Stephen Billing’s Blog

I am finding that people have recently been saying to me that conversations with me have been helpful, that they have helped them to see the situation differently. As an organisational change practitioner I interpret this as meaning that there are now different options available for proceeding from what there were before our conversation. 

While I feel flattered by comments like these, I have been struck how much more frequently they seem to be coming up at the moment. I am wondering about why this might be so. Although I would like to attribute it to some amazing insight or characteristic that I and I alone have, I also notice that these insights occur only through conversation and they do not occur in every conversation I have, or even in most conversations. They are rare enough to be noteworthy.   

As I reflect on these recent experiences I am realizing that I am developing an increasing interest in what is going on right now in my client organisations and in my own life at the present moment. This is quite different from the usual gap analysis approach that pays more attention to the desired future and how to generate a map to lead us there. The gap analysis approach leads us to concentrate on what we should be doing rather than what is actually happening now. 

I am more interested in exploring in detail what is going on now and then considering what the next step is. This requires considerable flexibility from both parties as the picture of what is going on can change dramatically upon reflection after significant events.  

I thank Ralph Stacey, the supervisor of my doctorate, for helping me to develop my ability to reflect on what is happening in my client organisations. 

This approach forces me to conclude that these positive feedback experiences are not be due to some intrinsic special characteristic of me that is innate, nor is it my particular professional skills, although undoubtedly my natural inclinations and professional training play a part. I am forced instead to conclude that the new perspective that emerges from these conversations about what is currently going on are a characteristic of the relating between me and the other person that leads to this experience of having been a party to a new way of thinking about the particular situation we are in together.

In my last post I described the sender receiver model of communication and said that thinking this way about communication was a reason why we have communication breakdowns, and why, when they occur, they are so hard to repair. I said that when you see communication as a sender and a receiver in this way, a misunderstanding can only be resolved by identifying which party made a mistake, or which parties made which mistakes. Admission of mistakes like this is hard for people to do, which means it is hard to resolve breakdowns in communication.

What is the alternative?

Ralph Stacey introduced me to the thinking of George Herbert Mead, who, early in the twentieth century pointed out what I have found to be a very useful alternative to seeing communication as a message transmitted between sender and receiver. Mead talks about meaning in interaction as being co-created through a process of gesture and response. Gesture means words, actions, facial expressions and so on, and the response to the gesture creates the meaning of that gesture, at the same time as it is being generated by the gesture.

How is this different from sender / receiver? Well, one difference is that the message has no intrinsic meaning of itself.

If I yell at you, you could take it as a warning that a car is coming and thank me, or as an insult and yell back at me. There is no intrinsic meaning held in the yell itself, and neither of us knows the meaning of it until you respond. Of course, I have intention in yelling, but the meaning we make of it together is not known until the response is given. And of course the response itself is also a gesture calling forth its own response. So, communication can be seen as a continuing process of making meaning through these gestures and responses.

Rather than transmitting meaning from one person to another we are jointly communicating meaning. The response gives the gesture meaning – there is no inherent meaning in the gesture alone.

In this way of thinking, you have to consider both the gesture and the response together as the unit of communication. Thinking this way, your attention is drawn to the meaning made of the gesture/response together, not how the sender’s intention differed from the message decoded by the receiver.

Here’s another example.

The statement “the cost is $10,000” is a very familiar occurrence in a range of settings, from financial (e.g. budgeting or financial reporting), to sales (negotiating a price).  A response of “That’s too much” gives a very different meaning to the interaction compared to a response of “Should we accrue that amount?” 

When I was first introduced to Mead’s notion of the conversation of gesture / response, I thought it was an academic concept of not much value. In fact I thought it was quite a difficult concept to grasp of extremely questionable value. I have now changed my tune completely.

So why is this such a useful way of viewing communication?

It is useful because it completely transforms the nature of what you think communication is. Instead of looking at the sender or receiver as being at fault, our attention is drawn to the meaning that we are making together in this situation. Communication becomes a process of joint inquiry in which we are both, together, making meaning of our situation, drawing on your unique background and understanding, and my unique background and understanding.

For leaders, taking this perspective completely eliminates the need to see employees as expressing resistance to change when they question a change initiative. Why? Because when employees ask questions, they are responding to gestures made by the leader, perhaps at a roadshow presentation, perhaps in a company newsletter or any other setting. This does not mean that the leaders have given the message poorly, or that the employees are resistant. The questions from the employees are the responses to the gestures made by the leaders, which lead to further gestures and responses in a never-ending process out of which meaning is constantly emerging.

When you take this perspective, communication is seen as a joint inquiry, in which both parties are accountable to each other for the meaning they are taking from the interaction. Meaning is constantly evolving through the conversation of gestures and responses. Each response is itself a gesture that calls forth a response. In this process the views of both parties can change.

And that is the exciting thing – it helps you avoid getting stuck blaming each other when communication doesn’t seem to be going the way you would like it to.

This view of communication has been very significant for me and others who have explored it. I would be very interested in your response to this gesture. That will enable us to make meaning together.

So please feel free to post questions or comments. 

Illustration by Martin Coates

Shannon and Weaver’s influential formulation in 1949 of the conduit or sender receiver model of communication constitutes the dominant model of communication. The sender encodes a message which is sent to the receiver who decodes the message. If the sender has encoded accurately, and the receiver has decoded accurately, then clear communication is said to have taken place.

Other factors that can be considered include the channel of communication – face to face, telephone, email etc, and also environmental factors which are considered as noise, and can detract from the clarity of transmission of the message. In this way of thinking about communication, the meaning of it is understood to be held in the message, and is to be decoded by the receiver.

It is known as the conduit metaphor because of the focus on the successful transmission of a message, almost like it was going down a pipe.

This way of looking at communication pervades our thinking on the topic in most areas of organisational life, from information technology and its evolution into knowledge management which concentrates on how these messages can be stored, accessed and decoded at a later date, to cybernetic and computer based models of how humans store, access and extract meaning from these messages.

The goal of communication is understood to be the transfer of meaning from the sender to the receiver with minimum spillage  in the process, to use Eisenberg’s term from his 2007 book Strategic Ambiguities.

The problems of communication are understood to be accurate coding and decoding by the sender and receiver respectively, limitations in the channel of communication, and problems with noise from the environment contaminating the communication. In practical terms, this means that when something goes wrong with face to face communication then we have no alternative but to consider either the sender as having erred in the encoding or else the receiver to have misunderstood the message. Either way one party is at fault.

I believe that this is one of the reasons that breakdowns in communication are so difficult to resolve. For there to be resolution, then one party or the other has to admit that they did something wrong, and this is hard to do.

The sender receiver model of communication is pervasive throughout the western business world. It seems to make logical sense. It fits with our view of ourselves as autonomous individuals making rational choices to bring about our intentions – if we can communicate our intentions clearly as senders, then we will be better leaders and get what we want in the world.

I have come to the belief that one of the reasons communication breakdowns occur is because of our faulty way of seeing communication as the transmission of meaning. And the sender receiver model is also a large part of the reason that we find it hard to repair communication breakdowns. In other words, our very way of thinking about communication in terms of sender and receiver is responsible for miscommunication and the difficulty in resolving miscommunication.

But what is the alternative? For years there seemed to me to be no satisfactory alternative, until Ralph Stacey introduced me to the work of George Herbert Mead, an American philosopher writing in the early twentieth century.

More about this in the next post.

When workshops are conducted and one of the reasons for them is somehow to facilitate change, then the workshop must generate new conversations. If no change in the conversations, then no organisational change. Participants must be able to talk to each other and take up new themes of conversation in the session. If they are not talking to each other then new conversations are not happening; in fact no conversations are happening. And then no change can happen through that workshop. 

This leaves the facilitator with a problem. The problem of how to ensure the session’s objectives are met. This is a problem because the client, who is paying the bill, has expectations and intentions, and the facilitator has to deliver something that has been agreed in advance. And yet I am saying that the facilitator cannot control the conversations in the workshop. How can the facilitator deliver what has been promised? 

Many facilitators deal with this dilemma by attempting to design the interactions in advance in order to meet the objectives. Coupled with this, they attempt to create their facilitation style in advance, for example by selecting a combination of directive and non-directive exercises. John Heron has a good articulation of the possibilities, by describing a range of 6 dimensions and 3 modes of facilitation coming together in an 18 box matrix. 

On the other hand, I am saying that the actual style of facilitators arises from their intentions (including their intentions about what particular style they seek to have) interwoven with the various intentions of the participants and the interactions between participants and facilitator. Therefore the facilitator is still a participant in these interactions, engaged to a greater or lesser extent. And yet there seems to be reluctance on the part of many facilitators I know to be more engaged with group participants. The role of engaged participant is a different one and represents a change in the power dynamic between facilitator and group members. If the facilitator is strongly directing the activities, asking the questions and writing on the flipchart, then they are in a very powerful position and that power differential is emphasised by these techniques. The interactions that are possible in this dynamic will be different from those where the power differential is not so obvious. 

If the facilitator participates as an engaged member of the group this de-emphasises the power differential and exposes the facilitator to some risk. There is the risk that the conversation might go into areas where the facilitator does not know the answers, and hence might not be seen as authoritative. There is also the risk that the group might lose confidence in a facilitator who does not know the answers. 

Facilitators would do well to reflect on their willingness to risk venturing into this unknown territory where the power balance is not tilted towards the facilitator. Likewise clients would do well to question people they engage as facilitators as to the degree of involvement with their participants that they profess to have. And then monitor practice to see whether it matches up.

I have been talking with a facilitator friend of mine recently about how often people working in break out groups can get off lightly without really engaging. Participants can take an activity quite lightly, skirting away from aspects that are challenging. Then afterwards they can say, ‘Well, that wasn’t much benefit”. But you as a manager know that if they talked about real situations and challenged themselves then they would get a lot more out of the activity.

It strikes me that you could say that these facilitation techniques of breaking people into small groups to undertake highly designed interactions are attempting to get people to have meaningful conversations with each other where the facilitator is not involved.

In order to make sure the conversations are meaningful, they are designed by the facilitator, with parameters, time constraints, questions to answer or structured activities to do. In these activities, the participants, who are people like the facilitator, have to have designed interaction to achieve the facilitator’s outcome. These designed interactions are unlike any they have outside the workshop setting. Imagine a group of people having coffee saying "let’s tell a story one sentence at a time where you only give positive feedback".

In these small group sessions, the facilitator is not really involved in a serious moment-by-moment way with the interactions of the members of the group.

Some facilitators barely get beyond the role of "director of traffic" i.e. getting the participants organised into their activities and giving them instructions.

It seems to me that if we’re facilitating the making of meaning, then we do need to be making meaning WITH our participants. Not just setting up structured interactions where they make meaning themselves but the facilitator stays apart.

Why do I say this? Well, I want to link this to the feel of the interaction, which comes from the work of John Shotter.

He talks about learning to notice the feel of the unique and novel in a person’s action or utterance. If the facilitator is noticing the feel of the interaction, then he or she can draw attention to aspects of novelty that have relevance to the theme of the session. Essentially, if the facilitator is not involved in the conversations, then he or she will not have the feel of the interaction.

Therefore the facilitator will be less effective in facilitating change in these conversations.

Being involved (and detached at the same time, of course) allows facilitators to gauge the feel of the interaction and generate opportunities for change in that conversation. The conversations can then be quite different from what they would have been if the facilitator had not been there.

Think of facilitated sessions you have been involved with. I am sure you have experienced some who act purely as the "director of traffic," giving the instructions for the activities. Have you also experienced a facilitator who engages in the content of the group as well?

What is your opinion about the merits or weaknesses of each approach?

If managers are attempting to facilitate change they must be thinking about who is talking to whom and paying attention to what is new in the conversation during the session. Often members of the group in facilitated workshops do not talk to each other, but rather to the facilitator or to the flipchart – this can also be a problem in therapy groups as well; Yalom points out that the members should “freely interact rather than direct all their comments to or through the therapist.” 

Watch out for facilitators who set up the activities of the group so that they have no choice but to think of ideas to write on a flipchart or to answer the facilitator’s questions, addressing the facilitator and the group but not taking up each other’s ideas. 

What do I mean? Consider the activity of breaking a large group up into small groups, a tactic often used by facilitators in organisational settings. These smaller groupings may be determined in advance by the manager and facilitator, based on who they want to have work together. I’ve seen these groupings indicated in advance on charts with coloured symbols. Alternatively, the groupings could be self-selected on the day. 

The small groups are usually given some form of activity to perform such as answering a series of questions, generating ideas or solving a problem. The results of the small group activity are often recorded on flipchart paper. It is common for the facilitator to get the small groups to present their flipchart ideas back to the larger group.  This is an example of what I mean by talking to the flipchart.

Why? Because group members end up telling the large group what is on their flipchart. The presentation may be relatively interesting or rather dull, depending on the skills of the presenter and the nature of the content. But either way, it is not a lively conversation amongst the participants of the group, it is a one way presentation from the presenter. There is no dialogue going on. 

Here’s the problem. The intention of this activity is to summarise the main points of the small group conversation, which was a conversation between a specific small group of people in a specific situation. The underlying taken-for-granted assumption is that the meaning of the small group conversation can be transferred to the large group through the use of these summaries. 

This is classic sender / receiver model communication where the large group conversation involves the transmission of messages from the small groups. But I think the large group discussion is actually a new conversation and a new situation with a different, specific, although larger group of people in a new situation. The new situation is the big group discussion. The experience of the past conversation in the small group is part of the history that led to the large group conversation but cannot be replayed. 

Recognising that the meaning of the small group exchanges cannot be extracted and summarised for the larger group changes the facilitator’s intentions. It also changes the intentions of the manager hiring the facilitator. To what? 

Managers must consider how their workshop will seed new conversations amongst the group. This means the facilitator could note that participants can read the flipchart for themselves, and ask what the small group talked about. It is noticeable when facilitators do this how often the group say that the important part of their discussion was not recorded on the flipchart at all. 

Recognising the ‘messy’ and repetitive nature of conversation the facilitator can also encourage responses in the large group conversation rather than waiting for questions at the end. This sort of debrief is much easier in a circle or around a table where participants can all see each other rather than in theatre style or other seating arrangements where people cannot see each other. 

Managers facing times of change should not worry about what participants say to the flipchart, but what they say to each other. 

What do you think? 

Yalom I, 2005, The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy 5th Edition, Cambridge, MA: Basic Books. Page 124.

Here are ten reasons why you should not be phased by "resistance" to change. Reason number 10 is the most important.

1. You get a chance to find out what people really think, and then can address it. It gives you the chance to improve your change implementation.
        
2. Those people who seem to be putting up the strongest resistance are thought leaders and can have a positive impact on many others when they are handled effectively. They can really turn the momentum of a project.
    
3. If you are experiencing resistance to change it means that your project is having an effect, it is a sign that things are starting to happen.
    
4. It gives you the opportunity to find out if it’s a sign of an entrenched pattern or an initial response to something. After having the opportunity for a vent or offload of their initial reactions, people’s views can change.
    
5. What people are doing and how they are responding to the change makes sense to them. There is a perspective from which it makes sense for them to act in ways that may look like resistance. Resistance situations give you the opportunity to broaden your own perspective, to find a way of connecting with someone with a perspective quite different from your own. The ability to do this is key to successful change and is useful in many other areas of life. In other words it is well worth practising and mastering.
    
6. It develops your leadership, your range of ways to respond to situations that arise, the people involved and the kind of issues that can trigger tricky situations. While it can be tough at the time, it will improve your ability to deal with a similar situation next time.
    
7. It gives you another chance to engage with people.
    
8. It is a chance to practice withholding judgement.
    
9. It is a real feather in your cap if you can deal with it effectively. Most people cannot.
    
10. When you identify what looks like resistance this indicates a real issue, a high priority area to focus your attention to really gain momentum for your change initiative. Don’t try to gloss over it or paste over with positive messages. Instead try to understand the concerns in depth. Don’t worry that you are dwelling on the negative. The negative will transform through your process of listening. The process of doing this will communicate to people that you are really listening. And you will then be able to address the real issues that are blocking the implementation of your change.

Meetings are clearly important in organisations. Van Wree’s study of meeting manuals charts the development of meeting practice for parliaments, voluntary societies and local councils, in a first phase from 1845 to the 1950s and a second phase from the 1950s where meetings in business settings with smaller groups of people resulted in a relaxation of rules and a more informal meeting procedure developed. The role of the chair correspondingly changed, moving from mainly watching over and applying procedures, to varying leadership style according to type of meeting, controlling tensions and conflicts neutrally and smoothly, based on their insight and feelings. Van Wree argues that meetings have become the pre-eminent route to power, income and status, and that the higher the individual is in the hierarchy, the greater the number of meetings they attend.

I am sure this is true in your experience as well. Most CEOs and senior managers need personal assistants to manage the tyranny of their diaries.

In spite of their predominance in the lived experience of those working at senior levels in organisations, meetings or sessions are still seen as separate events which stand outside of normal organisational life. They are treated as ‘necessary evils’ or timewasters that must be attended, and as being separate from ‘the real work’. They are often seen as distractions from or obstacles to getting on with the job in hand. The sessions then need their own set of measurable objectives and a skilful chairperson or leader responsible for driving the group forward to achieving these objectives. Otherwise the time will not be used productively, it might be used up in conversations or interactions which do not instrumentally achieve or at least move towards the desired outcomes.

The meeting becomes a focus of analysis and planning as a separate entity or event in its own right in terms of certain, predetermined outcomes, to move the group from where they are now to where the facilitator and manager want them to be. It is my experience, and I am sure that of other facilitators, to be asked at a week’s notice to facilitate sessions that have already been scheduled, but for which a facilitator has not been booked.

Schein’s seminal distinction between process and content leads to the expectation that an expert facilitator with group facilitation and process skills can come in cold and facilitate a process to achieve an outcome, without needing much context with the group’s business. However, in the same way that Tannen says one cannot “understand the full meaning of any sentence without considering its relation to other sentences”, one cannot understand the full meaning of a group session without considering its relationship to other events going on in the organisation. A change facilitator must therefore be considering the meetings and workshops they facilitate as part of this larger weave, rather than as an end in itself.

Ask your change facilitator how they view this meeting in the context of other organisational conversations. I think the answer will be revealing.

Schein E, (1999) Process Consultation Revisited, Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley

Tannen, D. (1987) “Repetition in Conversation: Toward a Poetics of Talk,” Language 63:3 pp 574-605.

Van Wree, W. (2002) “The Development of Meeting Behaviour in Organizations and the Rise of an Upper Class of Professional Chairpersons,” in van Iterson, A., Mastenbroek, W., Newton, T. and Smith, D. (eds) The Civilized Organization: Norbert Elias And The Future Of Organization Studies, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company

When I started my doctorate I took organisations so much for granted that the question of what an organisation is had never occurred to me. But if you’re working to change your organisation then it’s worth thinking about what your organisation actually is. How you think about organisations will affect what you do in trying to change your own one. Also important is how you are thinking about change. But for now, let’s consider the question of what an organisation is.

Clearly people are involved, but if you say that organisations are a group of people who make up or perhaps identify with the organisation, then how would you explain how when people leave organisations the organisation can still continue. When I left paid employment at Telecom, the company continued recognizably as Telecom. Even when a far more important person than me such as the CEO left, Telecom remains Telecom.

On the other hand neither is it the buildings, equipment and assets of the organisation that the company owns that constitute the organisation. If this were so, then how would you explain that without the people working in the organisation those things would just sit there as pretty useless physical objects?

Is it both the people and the physical assets? Well, again you have the problem that people can leave and equipment can change while the organisation continues – even the core business can change as an organisation ‘reinvents’ itself.

Ralph Stacey, the supervisor of my doctoral study, has a view that organisations are patterns of relationships between people. I find this idea very provoking in thinking about the essence of what makes an organisation. He suggests that organisations are ongoing patterns of interaction. In other words, organisations are not the people themselves, nor are they the physical assets owned or used by the legal entity that records the existence of the organisation, but rather organisations are the interactions between the people over time.

This view has some rather important implications for how we see organisations. For example, if organisations are patterns of interaction then they are not things, much less living things with goals and intention of their own. Usually when people talk of organisations, they refer to processes, market positioning, technologies, monitoring, plans and budgets.

Conversations are dismissed as ‘mere talk’. And yet budgets, plans and technologies are really tools that we use in our ongoing interactions with each other. The usual way we think about organisations concentrates on the tools, whereas I am now thinking of organisations as conversations. And paying attention to the conversations rather than the tools has certainly had a huge impact on my own effectiveness as a change management consultant, my experience with my clients and my consultancy business results.