As often as I’ve been able for the past three years, I’ve participated in a “Facilitators Guild,” a monthly gathering of individuals who share what they are learning or struggling with as they work both formally and informally to help groups come to better understandings of divergent points of view and to self-discover different ways of thinking about and doing important things.

One of the many lessons I’ve taken away from these gatherings is that we don’t get people to change by telling people what should happen. Effective facilitation is more subtle. In fact, it is not at all prescriptive: rather, the professional facilitator doesn’t really know where things might go; and the result is that the group takes ownership of the ideas that emerge.

This process of facilitation can be slow and messy. In literary terms, the process is more like an epic poem than a blog. It’s a path which rises and falls and twists and turns over many pages, rather than one that starts and stops abruptly in a few plain-spoken paragraphs.

Leadership, it seems to me, requires at different times both the patience to explore and embrace the dissonance of diverse points of view, and the power to express deeply held core values in a succinct and uncompromising voice.  Both poetry and polemic.