A Working Synthesis of Gestalt Theory with the Practice of Group Facilitation

Schön[2] writing on reflective practice uses the metaphor of “swampy lowlands” to describe messy, confusing and complex real-world problems which cannot be solved from the “high, hard ground” of technical rationality. The group environment can be the ultimate swampy lowland filled with hidden dynamics, shadow material and emotional undercurrents, also a fertile and rich environment in which life can flourish and the ground can be raised.

When I first came across Gestalt, I misunderstood it as a technical language, overfull of high-minded ideas and philosophical jargon. Years later I believe that Gestalt’s core concepts and principles are worth wrestling with for the leaps and advancements the (actually intuitively simple) concepts can bring to the work of us swampsters.

Here I will describe six core Gestalt principles below, overlaying each with my observations and examples from the world of group facilitation within organisations. See also my longer article covering similar ground in more depth.

The Here and Now

The Principle: Gestalt emphasises immediate, present-moment experience over past history or future assumptions

In Practice: Too frequently, groups default to superficial dialogue, avoiding the demands of completing tasks, resolving issues or letting power games and politics get in the way of progress. Patterns of contribution become entrenched, decisions are avoided and, as anyone who has ever played meeting bingo will know, language becomes jargon and cliché. It is surprising how typical and persistent these patterns are in groups - organisations often consider themselves rational and outcome-driven - while failing to address how well (or often how poorly) groups work and relate together.

A facilitator can steer the group back towards their shared endeavour, focussing on whether and how the task is being achieved. Being in the here and now does not imply a narrowing of focus, or the isolation of a moment: we carry the experience of the past and expectations of the future with us and both are accessible only in the present moment.

Typical questions or interventions might be:

• Are we on track?
• I notice the conversation seems to have become stuck.
• What thoughts, opinions and feelings are you experiencing here and now?
• You have said a lot about what has prevented progress in the past. What is preventing progress now?
• So far, just three of you have shared your views. What is happening for others?

Contact

The Principle: The Gestalt wave (or cycle) of experience peaks when a group fully makes contact with reality. Contact can happen at internal boundaries, e.g. an honest moment between participants, the group confronting its own patterns of behaviour, or an individuals’s sudden insight about themselves. Alternatively contact can take place at an external boundary, e.g. a group addresses the reality of their situation, acknowledges shared achievements, or reacts to external conditions. According to Gestalt practice, a contact boundary is not rigid – it is more like a shoreline than a fixed line.

In Practice: Breakthroughs happen in moments, at boundaries. A facilitator watches for the energy and quality of contact, helping groups to safely lean into and utilise pivotal moments rather than retreat to polite avoidance. Working towards meaningful contact helps the group build tolerance for difference, skills for telling the truth to one another, and resilience for navigating difficulties with more comfort.

Typical questions or interventions might be:

• It feels like we’ve just dropped the masks of politeness and arrived at what is actually true.
• Let’s stop analysing the data for one moment and look directly at the difficulty we are in.
• Can we take a minute to fully take-in and acknowledge what we’ve achieved?
• There was a tangible shift in energy just then – what happened?

Awareness

In Principle: Awareness is the active and fluid process whereby arising feelings, thoughts, sensations, perceptions and imaginings are recognised and interpreted in direct relation to the surrounding people, context and environment. It should not be confused with the mainstream use of “self-awareness” which in Gestalt terms, often maps more closely to an isolating self-focused spectatorship, verging on egotism, which usually limits or blocks contact.

In Practice: In group settings, participants often get trapped in their own heads – intellectualising, judging themselves, or silently rehearsing what to say next in a way that blocks contact. To shift from this isolated and individual state to true Gestalt awareness, a facilitator can help the group attune to each other while each navigating three distinct zones of awareness[3]

• The inner zone (I feel): internal phenomena, feelings, emotions, dream world and physical sensations
• The middle zone (I think, I imagine): memories, thoughts, imaginings, daydreams and fantasies
• The outer zone (I see, I do): perceptions, behaviours, actions – where we make contact with our outer world

In healthy awareness, there is usually rapid shuttling between all three zones such that we remain open and present to ourselves and to others, responding and relating in a continuous process.

Typical questions or interventions might be:

• What you say sounds logical but your voice is shaking. What is going on for you?
• We have heard a lot of theories about the impact of the project but what concrete changes are we seeing in the real world?
• There is a lot of dreaminess and little eye contact here – where is people’s attention focused right now?

Holism

The Principle: The whole is different from the sum of its parts. What happens, or more accurately, what catches our attention (the figure) cannot be understood in isolation from the wider environment (the field).

In Practice: A facilitator working with Gestalt principles would view every event in relation to the group dynamic, history, context and wider environment. An emotionally-charged contribution, such as an angry outburst, silence or closed body language would not be automatically interpreted as a problem or resistance related to an individual, but as something that expresses a truth about the state of the group/system as a whole. Perhaps that person is acting out the frustration of the whole group. Perhaps that person is the source of the frustration of the whole group.

Facilitating a whole-group understanding of patterns and behaviour will inform the group better about who they are and where they are, and equip them to move forward. That is, assuming the facilitator is skilled enough to handle expressions of frustration evenly and openly, without becoming hooked, critical or defensive themselves.

Typical questions or interventions might be:

• One person seems to be expressing a lot of frustration – is that shared by others here?
• The silence feels [boring, heavy, comfortable, uncertain…] What does that tell us about what’s going on here?

We are focussing very intently on just one bullet point on this powerpoint slide. Let’s first take time to share our responses to the proposal overall?

Self as instrument

In Principle: As a facilitator, you are not a detached, neutral observer but an active part of the field. Working relationally, with awareness and attunement, your moment-to-moment experiences serve as a highly-sensitive “antennae” for what is really going on in a group.

In Practice: Firstly, track your own internal reactions, seeing what arises as data potentially about the group. Knowing yourself - your reactions, triggers, defence mechanisms, historical patterns - requires a commitment to deep personal work so that you can identify where themes belong – whether to us, participants or groups or systems we work with. However much we wish to, facilitators can’t truly “read the room” although many of us think we can. In fact, we read ourselves in relation to the room, and this is always in the context of our own personal story (and there is always a story behind the story). We can though actively “attune” to our self, to the other and beyond.

Secondly, choose what to describe. Be capable of setting aside your emotional baggage, personal anxieties and critical judgements (a process known as bracketing). Selectively disclose what you notice, if appropriate and in service of the group. Actively foster horizontalism by sharing responsibility for what happens in the room and equalizing power dynamics with participants. Tracking, bracketing, description and horizontalism are at the heart of the phenomenological method central to Gestalt as described by Joyce & Sills[4] and also The Muppets[5].

Typical questions or interventions that might or might not be externalised are:

• I notice a real reluctance to share what I’m thinking right now. [I fear…] I wonder if anyone else is also holding back?
• I am feeling quite lost. Is that my lack of understanding? Or are others feeling similarly?
• I notice my energy has significantly dropped during that last phase of the discussion. Is that a personal glitch, or something collective in the room?
• I’d like to take off the facilitator hat for a minute to share a reflection. It feels like we are walking on eggshells. How safe is it here now?

Perceived Weirdness Index

In Principle: To be effective and credible for the task of engendering change, a facilitator must model a different way of thinking, behaving and acting from the group. Otherwise, what value do we bring? The facilitator must manage the dilemma of providing the stretch and difference that is missing in the system, while being tolerated within the system.

Described by Hanafin[6] the Perceived Weirdness Index dictates that a facilitator must track how "weird" (different, experimental, or provocative) they appear to the client system. If your PWI is too low, you blend into their existing culture, become co-opted by their politics, and offer no therapeutic leverage. If your PWI is too high, the system's corporate immune response kicks in, labels you as eccentric or irrelevant, and rejects you entirely. The sweet spot lies in being just weird enough to disrupt the status quo while remaining credible enough to be trusted.

In Practice: In many corporate settings, groups operate under unwritten rules of polite compliance, risk aversion, or aggressive posturing. A facilitator entering this environment cannot adopt these same habits to stay comfortable. If the team is hiding behind dense corporate jargon, the facilitator must introduce an unsettlingly simple, human vocabulary. If the team avoids conflict, the facilitator must deliberately slow the conversation down right at the point of tension to expose the elephant in the room. This requires high levels of awareness and bravery. You intentionally introduce "difference" or "creative indifference" to the group's expected outcomes, calibrating the amount of heat and stretch you apply depending on the context, and your contract.

Typical questions or interventions might be:

• I know it might feel a bit unusual in a 60 minute strategic meeting, but why don’t we just take a breather for one of those minutes.
• I am going to intentionally break our unwritten rule of politeness right now: it feels to me like this proposal is completely unachievable.
• We are using a lot of powerpoint slides to explain away a very messy human problem which starts in this team. Can we abandon the screen for a minute and look at each other instead?
• I’m aware that by asking you to share your actual feelings about this restructuring, I am pushing the usual boundaries of this boardroom. Who is willing to take that leap with me first?
• I realise I am interrupting you. That’s partly because we’ve heard you say that twice already. It’s also because I wished to to model the behaviours that may prevent your meetings overrunning, which was one of your aims today.

You may observe that in implementing these principles in practice, there is a sweet spot. Searching for the sweet spot is ongoing work. The most effective balance point is different for each facilitator and group depending on all the relational factors we explore experientially in our training programmes including power, focus, depth, context, contract, diversity, identity and so on. Internal and external change agents will need to consider these factors with on their relationship to the group and their personal standing. In his Rules of Thumb for Change Agents, Herb Shepard[7] suggests starting where the system is, and starting from there to model the behaviours that are missing from the system. The first rule is to Stay Alive.

Please do contact me with any comments in response to this article.

bella@associationoffacilitators.co.uk

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