An early opportunity for learning several lessons came when Stacie, my co-facilitator and equine specialist and I, were working with a group who were employed by a non-profit care agency. We were hired by a group of women that included management, marketing, nurses, administrative, and social workers. They contracted with us to help them improve their communication and become a team.
Eager to do the work, practicing our new learning modality of equine-assisted learning often led to finding creative ways of finding clients. In this case, this organization did not have the budget to hire us at a rate that we considered appropriate. So, I charged them the full rate for the program, then donated back half of that amount to their foundation. We were able to build awareness through a very visible local organization. They were given an opportunity to spend the day together, improving their communication, identifying blind spots, and increasing their self-awareness.
We rented an indoor horse arena at a local stable and hauled in one of Stacie’s young geldings, Phancy, to join my boy, The Alchemist, and my draft mare, Tigger. They were perfect four-legged facilitators, adding diversity in their ages, size, and gender. Phancy was young, energetic, and curious about everything. Al, was a more mature gelding, so more settled, though still willing to engage and play with Phancy. Tigger, our lead mare, was twice the size of Phancy and had a confidence that was palpable. When she moved quickly, one could almost feel the ground move because of her size and intention.
The morning was pretty low-key. We started with the goal of building relationships with the horses and helping our humans get comfortable with being around these large animals when they were at liberty. We also laid a foundation of connection between the participants and us, the facilitators, by sharing some insights we gained from their anonymous pre-assessments.
From the assessments, Stacie and I identified that there was a culture of distrust in the organization. A classic “silo” situation where individual departments believed they had to defend their turf. On the surface, our participants “played nice” with each other. “Playing nice” is pretending everything is okay, that you’re in total agreement. This behavior undermines outcomes which can lead to distrust, conflict, and wasted resources. Better, is a culture that supports vulnerability and having hard conversations, leading to healthy conflict, healthy relationships, and healthy organizations.
After lunch, we invited the group to do a classic activity called Obstacles. It’s an activity where you ask participants, using horse-safe objects, to build a path for them to move horses through, in, over, or however they define the course. Except, when we described the activity, we forgot to specify the “path” part and only spoke about building an obstacle.
Because we invited them to create an obstacle, that’s exactly what they did. Literally. They piled everything we gave them, PVC pipes, noodles, cones, buckets all in a big heap in the center of the arena. They created the obstacle, then all 12 of them stood in a circle looking at it. Stacie and I stared at each other with a questioning look of “what the bleep do we do now?” The group was not engaging with the horses, just standing there staring at that pile. This was NOT the outcome what we imagined at all!
One big problem was we didn’t have a clear ending to the activity. When an obstacle course is created, the group tries to move the horse(s) through the path. After several tries, it makes sense to end the exercise. In this case, they all just stood there while the horses milled around wondering what was going on.
So, we shrugged our shoulders, trusted the process, and approached the group. We asked them about their creation. They responded that they did what we told them, which was build an obstacle. Which they did. Then, we inquired about what the obstacle represented. They said things they couldn’t get over. Okay, we said, that makes sense.
Our next question hit paydirt; we asked how they defined their success? Several shared their definitions for success, which varied greatly. At this point, our equine partners started trotting around the arena, responding to the heightened energy created through their conflicting answers. The horses were sensitive to the increased tension created by the different definitions of success and the assumptions by the participants that they were all on the same page. Likely, a similar scenario played itself out at their office, where suppressing true feelings was reinforced in the organization. The participants weren’t curious, they were clueless.
Definitions of what success and barriers to it, or obstacles, were different for each person because most of them worked independently, even though they all worked for the same organization. We revealed this insight, including the horses’ physical responses to their incongruence. Identifying that this group did not have a shared vision helped them acknowledge that they sometimes worked at cross-purposes, undermining each other. The recognition of a lack of a common vision led to rich dialogue about their interdependence. They explored how the social worker’s definitions of success, as well as their obstacles, influenced the marketer’s definition, the nurses’, and the administrators’, as well as the leaders’ definitions.
I stated in the opening paragraph that this group hired us to help them become a team. They were under the assumption that we would do just that, make them a “team,” in a one-day workshop. They wrote about their disappointment on their evaluations; because, while they learned a lot, they did not feel they had become a team.
Building a team is a long-term, ongoing, and evolving process. A one-day workshop can be a good start, creating learning breakthroughs, that lead to team development.
From this experience forward, I became VERY clear about expectations and deliverables. I incorporated a question in my pre-assessment asking what outcomes the clients expected to achieve, inquiring about the changes in behavior they desired to see. I then shared the results of that question with the whole group at the beginning of the day, allowing me to debunk any false expectations before we even got started. This (in the words of my friend, Paul Smith) “created the container”, establishing a clear contract.
Staying focused on leveraging what was right in front of us, we found that this groups’ choice to build an obstacle with no clear definition of success was just what they needed to learn that day. By staying open to outcomes and curious, Stacie and I learned to trust the process, confidently moving into the situation presented. Most significantly, the horses provided us with a physical response to the tense feelings by shifting from walking to running around the arena.
When you reframe a mistake, such as poor activity instructions, into a learning opportunity, your new perspective offers insight and inspiration, not defeat or shame. Because of this experience and many other “happy accidents”, we painted on the inside wall of my arena, “What would you attempt if you could not fail?”