Today while walking across the parking lot I encountered one of our conference facilitators who asked me to say a word about “what happens when moral issues come up in conferences”. I peppered her with questions: how do these conversations differ from any other conversations in which there are intense feelings, difficult decisions and controversy involved? Who frames the issue as “moral” rather than “economic” or “medical” or “practical” or “political” etc.? What is the team’s role in engaging a moral dilemma?

Let me give you an example, a composite description of situations we encounter here: A hypothetical family conference. The team consists of a mother, her boyfriend, her best friend, her mother, her social worker and her family nurse practitioner. She has a case open with Child Protective Services on account of her oldest child (she has three), a 7 year old boy with health complications that are not being properly treated. Mom, herself, has some health complications: she is in her mid-40s and has an auto-immune disorder. While working through the issues that are endangering her 7-year old’s health, a new issue comes up: mom is pregnant. Her boyfriend is overjoyed; this will be his first biological child. Her nurse practitioner is horrified. Carrying this child to term could endanger this mother’s life. The issue is raised in the room and the considerations on the table are: have the baby or have an abortion. The best friend is a fundamentalist Christian and staunchly anti-abortion. She is adamant that her friend have this baby and feels that it is her responsibility to God to prevent her friend from aborting the pregnancy. The nurse practitioner feels strongly that to have this baby would be unconscionable. What about the mother’s inability to care for the children she already has? What if she dies as a result of this pregnancy? The social worker shares the concerns of the nurse, but she, too, is very religious and strongly believes that abortion is murder. In her role as a social worker, she is expected to be neutral and not share her religious views. She thinks this pregnancy is disastrous and directly impacts on the safety of the other children at home. Yet how could she live with herself if she wound up being party to someone aborting their fetus?

And the mother? She is, understandably, all over the map.

What makes this conversation so incredibly loaded? W. Barnett Pearce and Steven Littlejohn note that conversations about moral dilemmas are distinguished by worldviews that are very fixed. It’s not just “feelings” and they’re not just “deeply held”. It someone’s fixed understanding about what is true, what is right and what is real. Moral conflicts need conversations that do not rely upon ordinary conversational skills and processes.

The first issue for you conference facilitators out there is not moral, but rather logistic: you have to get your team to step back and decide whether or not this is what they want to focus on with the time they have together. Just because it’s emotionally compelling doesn’t mean that it’s in anyone’s best interests to have this conversation, in this configuration, at this moment. There are many options and your team should make its choice consciously and deliberately:

• Move this issue to the top of the list and deal with it now?
• Make another time to reconvene, just to talk about this?
• Pick a smaller sub-group to meet between team meetings and work on this?
• Mother, boyfriend and a counselor, physician or spiritual advisor will meet about this?
• there are many many options more.

In our model (Family NetworK), we default to the family members to prioritize issues, so in this case, the question goes to the mother: is this where you want to go? Let’s say she says “yes, this is the most important issue and I want the team to work on it”. Next question is: what is the team’s role? Are they there to:

• make a decision?
• offer support?
• think the issue through?
• what else?

Proceeding into any conversation, let alone one so loaded, without consciousness about what we’re talking about and why we’re talking is at very high risk for yielding frustration, confusion and angst. Invest the five minutes it might take to clarify these points and go forward knowing you’ve probably saved your team hours of time and dissatisfaction.

Now we’re into the meat of the matter and, in our hypothetical, let’s say the mom wants to use the team’s time to examine the question from all angles and gather factors she should consider in making her decision about this pregnancy. The conversation that follows contains ideas and reasons for having the baby and other reasons for aborting the pregnancy. What makes this conversation unique, according to my facilitator, is:

• There’s a distinctly different tone, almost ineffable, but deeper level than the typical team conversation.
• People in professional roles whose personal moral standards conflict with the expectations of their role become hamstrung and hold back from speaking.

There’s not a simple trick to this. The art to this thing is in helping the group to allow multiple, sometimes conflicting, viewpoints to co-exist and to aim first for understanding rather than agreement. It’s hard work, but it can be rewarding to you and transformative for the team if it’s executed well. Some tips for the facilitator:

• Go back and review everything I just said about making the team consciously choose the conversation and clarifying its purpose. Ask the group if they want to address other issues as well as this one and, if so, ask them for time limit.
• 5 minutes before that time limit is up, alert the group and ask them if they’re getting what they need or if they need to renegotiate their time and/or goal for the conversation.
• If the purpose of the conversation is to gain support or explore the issues, then there is no “product” at the end. You either come to the end of the conversation or you run out of time. The process IS the product.
• If the purpose is to make a decision, then you have to stop the discussion with enough time left to shift to decision-making mode. DO NOT BLUR DISCUSSION WITH DECISION.
• Don’t get swept up in the content or intensity. Team member emotions may run high. Your job is to be rational and guide their process. Project warmth, empathy and concern, but don’t play therapist. Use your facilitative listening skills and resist the temptation to make catharsis the unspoken goal.

Remember: your role is to help the group navigate through a conversation. It is NOT to resolve the dilemma or heal the wounds or cathart the feelings. You are not a therapist. You are not a therapist. You are not a therapist. Nor do your own opinions of right and wrong matter. Sorry about that part, but it’s true. If your own moral standards are challenged by what happens in the conference, you have to ask yourself if you can really facilitate with integrity — and that means with genuine neutrality.

Genuine neutrality doesn’t mean you have no opinions; it means that you honestly care more about the process than you do the content and that you trust the team to deal with the content — and the “content” includes the feelings. If you can’t be that neutral, don’t beat yourself up. Just do the right thing and talk to a supervisor about switching you out and bringing in someone who can serve as process guide in this particular case. Everyone has moral standards of some sort or another. The art of the thing is in knowing how to support the team when social worlds collide.