When we lead a workshop or a meeting on a divisive subject, we are tempted to judge it a success if people leave agreeing with us. I suggest judging it by the quality of the exchanges: were people able to build arguments and express different sensibilities, and did the disagreement become a debate rather than a clash between “I’m right” and “you’re wrong”? I draw on a workshop where one participant left as opposed to artificial intelligence tools as when she arrived, on research in social psychology, on John Dewey, on Jacques Rancière and on psychoanalysis. With this measure, the facilitator’s place changes: they have succeeded when people no longer need them to know what they think. Finally, I suggest a few ways of leading these collective sessions.
Is having convinced the same as having succeeded?
The people who commission workshops, training courses or consultation sessions often ask to measure their effects, and that is perfectly reasonable. They are then readily measured by agreement: how many participants say they are satisfied, how many say they have “changed their view”. And when we lead a session, we catch ourselves counting, at the end, the people we have moved in the direction we hoped for.
On a divisive subject, this measure has a consequence: the best-rated session will be the one where the facilitator got their point of view across most effectively, and the one where disagreements were able to come out will be penalised. Is that really what we want? If success consists in imposing one’s point of view, I do not see what democratic value we are defending. We are reproducing on a small scale what I have called dominating intelligence, when one person thinks on behalf of others, even when their ideas are good.
So I propose another measure. To my mind, a collective session has succeeded when, in the exchanges, people really built arguments, everyone was able to make their sensibility heard, and dialogue and debate were possible, without stopping at “I’m right and you’re wrong”. This is what I suggest evaluating: does each person know better, on the way out, what they think, why they think it, and how they got there? What did they hear that strengthened or shook their conviction? Whether positions have moved closer or not is another question.
“This raises a real ethical problem for me”
Recently, I was leading a workshop with a group of adults, cultural professionals, where the task was to make films with artificial intelligence tools. Just as I was about to start, a participant spoke up to say that what we were about to do raised a real ethical problem for her. In each stage she saw a profession: the script is the screenwriter’s job; historical research, the historical adviser’s; editing, the film editor’s. She did not claim to change the world by refusing these tools, but for her it was a matter of principle. She had known when she signed up what we would be doing, and she added that to criticise a tool, you also have to know how to use it.
I replied that what she was saying was important and highly respectable, that one can decide not to use certain tools, and that I would never say one absolutely must use them. I also told her that she had fallen into something of a trap, since by coming to the workshop she would have to use what she refused, and that I was sorry about that. And I explained why I was keeping the proposal. I have run this workshop with many people, teenagers and adults, for instance at the Studio 13-16 of the Centre Pompidou, at Tumo Paris or with some fifteen librarians at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, always keeping a real time for discussion after the films are screened. I have seen people come out more radically opposed to these tools than they went in, and others discover possibilities they had not suspected. Both suited me, and I also talk about this in Media education begins with our imaginaries. With the workshop, you do the thing yourself; afterwards you know, because you have done it, and you may come out even more convinced of your point of view, or having changed it. She did the workshop.
During the final discussion, this participant made two of the most useful remarks of the afternoon. She said it would seem strange to her to offer this workshop to children as their first experience of making images, before they had seen, by doing it themselves, that an image moves because you have moved an object, and I entirely agree with her. She also gave the group the most precise advice of the afternoon on using these tools: ask them, right from the start of the conversation, not to keep going along with us, and even to contradict us, because they tend to flatter us, and this flattery is dangerous for anyone who takes them as confidants (I analysed this mechanism in Sycophancy and the Mirror). Of the whole group, she was the one who looked at them most lucidly. She left, I think, as opposed to these tools as when she arrived, and with the means to argue her opposition. For me, the workshop was a success, for her as for the others.
The experiments of Willem Doise and Gabriel Mugny
Why was this disagreement so useful to the group? The social psychologists Willem Doise and Gabriel Mugny showed, in Le développement social de l’intelligence (InterÉditions, 1981; in English, The Social Development of the Intellect), that we make progress in our thinking mainly through socio-cognitive conflicts: when two people confront different answers or points of view on the same task, each has to reorganise what they know. Their experiments, conducted with children, run counter to common pedagogical intuition. We make progress by confronting a partner who is wrong, provided they answer differently from us, and we make hardly any progress when the partners share the same point of view.
Gabriel Mugny later specified, with others, the condition under which this conflict leads to progress. With Céline Darnon and Fabrizio Butera, in Des conflits pour apprendre (“Conflicts for learning”, Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 2008), he distinguishes two ways of reacting to a conflict, which they call regulations. In epistemic regulation, people seek to understand the problem better and to coordinate their points of view, and they learn. In relational regulation, they seek to defend their competence against the other, to show that they are right, or else to give in for the sake of peace, and the conflict then loses its benefits, when it does not actually harm learning. We slip into the second as soon as there is competition, or comparison of competences.
“I’m right and you’re wrong” is therefore a relational regulation of disagreement, and in that case the group stops thinking. That is why, when I facilitate, I try to keep the disagreement on the thing we are talking about rather than on the worth of the people. In this workshop, the thing was the tools, and first of all what they change in professions, since that is where the participant had begun (the script, historical research, editing). I believe that if everyone had been in favour of the tools on arrival, nobody would have got very far. She refused them, and she said so: so we all had to specify, myself included, what we expected from them. In Educating about images, organising disagreement I described notions and tools that help carry out this work.
Facilitating while being both judge and party
When we facilitate, we have a point of view ourselves, and that is a difficulty. Mine is known; I set it out in Conscious compromise with artificial intelligence: I work with these tools, I criticise them from within, and I do not believe in digital conscientious objection, whose dead end I described in The Dead End of Digital Conscientious Objection. This participant’s disagreement therefore also concerned my position. Welcoming it meant treating it as an enrichment, and not as resistance to be overcome. I said so to the group that day: whatever our disagreements, we must be able to welcome them, one way or the other, because we are responsible for a collective space and other points of view enrich us.
John Dewey said something very close in 1939, in a text written for his eightieth birthday, “Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us”, which Horace Kallen read in his absence. For him, democracy is “a personal way of individual life”, and it consists notably in cooperating “by giving differences a chance to show themselves”, because “the expression of difference is not only a right of the other persons but is a means of enriching one’s own life-experience”. He asks us “to treat those who disagree—even profoundly—with us as those from whom we may learn, and in so far, as friends”. I recognise myself fully in this text, and it is what I try to do when I facilitate.
But to welcome disagreement, one also has, to my mind, to state one’s own point of view, and even own one’s commitment, instead of playing neutral. The participant had stated hers before we began; I stated mine in answering her. So we had both shown our hand, and we were able to discuss the substance. If I had pretended to have no opinion, I think she would have felt she was talking into a void, and the final discussion would probably not have been as frank. I developed this question of what the facilitator says in Must You Have Something to Say to Facilitate a Discussion ?.
Checking that people have searched
If I measure a collective session by how much better each person knows what they think, why they think it and how they got there, my place changes a great deal. I no longer have anything to get across, and success can no longer be seen in others taking up my ideas.
Jacques Rancière describes this place in Le Maître ignorant (Fayard, 1987; in English, The Ignorant Schoolmaster). In 1818, Joseph Jacotot, lecturer in French literature at the University of Louvain, found himself facing Flemish students, many of whom knew no French, while he himself knew no Dutch at all. He had them learn Fénelon’s Télémaque in a bilingual edition, with the help of the translation, then asked them to write in French what they thought of what they had read; they managed as well as many French people, without his having explained anything to them. Rancière makes Jacotot the figure of a master who does not explain. The student must “respond to the three-part question: what do you see? what do you think about it? what do you make of it?” (I had quoted it in For an ecology of dispensability), and the master “will not verify what the student has found, he will verify that he has searched” (my translation). To my mind, this is what we should evaluate at the end of a workshop or a meeting: whether people have searched, and whether they know better, on the way out, what they think, whether or not it matches what the facilitator thinks.
I also think of the analyst’s place in psychoanalysis, and I had already suggested this comparison in What Artistic Discourse Reveals About Itself. During a cure, the person who speaks lends the analyst the features of figures from their own history. Freud called this movement transference, and Lacan named “subject supposed to know” the place then lent to the analyst (I said a word about these two notions in The framework that authorizes). We relive old situations with him or her, we admire them, we hate them, we put them on a pedestal, and the work of the cure rests on all of this. When this work is done, we no longer project anything onto the analyst, who becomes an ordinary person again, with their weaknesses and failings; we may even leave them with a kind of contempt. Lacan describes this end of the cure as a “dis-being” of the one who was supposed to know, and speaks of an analyst who finds themselves “in the position of remainder” (“Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School”, my translation). For the analyst, the end of an analysis is therefore not at all flattering, and yet it is the sign that they have done their work well.
In a workshop, I see something comparable, on a much smaller scale. As long as the group expects me to tell it what to think, I hold a place that is lent to me. The collective session has succeeded when nobody needs me any more to know what they think. The participant who refused the tools left with her own arguments, without my having convinced her of anything, and that is why I count this workshop among those that succeeded. This requires, when we facilitate, accepting a success that does not flatter us.
From the first round of speaking to the review
Here are the ways of working I suggest, for a workshop, a training course, a team meeting or a consultation, in the order in which they come during a session.
At the start, I let everyone voice their reluctance. That day, I did not try to talk the participant out of her refusal: I said in front of the group that I had heard her, I explained why I was keeping the proposal, and she remained free not to take part. I also said what I myself thought, namely that I work with these tools while criticising them, so that the group knew who it was dealing with.
Then we made films. Once you have done it yourself, you discuss far better than with ideas of principle, whether you are “for” or “against”. And when the exchange turns into “who is right”, I go back to the tool itself, for instance to what it changes for the people whose profession it is, since that is where the participant had begun.
At the end, I keep a real time for discussion, even when we have fallen behind schedule. In the workshop I described, that is when the most reluctant participant made her two remarks. We can also look together, after an exchange, at who spoke and how the arguments were constructed; I described this for the moving debate in The moving debate revisited : playing positions, revealing power, keeping a trace.
For the review, finally, I ask neither “are you satisfied?” nor “have you changed your mind?”. I ask each person what they think now, why, how they got there, and what they heard that strengthened their view, or shook it. I suggest that the people who commission these collective sessions evaluate them in this way. A person who leaves more opposed than when they arrived, but who now knows what they are opposing because they have done it themselves, is part of the success!
