This posting is for those people in my network who are interested in Marshall Rosenberg’s work in the area of nonviolent communication and/or Roger Schwarz’s Skilled Facilitator Approach (SFA). How do they compare? And because this is a blog posting rather than a full article I’m sharing – for now at least – my first impressions.

Let’s start with values. A core value amongst practitioners of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is compassion. As it happens, compassion is also a core value of the Skilled Facilitator Approach – amongst others. As I look down the list of values on my SFA card – transparency, curiosity, accountability, informed choice, compassion – I wonder whether the Skilled Facilitator Approach doesn’t make explicit some of the values implicit in NVC. None of them seem at odds.

In the Skilled Facilitator Approach, the mutual learning cycle begins with something which is also at the heart of NVC – making an observation. In NVC this may be noticing your own thoughts and actions or noticing someone else’s. It may also be noticing the voice with which you are speaking – with compassion (called speaking in giraffe) or from a place of non-compassion or anger (speaking in jackal).

There are some similarities here and some differences between NVC and the Skilled Facilitator Approach. In NVC our attention is on the needs we have or the needs we think the other person is expressing, together with the feelings that give rise to those needs. In the Skilled Facilitator Approach, the same focus is reflected in a rule: focus on interests, not positions. At the same time, the Skilled Facilitator Approach places a great deal of emphasis on checking our observations (“I think I heard you say…”) and our inferences (“I’m thinking you might be thinking… What do you think?”) This seems to me to be at odds with the view held by Marshall that to focus on thinking can get in the way of understanding needs. Whilst the goal of each approach is the same, the route seems to be different.

There’s a rule in the Skilled Facilitator Approach that seems to me to add something to the practices of Nonviolent Communication: explain reasoning and intent. According to this rule, you might add to a question an explanation (“the reason I’m asking is…”). In NVC, we share the needs that might be met when we make a request – again, a different route to the same end – so I wonder what it is this different approach adds. Perhaps it’s a different way of expressing the same thing – and perhaps it’s the language in which an intention is expressed. Sometimes in NVC the language of needs can be a barrier to easy understanding because it is so foreign in our wider culture.

I notice that I could go on – making comparisons – and yet the more I do the more I encounter a challenge. For it seems that for every aspect I identify of the Skilled Facilitator Approach I find an equivalent in NVC. For now, I am left with a belief that engaging with both approaches is adding each to the other and yet, I don’t know what.

I wonder if you, my reader, have thoughts? If you do, I’d be glad to hear them.