Stephen Billing’s Blog

In my last post I highlighted Saras Sarasvathy’s simile of a meal that can be prepared either by designing a menu and then assembling the ingredients to make the meal (which she calls causation) or by looking to see what ingredients are to hand and choosing the dishes based on the ingredients in the cupboard.

I am struck by how many corporate change initiatives focus on the set pieces such as road shows, documents and deadlines. The change team prepares a plan with these events set to occur at certain intervals. This is very similar to preparing a series of three course dinners over the course of the project. (more…)

I have recently spent a couple of days in the company of Alan Weiss talking about strategy – in particular strategy implementation. My clients hire me for planning and implementation of change projects related to strategy, and so I am very interested in this topic.

There are many matrices, models, formulas and recipes for doing strategy. No doubt you have seen a few of these yourself over the years.

From where I stand, strategy formulation and implementation in organisations are themes in the pattern of conversations myriad ongoing conversations taking place in that organisation.

From that point of view, the strategy models, matrices and other artefacts have little value in themselves. This is because they do not convey some message or meaning in themselves. The usefulness of the models, matrices and recipes is not in the elaborateness or sophistication of the model, nor even the theoretical rigour of the model or matrix itself.

The usefulness is rather in the conversations sparked by the models and matrices. These conversations in turn help move strategy along if they result in people making new sense of the organisation and what it is doing. 

It is interesting to think about what conversations you are taking part in about strategy in your organisation.

More importantly, what are your people saying when they talk about your organisation and where it is heading?

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.

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.

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