CHAPTER 5

Both/And
>
Or/But
 Unlocking the Magic of Facilitation:
11 Key Concepts You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know
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 5

Both/And > Or/But

“That’s what careless words do.
They make people love you a little less.”
- Arundhati Roy

L
et’s consider two situations. In both, someone is fa-
cilitating a training with a group, and their goal is to
help the group understand humanity’s effect on global
climate change. One participant is struggling with the ma-
terial. For this example, let’s do our best to empathize with
that participant.
In the first situation, the participant in the training who
is struggling pushes back. They say, “I don’t understand how
you can think the planet is warming. We just had a terrible
 Unlocking the Magic of Facilitation

blizzard last week.” The facilitator, confident that the materi-

al being covered is factually true, sensitively responds, “I ap-
preciate you sharing your perspective. A lot of people share
that concern, but extreme weather is actually a symptom of
climate change.”
Now consider an alternative situation, where everything
is the same, except for one word being changed: the facili-
tator responds, “I appreciate you sharing your perspective.
A lot of people share that concern, and extreme weather is
actually a symptom of climate change.”
You may have already had a feeling in your gut in re-
sponse to that simple word change: the feeling of “and” and
the feeling of “but” can be dramatically different. If you felt
it, then your gut has already taught you what this chapter is
all about. If the message didn’t make it to your gut just yet,
no worries—we’ll do our best to work our way from your
head down.

AND VS. BUT: UNPACKING THE

DIFFERENCE
“And” and “But” serve similar functions grammatically.
And, generally speaking, we can exchange one for the other
without noticing much of a difference in meaning. But when
disagreeing with someone, the difference between “and” and
“but” grows to a canyon.
Whenever someone makes a statement, connecting your
response to theirs with “and” builds on what they said; con-
necting your response to theirs with “but” negates what they
said. “And” recognizes their truth, and adds yours on top of
or alongside it; “But” negates their truth, and replaces it with
yours.

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 Both/And is Greater Than But/Or

“Meg is wonderful, but she smells bad.” Meg might be

wonderful, but that is diminished by the fact that she smells
bad. “Meg is wonderful, and she smells bad.” In this sen-
tence, Meg’s wonderfulness isn’t diminished by her odor—
heck, it might even be part of her charm (“Meg is so busy be-
ing wonderful she ain’t got time to shower—I respect that.”).
What we’re doing with the “And” is allowing these two ideas
to have their own merit, to exist alongside one another, in-
stead of putting them on opposite ends of an ideological tug
of war (the classic hot-button controversy of “wonderful” vs.
“smell bad” you’re always hearing about on cable news).

Manifesting Polar Bears

Facilitation requires so much attention to so many com-
peting things, it can be easy for us to accidentally create a
throwdown we had no intention of throwing down. Some-
times, something as small as saying “But” when you could
have said “And” will trigger a fight or flight reflex in a par-
ticipant, where you turn them into a hyper-protective mama
bear whose cub is her idea. We’ll call this manifesting polar
bears.
If you want to steer clear of polar bears, your best bet is
to avoid poles. We are really good at internalizing two ideas
as competing, polar opposites, when often they’re better un-
derstood as two distinct ideas, and not actually in competi-
tion at all.
Do your best to be intentional about which ideas, or what
material, you’re discussing are actually polar opposites, and
which can happily coexist.

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 Unlocking the Magic of Facilitation

But/Or Create a Hunger Games of Ideas

If there really is one absolute truth--a winning idea that
needs to emerge as victorious--creating dichotomies and
forcing people to choose one concept over another is neces-
sary. Responding to participants' statements with “but” and
“or” are great ways to create that competition.
Sometimes allowing for multiple perspectives won’t help.
It may create more confusion than clarity, or the ambigui-
ty is occasionally too difficult for participants to hold, and
without anything concrete to anchor them, all the learning
drops out. We understand this. We simply encourage you to
pick your ideological battle royales.
“What you just said might be true, or everything we know
might be a lie and our universe is really a simulation being run by
some super-computer of an advanced civilization.”

And/Both Create a Sandbox Where

Everyone Can Play
One of the best things about facilitation is bringing
learning out of a bunch of individuals, and enabling them to
share what they know with one another. Most ideas can play
nicely with other ideas if we allow them to.
When it’s clear that the learning being shared can add
to the learning you’re hoping to accomplish as a facilitator,
we encourage you to “And” relentlessly. If you notice a false
dichotomy that participants are struggling with, a carefully
placed “both” can keep them from flinging sand in one an-
other’s eyes.
“Folks, may I suggest something? Perhaps the leaders of the
advanced civilization controlling our universe are both ‘a huge
pile of jerks’ for taking away the dinosaurs and ‘benevolent

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 Both/And is Greater Than But/Or

all-healing gods’ for giving us guacamole.”

HOW BOTH/AND LOOKS IN THE

MOMENT
Hopefully you don’t need convincing that multiple
truths and realities exist—about any and every concept—
even when they seem to contradict each other. And maybe
the above helped you recognize the power you have to create
space for these multiple realities, or to demolish them, all
with your choice of conjunction1. Having the ability to iden-
tify the “But” statements that can be “And” statements is an
important skill. As soon as you’re comfortable with that dis-
tinction, you can move into choosing your language inten-
tionally, and, in turn, helping participants understand that
multiple truths and realities can exist together. Here are a
few things to think about that might help you do just that.

Your reality being true doesn’t mean my

reality isn’t
It’s easy for us to fall into the trap of believing that our
truth is dependent upon it being universally true. Sam is
constantly arguing that the entirety of The Matrix trilogy has
merit, and has a hard time believing that when literally every
person he talks to thinks the latter two films are worthless.
He can be right (i.e., all three films can add worth to his life),
and everyone else can be right (i.e., the second two movies
are, to them, a festering waste of film, money, time, and Kea-
nu Reeves). Both parties are right, and Sam is delusional.

1 Conjunction Junction, what’s your function? I’ve got two real choices,
and one will get me far: Protect participants’ realities, or destroy and
leave them scarred.

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 Unlocking the Magic of Facilitation

We see this come up again and again in facilitation: if my

reality is this way then your reality can’t be that way. “If I am
experiencing what you said as problematic, and you didn’t,
we can’t both be right.” Instead of discussing the core of the
issue, we talk about who is “really right” as if there is an ab-
solute reality we are close to, and need to find. The Both/
And concept allows us to stop having that conversation and
move into having the next phase of the conversation, which
is “tell me about your reality, and then I can tell you about
mine.” This is particularly important with social justice con-
cepts, when you’re attempting to affirm many different types
of experiences and understandings of self, some of which are
less part of the dominant narrative than others.

And my reality being true doesn’t mean it’s

true for you
At some point, far too late into his adult life, Sam realized
that he can appreciate all three Matrix films, while everyone
else hates them. In fact, he now celebrates that he might be
the only person in the world who likes all three films (“More
metal plug-shaped Keanu Reeve nipples for me.”).
Creating space for Both/And means recognizing that
disagreeing is okay, healthy, even desirable, and can lead
to learning for everyone. As a facilitator, your first hurdle
is getting over your own But/Or thinking when it comes
to something a participant says. Your second hurdle (often
higher, more wibbly-wobbly, and likely to send you sprawl-
ing) is helping participants get over their But/Or thinking in
response to what other participants say.
A phrase we use, that you are welcome to think of as the
penicillin of facilitator interjections, is “Thanks for sharing
your perspective. It’s always nice to see how many different

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 Both/And is Greater Than But/Or

perspectives people have about this.” Then, when anoth-

er participant shares a contradicting or directly retaliatory
view, you can use it again. “And thanks for sharing your per-
spective! It’s always nice to see how many different perspec-
tives people have about this.” And you can rinse and repeat
until your participants evolve into an anti-confrontational
resistant superbug.
Enabling participants to have coexisting—instead of
competing—unique perspectives amongst one another is as
important as recognizing when their perspective and your
perspective can coexist.

IMPORTANT BOTH/AND CONCEPTS

There are innumerable situations in which Both/And
will come in handy. Instead, we’re going to highlight a few
of the most easy-to-But/Or concepts we can think of, and all
of them come from a fountain of perpetual controversy: the
perspective, process, and goal that is social justice. It is our
hope that in seeing how these highly divisive concepts are
unified, you’ll be able to extrapolate this out to just about
any situation you might experience in your facilitation.

You can be both privileged and oppressed

We often talk about privilege and oppression as if they
were the two positions of a light switch: you can either be
oppressed, or privileged—no in between, no other options.
This, like all Both/And-able concepts that are But/Or-ed,
creates unnecessary conflict, demolishes nuance, and pre-
vents understanding and empathy. Every person has many
identities, and experiences those identities in unique ways,
depending on location, time, and the rest of who they are.

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 Unlocking the Magic of Facilitation

Not only can a single person experience both oppression and

privilege, most of us do! Being able to accept and present
that reality, being both privileged and oppressed, helps oth-
ers see the complexity of both issues, and creates some wig-
gle room for a productive dialogue.

You can be doing good (or trying to) and

causing harm
We often struggle when our intentions don’t align with
outcomes, and participants in a training will be the first
to latch onto just that. As facilitators, it’s easy to focus on
the harm someone causes, and we might be able to enable
more learning for everyone if we also acknowledge the good
(whether manifested or intended). And we, as facilitators,
often do the same thing. For example, if we are silencing,
forgetting, or even purposefully excluding particular mar-
ginalized voices, perspectives, and identities from the con-
versation, this is doing harm (it’s reinforcing the erasure and
marginalization these perspectives experience in society),
and it might be doing good (we might recognize that trying
to talk about everything all at once will lead to confusion, and
instead focus on accomplishing a small, specific win instead).
Sam may be doing a great job facilitating a workshop about
lesbian, gay, and bisexual identities and completely ignore
(or not leave time to discuss) asexuality. Whether intention-
al or not, this may cause harm while simultaneously doing
good: participants may have a vastly more comprehensive
understanding of LGB identities but have no more under-
standing, empathy, or connection to asexual identities.
As facilitators, we have to make choices like this all the
time. It happens when we decide what we are going to be
discussing or not covering, what concepts we are prioritizing

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 Both/And is Greater Than But/Or

and what concepts we just may not get to. These are diffi-
cult choices, and many of us are aware that we’re doing some
amount of harm (even if it’s just in way of not doing good),
while we’re doing good. Keep this in mind, and use it as your
source of empathy, when helping participants recognize they
are often doing the same thing.

KEEPING YOUR BUT OUT OF

CONVERSATIONS
This concept can be difficult to unsee now that you’ve
seen it—like many others in the book (we hope!). It under-
mines a foundational component of our communication
that we may not have realized we were communicating. You
might, for a short while, find yourself stumbling over basic
sentences in conversations with others (e.g., Someone asks
“How are you?” and you reply “I’m well, but today—oh no.
Is that an and? Hm… ‘and’ today…? Hold on a sec! Can I
try again?”), to the utter confusion of those others. In fact,
it’s not uncommon for us to get an email from someone we
trained, days or weeks after the training, like the following
email Sam received:

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 Unlocking the Magic of Facilitation

We understand. This concept had—and has—a similar

effect on us.
You might also find yourself glowing with pride when
you pepper in an “and” where previously you would have un-
wittingly inserted your “but.” We’re guilty here, too.
We’re not sure which one leads to more social awkward-
ness: the cursing yourself for saying “but,” or the “my kid is
going to Harvard” pride when you nail the “and.” What we
can say for sure is that both are likely to lead the other per-
son in the conversation to think you’ve had way too much
caffeine.
This technique is something that will take time to utilize
without awkwardness, and that’s okay! Curse yourself, pat
yourself on the back, do neither or both, and keep reading.
Now that you’ve stumbled upon the ground-shaking glory
that is “and is greater than but,” you’re ready for something
even more powerful: the “Yes, And…” rule.

54
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