Instead of ignoring clues from the emotional domain while you are facilitating, or immediately reacting to them unawarely, this pattern is to help you stop and get grounded before you choose your response. Applying it you will have checked your own state of congruency and that of the participants and the community and may get ready to respond instead of react.

Context:

Facilitating a retrospective.

Problem:

As facilitator:

• Your emotional domain is sending messages something is "amiss".
• You have difficulty understanding what verbalizations are about.

How to figure out whether some incongruence is playing, or something else?

Forces:

• Clarity of purpose of the project, department, company or (local) organization that participants wish to retrospect on.
• Clarity of the facilitation process and expectations of participants
• Hidden needs, wants, desires, yearnings, frustrations.
• Current state of project, department, company or (local) organization.
• Familiarity of facilitator with participant culture.
• Familiarity of participants with facilitated processes.

Solution:

Shift attention to the individual team members and yourself and observe or check^[1]:

• Behavioral clues
  • Face, manner and way of talking and moving, projecting frustration and anger.
  • There is no quality of ease and spontaneity in team members, reflecting that they may be at war with themselves.
  • There is no harmony between what they say and do and how they look, sound and move.
  • There is no openness to and curiosity about new ideas, new experiences, and new possibilities of life.
  • Some or all participants appear to be intimidated or overwhelmed by fears of anxiety or insecurity.
  • They seem not to enjoy the humorous aspects of life, in themselves and others.
  • Qualities of harmony and dignity are not preserved under stress.

• Spelling and grammatical clues in body language
  • Eyes are not alert, bright and lively.
  • Face and jaw are not relaxed.
  • Head is not held erect and in alignment with the body.
  • Shoulders are not relaxed.
  • Arms do not hang in a natural and easy manner.
  • Posture is neither erect, nor well balanced, but rather strained.
  • Walk or posture is aggressive or overbearing.

• Interactional clues
  • Participants seem not at ease talking of accomplishments and shortcomings.
  • Compliments, expressions of affection, familiarity, or appreciation are not given.
  • Participants appear closed to criticism and uncomfortable about acknowledging mistakes
  • They do not seem to have flexibility and trust in their mind to respond to situations and challenges
  • They seem to see the world or any situation as doom and defeat, or only in terms of win or lose

None of these clues in and of themselves signifies incongruence, not even when occurring in combination with other clues. When a "head is not held erect in alignment with the body" the person may have a medical problem or may be watching their feet to not stand on insects, other small crawling creatures, or to watch out for floor-bound hazards. Yet when the amount of clues possibly indicating incongruence increases, the likelihood of incongruence increases fast.

My rule of thumb: With more than three clues with three different participants, including myself, I assume some incongruence is happening and I will have to tread lightly and focus on the emotional domain and trust levels.

Resulting context:

As a facilitator you have now shifted gear from the product domain to the emotional and logical domain. Several approaches are possible depending on the results of your observations:

• Which clues you detected, if any.
• How severe the clues seem.
• Forces playing in the context of the community retrospecting.
• Where the community is in the overall retrospective process.
• In which congruency domains you detect clues:
  • yourself (facilitator)
  • participants (community members present in retrospective)
  • community and retrospective context

Possible approaches and actions to take:

• No clues were found, it was my emotional domain playing tricks on me (mark it and let's investigate that later) and I saw the unimaginable again, so we can try to move on again.
• In preporatory phases, you can consider a path of InvolvedParticipants.
• Quietly cast a MoebiusWiki:ProtectionSpell on yourself. (Sorry, this spell is not articulated in pattern format yet)
• ?IncreasedSafety - only if you now "know" (some) people do not feel safe enough. If you are not sure whether people feel safe or not, you can check safety levels with ?CheckedSafetyByBallot first.
• ?CheckedPurposeAlignment
• ?CheckedStateByOpenness - a pattern in which you as a facilitator say what you think and feel (Practising the MoreFullyHumanWiki:SatirFiveFreedoms), sharing your observations and asking the participants whether they agree and if they can help.
• ?CheckedStateByBreaking - a pattern used in severe cases, like someone running off or people yelling at each other in an argument, or when weapons come into play. A good time to break and gather our wits about us, all of us!

Rationale:

MoreFullyHumanWiki:SatirModelOfInteraction

Known Uses:

Getting back on track when progress comes to a standstill and following the planned agenda yields no results.

Engaging the deeper personal issues sabotaging a given work culture that, when unaddressed, make other practical or external efforts to improve project quality ineffective.

Authors:

NynkeFokma, ?MichaelGreen, ...

[1] Contributions by JerryWeinberg, StilesRoberts and others on a Shape Forum thread in 1999 (Not found in the archives).

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