stakeholder participants rated the event at above 90% and many noted that one thing they liked most about the event was the opportunity for candid, open exchanges. 

Early in preparations, some facilitation team members expressed concerns about inviting funders, and about treating them as participants and as a distinct group in a convening mainly for grantees. The decision to include them was an extension of the senior leader's priorities of transparency, support and solidarity, inclusion, collaboration and accompaniment.

Sometimes people are afraid unnecessarily.  If fears have a base in people's experience and reality, even more reason to encourage that a process open up for a managed honest exchange. But if internal leads advise against it, trust them. If fears relate to experience with reprisals, retribution, risk and rejection, the facilitator's priority becomes to protect the extent of open exchange that is safely possible for all participants.

This case validates Tactic 16, using evidence base and accurate data to build people's trust in candid exchanges.  

Tactics 17 and 18:  Balance the long view with celebration.

To sustain changes, you must frame short-term pain as long-term gain (Tactic 17) and strategically leaven the agenda with recognition and lighter themes (Tactic 18).  The two support balancing the difficult with the positive. 

Tactic 17:  Bring the long view:  short-term pain, long-term gain, growth and stability. 

• Encourage and support organizations to be more open about what they need to improve as well as to celebrate what they’re doing well.  Look up from an event-specific and even a one-year time frame, to the strategic plan. Accept that you can only go so far. 

• A facilitator’s job is in part to make the people feel good and the organization look good.  But that has to happen within the purpose-drive, results-based design frame or model. 

• Where the organization is dealing with significant challenges, the only way things will change is if people are enabled to bring a solutions focus to addressing them. 

• Create and maintain a safe space for candid exchanges, within the limits of what the organizational representatives can handle. 

Tactic 18:  Leaven sobering need for change with carefully planned lighter themes, recognition and celebration of achievements.   

Photo by Ulin Wang on UNSPLASH

• Use ‘fun’ team building sparingly and purposefully.  Many professionals prefer work-related connection and practical relationship building.  Offer more physically demanding activities on an optional basis, with alternatives.

• Often people need and want work related points of connection and prefer to use precious meeting or retreat time to get to the nitty-gritty, not being addressed in mainstream work processes.  Some short ice-breakers and energizers serve a number of purposes including team-building, without taking too much time or being too much of an emphasis.

• Even when team building is an objective of an event, propose team-building activities that have some connection to people’s work and dynamics, transferring results back to objectives and purpose.

• Definitely build in social time:  a welcome cocktail, a dinner for facilitation team members and resource people, a recreational slot making the most of available facilities, an outing to enjoy a unique location, a dinner together.  Adjust a schedule of social programme related activities to the budget you have, but definitely plan them as a continuing theme of connection, not as one-off events.

• Support the group to organize itself for outings, enabling individuals planning things to have the floor to invite others.  Build in some free-style space for people to network on shared interests.

• People are typically more able to speak about difficult things in a positive and warm group environment.  In a longer programme, build up to the most challenging sessions.  Schedule those just past the mid-point:  after a good foundation has been established, before the facilitation spiral begins to move to closure.  Avoid starting “cold”, for example placing these on the first day of a programme, although good progress can be made by linking objectives to a sequence of sessions including a briefing near the beginning and a working session to plan near the mid-point.

• Find ways to profile and celebrate positive dimensions while maintaining open conversation and forward progress on negative aspects. 

• Include in the “wall graphics” for the event a full display of the good work the organization has done.  Most organizations invest a lot in presenting their work.  Flyers, banners, report covers, launch notices:  all contain carefully selected visuals that can help you and the group “make the room your own”.  Featuring highlights from experience also indirectly addresses making the group look good including for funders.  Try to feature results of work to which stakeholders have contributed.

The pressure to make the organization look good may be an inward one, or it may relate to the pressure to affirm success for external stakeholders. 

Affirm success for external stakeholders: downplay weaknesses to maintain funding or political support.

Particularly when an event includes funders, donors and other stakeholders with which the lead organizers have a dependent relationship, pressure may rise to profile the positive work of the organization as strong, worthwhile, bringing value, whether it is true or not, and without a balanced view.   

In my experience, stakeholders and funders appreciate a candid and transparent exchange more than a pre-packaged script.  

Tactic 19:  Set a strategy with lead organizers for fielding input from key stakeholders. 

• Set a strategy with lead organizers to field and direct certain types of questions from key stakeholders to identified logical leads. Follow the guidelines carefully, even when they are informal and not codified. Debrief as a standing topic at the daily debrief meeting.

  - some inputs require that the most senior person in the room responds: political ones;

  - some inputs are logically answered by the natural lead on that subject - "go to the source";

  - some inputs from people in certain positions may need to be nimbly and quickly balanced with different or additional positions (e.g.: an administrative lens on a proposed new policy.

• Be strategic, choreographing a smooth process without the mechanics of it being visible to all participants. Track and bring balance to the inputs from different represented groups: senior / mid-level / more junior; specific disciplines; headquarters / field or remote locations; within the hosting organization / outside of it. When people representing some perspective don't contribute, informally speak to them and encourage inputs, or ask if they are comfortable if you call on them for a specific perspective. Examples include youth, as junior people may often self-silence, women in contexts where a subordinate position is the norm, or people from self-identified culture, religion and language groups. Typically disenfranchised and marginalized voices may need repeated invitations to contribute and a range of methods aligned to their comfort levels.

• Try to make the "balancing act" of gathering diverse views a natural one, and address it in the process norms, to avoid appearing preferential, manipulative or "cooking the process", which can backfire if it irritates people.

Tactic 20:  Be realistic about balancing these pressures, aligned to purpose.  Do what you can.

• This pressure can be beyond the scope of what a facilitator can address.  For some events, including resource mobilization ones, the polish and shine on the work of the organization is a direct investment in securing more resources, so incentive to address gaps or lags in progress or failures may not exist. 

• As a facilitator, or member of a facilitation team, initiate informal conversations with stakeholders and partners at breaks, meals and social occasions.  Try to get a sense of their take on proceedings, their attitudes toward the organization, decisions they may be considering.  Share intelligence you get with lead organizers and resource people who may be able to speak to parallel paths and common goals.

• Set seating plans that pair external stakeholders with internal leaders and innovative practitioners, experienced and confident enough to engage with them.

• As with the case example, include in your evaluation strategy ways to identify sources of input and analyze them separately.  The results may surprise you!  Sometimes internal people are overly critical, and external people are glad to be included and positive.

• Work with the communications and codification team to ensure balanced reporting and ample attention to the positive, so it’s part of the record, and fair attention to the negative, with a clear way forward. 

• In a worst case, plans made for an event or process may need to be rapidly revised and refocused if new developments and changes occur. The priority for an event may shift from, problem-solving on existing pain points and challenges to briefing, securing the latest intelligence from the most senior reliable source available, with a goal of ensuring that all participants are equally well prepared to plan and strategize. Lessons from psychology and experience include that a typical response to change is to reject it and criticize it, so be prepared to absorb it. Also, some people take a role as "devil's advocate" not because a point expresses their position which may be evolving but because they want to be thorough in examination of possibilities. Be cautious about 'devil's advocates' who disguide resistance as thoughtful reflection: they can be spoilers.

In closing

Navigating organizational optics is a tightrope walk between political necessity and process integrity.  The six tactics provide guardrails.  Pre-empt spin with honest planning (15 and 19), ground discussions in evidence (16), balance critique with a forward-looking celebratory frame (17, 18) and know where your influence ends (20).  Navigating organizational options also offers rich scope to celebrate successes and use available visuals to "make the room the group's own", literally using images and graphics as indirect optical background.

The goal in this area of addressing shadow facilitation pressures is not to eliminate political pressure and individual agendas. We couldn’t even if we wanted to!  The goal is to create enough protected space and trust for honest dialogue so that the process and the organization emerge stronger, benefitting from diverse perspectives available.  Achieving that goal requires that participants feel safe and heard. This intersects with tactics that build trust and a safe space, and equalize power and opportunity to contribute within and across a group.

This concludes Section 2: Preparing for power and politics in group dynamics.  Next we move to Part 3: Process integrity challenges, focusing on pressures that threaten the core design and outcomes of your work.  (Link)