Recently, my niece got angry at her younger sister for interrupting her. Except that she hadn’t been talking at the time. At least not out loud.
“She interrupted the story I was telling in my head!”
Not much I can do about that one.
Or is there?
One way that strong facilitators add value is by making the implicit explicit.
By creating opportunities for people to describe what is going on inside their heads, we not only surface unspoken disagreements, but we also bring to light surprising ways in which folks might be using the same words but envisioning different things.
I often refer to this as “making sure the whole group is watching the same movie.”
It’s an important invitation in conflict resolution, but also in strengthening our collective imagination skills. We too often assume that we are all working toward the same desired future…until we ask someone else to describe theirs.
The more vivid our picture of the future we want to create, the more likely we are to be successful in creating it. We’re even more likely to achieve it if we do it together. But that’s only going to happen if we’ve created the space to make sure our desired futures look alike in the first place.