Trust, safety and consent
The key values of farm succession facilitation and mediation
One of the most important things in farm facilitation mediations and facilitated meetings is trust, which is the precursor to being emotionally safe, which is what you need to express yourself and to create. As a facilitator, I also need to get permission from people to be managing the process. That’s about consent.
Trust is the foundation of so many things. As a facilitator, I can't just go into a meeting and command some sort of outcome. People are more open, expressive, and creative when there is trust there. And I can't just force trust, or say, ‘we need to have trust here’. I explain that trust is a value, and it gets developed and built with ‘trustworthiness’, which is essentially a set of behaviours that you interpret as worthy of trust. It’s not complicated. So I need to model trustworthiness. I say to people ‘if you dont think I’m doing my job, if I'm not deserving of trust, let me know. Get out your whistle and blow it’. In many years, I haven't had the whistle blown, but that may come.
When people build trust, and there’s trust present, they’re more solutions focused. They can progress to an agreement stage.
Safety is really important. You're more likely to feel safe when trust is present. Safety in this context is about being emotionally safe. As a facilitator, I need to facilitate in a way that people can be expressive, but not talk over each other. I establish safety with a simple rule - we take it in turns to talk. So everyone’s monitoring the order of their discussion, and there's only one person talking. People can get excited, expressive - so when that happens, I remind people to remember our rule: it’s important to feel safe. We have permission to speak, but not to speak over.
Consent: is about getting permission. I need to feel that I've got permission from participants. They’ve got to decide, ‘we want you to facilitate this meeting, because we're stuck in content, in the bits we need to say, we don't have an overview.’ My role is essentially the eagle - flying above, watching down. I’m managing the process. I need to have participants' permission to do that job. It's hard to be in charge of the process, and also be creative. As the facilitator I don't have interest in the content - I'm managing the process, so you can relax knowing that I've got that covered.
Gregory Dale on the values that guide his farm succession mediation practice