The Trouble with Standards of Conduct
What are guidelines, expectations, or standards of conduct?
In the world of facilitation, guidelines are typically a set of expectations for how people will behave in a space. Often, these guidelines are intended to prevent harm by letting people know how they expect folks to treat each other. Guidelines are typically things like:
“Land the plane”—meaning, get to the point quickly so that you aren’t taking up other people’s time.
“Racism, sexism, xenophobia will not be tolerated”
“No yelling or raised voices”—sometimes this is said more abstractly, like “Treat others with respect”
“No interrupting”—sometimes this is more direct, such as “Only speak when it’s your turn.”
12 Ways that Guidelines Go Wrong
Top-down standards of conduct—created by facilitators, leadership, or officials— are centered in control, where people in positions of authority determine what behaviors are acceptable or unacceptable in a given space.
Rarely are the responses to these behaviors outlined, leaving participants unsure of what will happen if they make a mistake. When someone does make a mistake (or intentionally acts outside of the guidelines) the response is often discretionary and unequal.
Further, participants and facilitators are then in a position to monitor one another’s participation against these pre-determined standards—in essence, policing one another’s behavior. Unacceptable behaviors are then isolated, alienated, silenced, or removed—a structure that mimics criminalization.
Different cultures and subcultures have wildly different ways of speaking, gesturing, and expressing themselves. For some, a raised voice shows passion, care, and commitment while for others a raised voice is rude, aggressive, or intimidating. Ultimately, it is too often the very people these standards purport to protect—traumatized, marginalized, profiled, mentally ill people—who end up being removed because of these standards.
When people become uncomfortable, it is easy to point to a behavior and then to the standards, rather than confront the underlying experience, emotion, or communication. Ideally, a facilitator’s job would be to help participants explore difficult dynamics, empowering them to work through problems that might arise again outside the process/space. Instead, the problem is removed or suppressed, or the problem doesn’t materialize in the space because people are behaving inauthentically.
Guidelines meant to produce equity, such as not taking up too much time, have ableist outcomes—people who struggle to communicate in the way being centered, or who process their thoughts more slowly than others, are made to seem like they are “hogging” time+space.
Similarly to #3, guidelines that relate to voice volume or gesturing (most often related to anger, but sometimes also to crying) problematize people who have difficulty controlling or regulating their emotions. They also suppress emotionality and prioritize intellectualizing or control of one’s emotions—standards defined by whiteness and masculinity.
“Not tolerating” oppressive perspectives provides a façade of anti-oppression, but often fails to help participants understand what is expected of them. In rooms where there is no shared understanding, experience, or knowledge about oppression, people will withhold genuine questions or thoughts that seem out of step with the dominant view (within the space), due to an understanding that “wrong” thoughts will be punished. In rooms where this is already shared language and culture, people tend to speak in buzzwords, euphemisms, and regurgitated language, in order to align with the expectation. In this atmosphere, creativity and critical thinking are difficult to generate and sustain.
Redirecting or stopping certain conflicts can give the false impression that the conflict itself is intolerable (when often the conflict can be moved through in just a few moments)…
And/or that the target of the “offense” is incapable of responding (when they are almost always more than capable of speaking their truth, so long as they have others’ support).
These standards tend to come with an overt or covert expectation that certain people with certain identities should be allotted more or less time, but the who and why are unspoken. The intersectionality of people’s visible and invisible identities and relevant experiences are overlooked, with visible identity prioritized over substance of participation.
Perhaps most significantly, guidelines focus on individual behaviors, suggesting that participants’ tone, word choice, attitude, emotionality should be the focus of assessment, scrutiny, and control. This focus can draw attention away from evaluating and questioning the effectiveness, equity, empowerment, and outcomes of the organization, system, leadership, or process itself.
8 Ways We Can Take Care of Each Other Instead
Create specific, structured, informed spaces for the most directly impacted people to speak while others listen. A great strategy is a fish bowl format (check out other strategies in Cool Tools for Hot Topics). In the fish bowl, a small group sits in a smaller circle at the center of the room and has a facilitated or unfacilitated conversation while others listen. When this group is finished, the space can be opened for responses, collective conversation, or another group can enter the smaller circle. Some suggestions: Make clear who is in the center and why; allow people to self-select into the center; focus on impact and experience as often as identity.
Make very clear, through actions, that marginalized people and voices are valued. Doing so ensures that everyone is aware that these are not underdogs who are vulnerable—that these are treasured members of the group and that if they are harmed, people will have their backs. If we do this, we have to actually, materially and socially, have their backs by supporting them in navigating conflict, supporting their healing, ensuring they have a central role in decision-making, and sharing resources to meet their goals and needs.
Start with a collective conversation about values and outcomes. Let the group self-define the standards for the process/meeting/organization (rather than individual behavior) and get specific about what that looks like and who is responsible for what, such as: We will build understanding of each other’s experience toward collective healing, that looks like everyone having time to share, listen, and reflect.
Provide more than ample time to discuss contentious topics, breaking the meeting into several sessions if necessary. By doing so, people have more time to think and to respond, there is less urgency is involved, and the larger structure is demonstrating that each person’s participation is truly valued.
Provide space for people to share their fears, concerns, and commitments about their own behavior as well as ways that they would feel supported if they were harmed. Instead of putting the focus on an outside source controlling participants, let participants take ownership of what they want themselves to do and how they want to behave. For example, someone might say: “When things get heated, my anger overwhelms me and I don’t always treat people well. I really want to try to be kind and listen.” Someone else might say, “When other people yell, I tend to shut down. I want to push myself to stay present and hear what people are saying despite their volume.” Folks might need help generating these, so it’s good to explain and provide prompts ahead of time.
Prior to meetings, sessions, and processes build skill related to tolerating discomfort, responding to offensive or insulting remarks, being open to people who don’t have the same experience/knowledge/lens, and asserting needs, wants, and boundaries in the moment. Focus on developing the ability to
(a) give feedback to people in positions of power and/or suggest changes to the process/system
(b) hear how our beliefs/comments impact others when they uphold oppressive dynamics and
(c) give people that kind of feedback if someone’s beliefs/comments are hurtful to us.
All of these skills will help to build individual abilities to be empowered and protect oneself in a moment of conflict and foster deeper understanding about oppression.
If there is a collective desire for any kind of standards within an organization, let the smallest group possible collectively design their own standards and ensure that these standards are flexible (can be modified easily as they work or don’t work) and the response is clear and mutually agreed on. For example, in an organization with hundreds of members and ten departments, let each of the departments develop their own internal commitments (We all agree to…). By doing this, authority is displaced from the top while the larger organization acknowledges that people with different cultures, goals, and/or roles can have different expectations of each other, that expectations should be collectively decided and responded to. Note: I advise against setting any standards where there is a significant majority of a dominant social group (i.e. white women), who will be the ones setting the standards for marginalized people in every/most departments.
When someone does something that would have been considered “bad conduct,” acknowledge it openly and empower the target—if any—to guide the response (i.e., “Steve, you’re yelling at Amanda and you’ve said you’re angry and you think she’s stupid. Amanda, would you like to respond to that, have a one-on-one, take a break, or do something else?”). If this conflict can’t be resolved in a few moments and is keeping others from being able to participate, acknowledge what the person has said (i.e. “Steve, you are angry that you were lied to and that now the group wants to do something that isn’t fulfilling your needs. We’ve heard you and we’re going to take that into consideration, but we need to keep going—”) and then try to keep it moving. Make sure that the underlying needs and concerns aren’t ignored and that the person who engaged in the behavior isn’t isolated, while allowing the planned session/meeting to continue.
Endnote:
I talk a lot about “preventing harm,” and I hold that goal as central to the work I do because how we treat each other matters deeply and treating each other well is anti-oppressive when it builds collective strength. But when we focus too much on “preventing harm” between individuals, we turn harm into an abstract boogeyman to be avoided at all costs, rather than a meaningful, normal part of life. We tend to lose focus on altering systems of oppression and instead see individual slights and conflicts as oppression itself. In the end, this places some in the position of protector and gatekeeper and others in the position of victim, rather than empowering us all against structural violence.
Opportunities to Learn + Act
Anti-Oppression Facilitation Fundamentals Training hosted by AORTA being held on several dats in mid-late May! Register.
Prisons Make Us Safer: And 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration webinar with Victoria Law on May 4. Register.
The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth: support the Red Nation’s fight for indigenous liberation and a healthy planet; the book details the Red Nation’s three part plan for grassroots action.
#8toAbolition: A reminder of this essential resource toward developing abolitionist, transformative actions against the harm of policing. As others have said, justice would be if George Floyd, Daunte Wright, Ma’khia Bryant, and Adam Toledo were still here. In the fight for Black life and for Transformative Justice, fighting laws as “simple” as bike helmet laws and loitering laws that criminalize and incarcerate Indigenous, Black, and poor people can take power from the state. Taking funding and power away from police is a transformative solution, unlike incarcerating police after the fact (though it is totally understandable why folks feel vindicated, relieved, and empowered by this conviction).
Free Ashley Diamond: Support the campaign, visit https://www.freeashleydiamond.com/ for action opportunities!
Flying While Black: As a comic geek and Eve Ewing fan, I appreciated this article about writing comics with Black superheroes.
Wow, this really touched on a lot of things I've never considered and provided a lot of concrete ideas to try instead. Thank you for explaining this all so clearly -- I look forward to sharing these ideas with others!!