Resource

4. Guidance on Facilitating Conversations for Change

Keyword Search Tags

Project Phase:
Initiation Phase, Planning Phase, Implementation Phase

Approaches for Working With Communities: Community Development Approach, Community Engagement Approach

Behavioural Drivers (COM-B): Motivation

Stages of Change: Pre-contemplation Stage, Contemplation Stage, Preparation Stage, Action Stage, Maintenance Stage

Project Support: Facilitator Resources, Training

Specific Topics: Outreach and Communications; Community Change Agents

Much of the work of community facilitators relies on their ability to effectively facilitate conversations and motivate communities to adopt desired change. A guided conversational facilitation technique for engaging stakeholders, clarifying their strengths and aspirations, evoking their own motivations for change, and promoting their autonomy in decision making is called Motivational Interviewing (MI). This facilitator resource outlines the spirit, processes and key principles of MI ensure conversations about change are effectively facilitated and that communities’ preferences, needs and values remain at the heart of all conversations.

The Spirit of Facilitating Conversations about Change

In order to be effective in facilitating conversations about change, it is first necessary to have the right mind-set or way of being, referred to a “spirit” in MI. The following section outlines the key elements of the spirit of MI which are required to effectively facilitating conversations about change, which are represented by the acronym “CAPE” ^[57]:

Compassion: Actively promoting community members’ welfare and needs.
Acceptance: Viewing your community members’ as people with absolute worth and autonomy, and engaging with empathy and affirmations.
Partnership: Viewing your interaction with community members as an active collaboration between experts.
Evocation: Viewing community members as people with their own good reasons and strength to change. Your role as a community facilitator is to guide them there.

It is important to consciously strive to embody this spirit and draw upon these four elements whenever facilitating conversations about change with community members.

Key Principles of Facilitating Conversations about Change

In addition to embodying the element of spirit, it is important to follow the four guiding principles below to effectively facilitate conversations about change ^{[57, 112]}:

Listen with empathy: Effective listening skills are essential to understand what will motivate a person to change, as well as the pros and cons of their situation. Seek to understand their values, needs, abilities, motivations, and potential barriers to changing their behaviour, and communicate respect and acceptance of where the person is in their change process.
Understand a person’s motivations: It is a person’s own reasons for change, rather than the community facilitators, that will ultimately result in behaviour change. By approaching a person’s interests, concerns and values with curiosity and openly exploring their motivations for change, community facilitators will get a better understanding of community members’ motivations and potential barriers to change.
Empower the person: Empowering people involves exploring their own ideas about how they can make changes to improve their animal’s welfare and drawing on their personal knowledge about what has succeeded in the past. It is the role of the community facilitator to elicit hope and support and encourage a person’s belief in the possibility of change, and their capacity to reach their goals. Work with them to identify achievable steps towards change an
Resist the righting reflex: The righting reflex describes the common urge amongst community workers to fix what is wrong (with a person, situation, or animal). It involves giving unsolicited advice e.g. “you should…”, or advice without eliciting more about the person’s perspective. At its core, it is a helping response driven by a desire to be of service, promote positive change, and support others; however it is often unhelpful in situations where people are uncertain about changing. When we give in to the righting reflecting, we often inadvertently reinforce a person’s argument to maintain the status quo. This is because most people resist persuasion when they are uncertain about change, and instead respond by recalling their reasons for maintaining the behaviour. Community facilitator’s ability to suppress their initial righting reflex is essential enabling them to explore and evoke a person’s own motivations for change.

Guidance on Providing Advice and Feedback: Ask-Offer-Ask

It is important to always remember that community members have the most expertise in their lived experience, and that any engagement with them needs to be in the spirit of partnership (vs. acting like the expert or parent or in their lives). When providing information, advice or feedback to support others’ change process and avoid falling into the unhelpful righting reflex trap, it is recommended to use the Ask-Offer-Ask model as described below:

Before providing your advice, information or feedback to community members, first ASK what they already know or what do they want to know about? e.g. “You know your situation best, how are you managing this issue right now?”, What are your thoughts on…? “What you know about….?”, “What would you like to know about?”, “Is there any information I can help you with?”, “What might be helpful?”

Exploring prior knowledge and what community members are interested in knowing more about shows respect for community members as experts on themselves. Further, it avoids telling them what they already know, which can also save time. Asking about what they’re interested to know helps you find out what they most need and want to know. You can then use reflections to show you have listened to what they have said before moving on to offering your expertise.

Ask permission to offer your advice, only then OFFER your advice/information, suggestion e.g. “Would it be alright if we talked about…?”, “I have some ideas about…, would you be happy for me to share them?”, “Would you like to know about…?”

Consider the following when offering your expertise:
- Offer your input in a neutral way, and avoid scolding, instructing, telling them what to do, giving long lectures, or saying things like “you should…”.
- Prioritize what you offer: what does the person most want/need to know? Start with what they want to know. Even if you have information you want to share, but don’t lead with what you think is most important.
- Be clear: avoid jargon and use everyday language
- Offer small amounts of information/advice and then check how it is received, making sure to provide them with time to reflect.
- Support their personal choice/ agency: Acknowledge people’s freedom to disagree or ignore your input. Giving them the choice not to take your advice provides them with freedom and autonomy, and they are in turn more likely to listen and take your advice. e.g. “You might disagree with this idea”, “…but, of course it’s up to you…”, “I don’t know whether this is relevant to your situation…”, “This may or may not interest you…”, “I wonder what you will think of this…?”
  
  Asking permission shows respect and increases their willingness to hear your thoughts/advice/information/feedback. Collaboration and shared focus are key.

Once you have provided advice or information, ASK community members what they think about it and what it means to them by:
- Using open questions e.g. “What do you think?”, “What does that mean to you?”, “What are your thoughts on this?”, “How does that sit with your knowledge of this?”
- Use reflections to reflect back the reaction you observed in them
- Allow them time to process and respond to the information.
  
  Asking what community members think of your input respects them as experts on activating their change. It also will enable you to check their understanding, identify potential needs for further discussion, or enable you to adapt your engagement as needed to further support their change process.

To effectively provide advice and overcome our righting reflex requires skills in active listening and empathy. Refer to the facilitator resource Essential Communication Skills for Promoting Behaviour Change for guidance on active listening and empathy.

The Process for Facilitating Conversations about Change

In addition to having the right mind-set or spirit and communication skills to facilitate conversations about change, you also need to know how to go about it. The following section outlines the four processes or sequential steps to follow to facilitate conversations about change^[57]. However, it should be noted, that while these processes are generally followed in the order shown, in the course of a conversation, the processes are not necessarily fixed and any stage might recur, or the steps might overlap and flow into each other.

Step 1 - Engage: during this step, the goal is to create a collaborative working relationship with community members based on mutual trust and respect. To do this, community members need to feel that they are comfortably and actively participating in the discussion.

During the engage process, focus on:

Understanding why community members want to work with you. What do they want?
Understanding how important community members’ goals for their animals’ welfare may be. What are their challenges and motivators for improving animal welfare issue(s)?
Being welcoming, empathetic, and understanding.
Establish and explore expectations around how community members think you can help.
Offering hope, and presenting a positive, honest picture of possible changes.

Consider the following questions to support your effectiveness in having conversations seeking to engage community members in a collaborative working relationship:

How comfortable is this person talking to me?
How supportive and helpful am I being?
Do I understand this person's perspective and concerns?
How comfortable do I feel in this conversation?
Does this feel like a collaborative interaction?

Step 2 - Focus: during this step, the goal is to build a conversation that is purposefully moving towards change. Ensure consistency between your ideas and those of community members in terms by finding one (or more) goals or outcomes that create a direction that you and community member(s) agree on. The following three elements can help bring about focus, and may influence one another:

Community members may have problems they are interested in discussing with you
The context can inform the topic of focus e.g. veterinary visit, welfare inspection
Your own expertise may similarly provide insights on potential topics of focus as while community members may have ideas of their own, others may become apparent to you in course of your discussion with them.

Consider the following questions to support your effectiveness in having conversations with community members to bring about focus in goals for working together:

Do I have different aspirations for change for this person?
What goals for change does this person really have?
Are we working together for a common purpose?
Does it feel like we are moving together, not in a different direction?
Do I have a clear sense of where we are going?

Step 3 - Evoke: the goal of this step is to elicit community members’ own motivation to change whereby they talk themselves into change. To do this requires learning to recognise and evoke change talk, and strengthen it when it occurs (refer to facilitator resources 3. Guidance on Listening for Change Talk, and 2c. Key Communication Skills for further guidance)

Examples of change-oriented questions related to level of importance or confidence that can help evoke change talk include, but are not limited to:

If you could magically change one thing right now by snapping your fingers, what would it be? How could you do it?
What have you achieved so far?
How important is it for you to….?
What are the down sides of how things are now?
If you choose to continue on without making a change, how do you think your life might look like this time next year?
How could you implement this change?
What’s the worst thing that could happen if you make this change?
What’s the best possible outcome?

Use the following tips to strengthen change talk once you hear it:

Ask for more details or an example
Reflect positively on what you heard
Reflect the meaning of what you’ve heard
Summarise

Consider the following questions to support your effectiveness in having conversations seeking to evoke community members’ own reasons for change:

Is my righting reflex being activated and causing me to be the one arguing for change?
Is their reluctance to change more about lack of confidence or that they don’t feel making a change is important?
What arguments for change am I hearing?
Am I directing the conversation too far or fast in a particular direction?
What are this person's own reasons for change?

Step 4 - Plan: the goal of conversations in this step is to have conversations about action, whilst carefully promoting community members’ autonomy and decision making. The planning step occurs when community members begin thinking and talking more about how they could change and when, and less about why and whether to change, for example, when community members:

Ask you about the change
Increase their change talk, and decrease their sustain talk
Use more mobilizing language e.g. “I’m going to…”

Consider the following questions to support your effectiveness in having conversations with community members about planning for change:

What would be a reasonable next step towards change?
Am I remembering to evoke rather than prescribe a plan?
What would help this person move forward?
Am I offering needed information or advice with permission?
Am I retaining a sense of quiet curiosity about what will work best for the person?

Facilitating Conversations about Change with Groups instead of Individuals

The guidance outlined above applies when working with individuals or groups. However, when having conversations with groups of community members, applying MI’s spirit, principles process, and key communication skills (discussed in the facilitator resource Essential Communication Skills for Promoting Behaviour Change) can be further tailored to support group discussions in the following ways:

Affirm peoples' efforts to come together
Giving people a chance to have a choice (listening to them)
Reflect change talk as people contribute back to the wider group to inspire more collective change talk
Ask permission to give information
Evoke Questions from the group
Draw upon their expertise and experiences
Acknowledge their choices/agency/autonomy
Summarize the group consensus
Support the group to prioritize options and choices

General Best Practices and Rules of Thumb

Key best practices and rules of thumb to remember about the spirit, principles, and process of facilitating conversations about change (MI) include:

Effective Way of Being(MI consistent - DO)	Infective Way of Being(MI inconsistent - AVOID)
I have some expertise, and community members are the experts of themselves.	I am the expert on how and why community members’ should change.
I find out what information community members want and need.	I collect information about problems.
I match information to client needs and strengths.	I rectify gaps in knowledge.
Community members can tell me what kind of information is helpful.	Frightening information can be helpful.
Advice that champions community members’ needs and autonomy can be helpful	I just need to tell them clearly what to do.

Avoid the following common pit-falls in facilitating conversations about change:
- Assuming providing our expertise will fix community members’ problems by providing our expertise and assuming this will solve the problem.
- Overestimating how much information and advice communities need.
- Thinking that frightening information is helpful and will motivate people to change.
Facilitating conversations about change (MI) is about evoking peoples' own motivations for change rather than trying to instil it.
Have interest in, and make an effort to understand the internal perspective of community members with whom you engage.
The use of MI techniques outlined in this resource are done 'for' and 'with' people.
Actively prioritise community members’ needs and promote their well-being. Improving animal welfare should not come at the expense of community members’ needs or well-being but rather be aligned with them.
Value and trust in the inherent potential and worth of community members with whom you interact.
Seek to acknowledge the efforts and strengths of community members.
Honour and respect community members’ autonomy, and their right and capability to direct their own lives, learning, motivation and behaviour based on their understanding of their own situations.
Spend more time listening than talking.

This resource was developed with support of Human Behaviour Change for Animal (HBCA) and Alison Bard

Link to References Cited