How to Facilitate Groups in Polarizing Times

This year, just as DEI programs have been eliminated or severely curtailed in private and public organizations, I have engaged in a yearlong DEI leadership training to enhance my capacity for greater self-awareness, relational trust, and collaboration when faciliatating organizations confronting polarization and uncertainty.

In divisive and polarized times, good facilitation is less about guiding a group and more about holding a dynamic process of emergence. Facilitation unfolds not through control, but through trust, adaptability, and shared intention. As facilitators, we need to listen for what wants to happen rather than impose what ‘should’ happen. It is a practice of noticing how energy shifts among people, how silence speaks, how ideas evolve when people feel psychologically safe enough to bring their full selves into the room.

Conflict by its nature is emotionally polarizing, sometimes forcing us to ‘choose a side’.

How might emergent facilitation be supportive under these circumstances?

Notice whether you’re moving into binary thinking when more complex thinking is required
Observe whether you’re taking a ‘neutral’ position which supports the status quo
Cultivate a non-polarized view, an ability to hold multiple truths

Seek to balance structure with spaciousness. This means holding the group’s purpose while allowing transformation to occur organically. In these times when rapid solutions and fixed outcomes are privileged, emergent facilitation reminds us to trust process over perfection. It invites patience, humility, and the willingness to be shaped by what unfolds, even when that means slowing down or finding the inner resources to reach out to have the difficult conversation. Facilitation, then, becomes less about directing others and more about cultivating conditions in which collective wisdom emerges naturally.

Please read these tributes from the Mindfulness Bell to my friend Rev. Dr. Larry Ward, Senior Dharma teacher in the Plum Village tradition. Dr. Ward’s recent passing is a profound loss and yet his life and his legacy continue to live on in his new self-published book, Morning Night, an exquisite collection of poems—explorations of race, nature, and spirit woven with messages of hope, justice, and belonging. The book pairs his poetry with his original paintings, offering a glimpse into his inner landscape and how he catches a poem.

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