The travelling moderator

When I came back to Berlin, our clowns' meetings were characterised by general intransparency, chaos, and lenghty discussions would seriously take place on whether we should start talking immediately or play first. The result was mainly frustration - except when we played. Our time together appeared as an unstructured blob which we didn't necessarily know how to put into shape - each time anew.

The examples for unstructured and frustrating group discussions in left circles are surprisingly numerous, and although most networks in which I hang out are familiar with the basics of respectful discussion, the advantages of moderation and in certain cases non-violent communication remain widely unknown. Of course, moderation is immediately perceived with a dose of mistrust, as the moderator is endowed with a certain power and influence, in a way also creating a certain hierarchy in the group. And I don't want to say this mistrust isn't founded, as I've experienced myself the power I suddenly felt in my hands in this position: Power in that I was in the position to "hear out" and formulate a common decision from the various individual positions and hope that I wasn't pushing one position over another. Power in that people will often look up to the moderator as a sort of all-knowing higher being who has the last answer.
But experience and enthusiasm for moderation should, I believe, allow the trainee-moderator to avoid the trap of hierarchy building - developing more into a facilitator than a higher instance. And ideally really, EVERYONE becomes her or his own moderator, so that a separate facilitator isn't necessary.

And so it is that I eagerly take nearly every opportunity to structure and facilitate group discussions. I moderated some of our clowns' meetings and am gradually thinking of ways to get structure in without loosing our spontaneity. And I got a specific "success-moment" after my food-coop's plenum last Monday which reinforced my will to train - formally or simply through practice - in this area and put these skills to practice (also) later when on the road. I find the idea of being a travelling moderator appealing...
The success-moment: My food-coop has been around for ages, some of the members there have been in it for 15 or even 20 years. The plenum culture is characterised by decision making based on majority vote, a lack of self-moderation and generally people talking AT ALL TIMES, whether someone else started before them or not, and jumping off to side topics in disrespect of the agenda set up. Frustration among participants because of the time wasted in aimless and unproductive discussion: VERY high. Last Monday was my first plenum with them since coming back from the trip (I skipped the last one to go see Naomi Klein present her new book), and I volunteered to moderate. I tried hard to structure transparently the discussion, keep people on the topic and stop them from talking in between - that was tough and changing their behaviour will take for ever. BUT what I DID manage to do was make majority vote unnecessary by summarising and formulating consensus decisions out of the positions presented. And that, when I thought about it as I went to bed later, is a cool achievement. A cultural breakthrough without any of us really noticing it was happening.
Still plenty to learn though - focusing more on those who don't speak, training my empathy ability...