Stephen Billing’s Blog

Theodore Taptiklis has written a very readable book called Unmanaging, in which he brings together the thinking of Patricia Benner, John Shotter, Ralph Stacey and David Boje.

He gives a critique of Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, in which the relationship of the human person to the world is seen as a series of needs – things that it takes in from others. The needs are expressed in a hierarchy from survival to self-actualisation, and these needs correspond to stages of life maturity – the basic needs are those of infancy and the higher needs are those of the mature adult.

Taptiklis points out that these needs were seen as universal motivations which were held to be innate, and the individual could not therefore influence or take responsibility for them. And he sees this as a very plausible justification for selfishness that has been incorporated into a wide variety of human relations and economics theories.

Taptiklis poses some problems with this, saying that this process of categorising human needs allows humans to be regulated and administered by purely rational means, and leads to the acceptance of the possibility that all needs can be monetised.

According to Taptiklis, one of the most important implications of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is that it weakens the idea of human society. Each person is a walking bundle of needs, concerned about needs at one of the levels on the hierarchy depending on their maturity. The relationship of these individuals to others is about how those others can fulfill their needs.

Reading Taptiklis made me realise how individualistic Maslow’s hierarchy is. It really does not allow for the experience of humans as interdependent beings. And yet it is such a foundational part of all our management thinking about motivation. It is often taught as one of the basics of motivation, followed up by Herzberg’s theory about motivators and hygiene factors.

It is surely worth recognising that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs represents an individualist approach to being human rather than taking for granted that we are isolated bundles of needs walking around in bags of skin.

I have been thinking about how my facilitation is different from other facilitation I have experienced and criticised in previous posts.

Rather than conducting structured exercises that take participants through a process where beginning and end are known, with the facilitator very separate from the group, I become a temporary participant in the group, examining issues together with the members.

This means that instead of looking for a "positive" outcome, or one where no negativity or resistance is expressed, I am looking to get people to express what might be seen as their negativity, if that is what they have, within the forum. The alternative is that they will express it amongst themselves in the tea room or around the water cooler.

I am not seeing the session as separate from myriad other conversations that occur in organisational life in many different settings and amongst many different participants. The manager cannot control those conversations and it does not make much sense to me to try and control the conversations in a facilitated session.

You might say that I am trying to replicate in the session the water cooler conversations that take place all the time. The difference is that the most powerful in organisations are usually insulated from these water cooler conversations through the hierarchy of managers who decide whether issues are important enough to raise with the senior managers, or not.

I am trying to discuss what previously was undiscussable, to bring the shadow conversations into the room. In this, I would suggest, my intentions are very different from those of most facilitators.

What do you think?

In uncertain times, many people want to make sense of what is going on and reflect on the events and experience that has led to where we are now, while planning for the future.

Many facilitators become enamoured of creating some innovative new session design that has novelty for them. Inadvertently perhaps, these session designs end up not providing the opportunity for people to make sense of their real world. For example, doing skits or presentations back to the big group of what was discussed in a small group. Or even just taking up a half day discussing your MBTI or TMI profile. Too many corporate facilitators, in my opinion, take up their time with abstractions from the group’s reality.

The facilitator’s innovative design, even if it has very engaging activities that the participants love at the time, ends up being run at the cost of the participants making meaning of real experiences occurring for participants at their workplace.

This is like the IT specialist who becomes enamoured of their technology (i.e. falls in love with their technology) and must explain every last nuance of it to the user. All the time, the user just wants to know what button to push.

Many facilitators are lost without their preplanned activities which lead to the creation of lists of activities or issues which come to be seen as ends in themselves. I.e we produced the list, we successfully delivered the desired outputs of the session.

As the manager of your group, think about the last away day or retreat session your team was involved in. Were you more concerned about achieving your predetermined objectives or did you identify and then address the issues your team was concerned about? Many facilitators design sessions that identify but do not address these issues. And they identify them in a way in which people do not have to be accountable to each other (e.g. anonymous comments on post it notes). But that is the subject of another post! 

An earlier post Ten Myths About Organisations and Leadership has been picked up by Less Than Dot forum. They have started a dialogue there if you scroll down nearly to the end.

It is a weird experience being referred to as "the guy" and "he," in this off hand third person manner. That’s the interweb thingie for you!

I am convinced that the value of a facilitator is in fostering free flowing conversations among participants, related to the job in hand. During this process they generate meaning for the work they are involved with, for example coming up with new ideas, enhancing a relationship between 2 units, proposing a collaboration between 2 groups or understanding a situation from the other person’s perspective. There are many more possible outcomes – these are just a few examples.

And yet how many times have you seen facilitators who:

1. Create structured activities that are engaging but do not foster real conversation about real things going on in the work place (e.g. cutting articles out of newspapers, getting people to vote on arbitrary rating scales).
    
2. Are more intent on getting through their predetermined programme than meeting the needs of the participants (and the sponsor).
    
3. Build in restrictions on the conversation (e.g. speaking only one sentence at a time) that interfere with the natural ebb and flow and repetitions of normal conversation.
    
4. Get participants to talk to the flipchart or to the facilitator, but never to each other?
    
5. Regard participants talking to each other as a waste of time, something to be discouraged. Why is it that the most lively conversations seem to happen at breaks?
    
6. Close conversations down rather than opening them up.
    
7. Divert attention from what is important to participants, for example through skits or artificial presentations.
    
8. Generate ideas in brainstorming sessions but never discuss the merits of the ideas?
    
9. Ask questions that they already know the answers to in order to reach the predetermined outcome – this amounts to a subtle manipulation.
    
10. Use devices that touch on, but avoid, dealing with real concerns, for example getting people to write their concerns on yellow stickies and posting them anonymously on a flipchart (never to be seen again), or posting anonymous ratings of how we are getting along at the moment or how we are doing as a team. If the items raised by these techniques are not discussed in the group then they amount to disguised manipulative techniques to get the group to think that something has been done just by undertaking the exercise.
     
11. Getting through a set number of Powerpoint slides in the time available (e.g. "These ones are not relevant to you so I’ll just go through them quickly").
     
12. Facilitate sessions that generate long lists of ideas or issues that never see the light of day again.
     
13. Have a pre-set agenda that gets in the way of what is meaningful to the participants (e.g. even though we know the answers now, we won’t answer your questions about the space you will have because according to our plan we will address that in stage 2, which takes place next month.)

These are examples that I have seen over the last four years or so. The embarrassing thing is that in the past I have been guilty of some of them myself!