Looking at the whole context of your group’s dynamics over a month or so can help you to identify the natural flows of interaction and how your team meetings can best contribute to and shape it.

What kinds of interaction does your team need? in a month? Most teams need opportunities for the following:

• Understanding what is going on in the organisation that may affect their work.
• Working on ideas for improving your operation.
• Catching up on new developments or information that affects the team.
• Knowing how the team is performing.
• Acknowledging / celebrating success.
• Letting off steam.

Some team meetings rather unrealistically try to achieve all these things in one session – no wonder no one ends up being satisfied! Please don’t think that the team meeting has to accomplish all these things. Think of the other avenues you have for the different kinds of interaction that are required.

For example, do you have Friday night drinks, or a regular day when you have morning or afternoon tea together? If so, then that can provide an opportunity for people to let off steam. You can couple that with acknowledging success. One company I know puts up their wins for the week on a whiteboard at their Friday night drinks – this practice began when they were first starting out. Facing some tough times they decided to use this as a way of focusing on some of the positive things that tended to get buried during a difficult period.

In one group I know, everyone comes to work 30 minutes early (not because they’re super-motivated – it’s so they can get a carpark) and this time before work is where they catch up on how things are going in their personal lives, let off steam and develop their informal relationships with each other.

Even if you don’t have this kind of opportunity for informal group dynamics to take place, you could consider having an ‘informal’ meeting every second time you meet, where there is a much more informal agenda.

Or you could allocate a section of the meeting for informal checking in, perhaps at the start for example. There will always be new developments in your organisation and so it’s good if you can keep this on the regular agenda.

As far as team performance goes, if you are reporting monthly, then you could include this as part of your meeting once a month around reporting time, so it doesn’t have to be on every agenda.

The thing with team meetings is to consider the overall flow of your team’s work and how the team meetings can assist in facilitating the group dynamics your team requires to accomplish its work.

I was once engaged to facilitate some change workshops to help an organisation implement new ways of working – what they were calling a new culture – it involved moving to a new building. These workshops were stage one of the change, and were to concentrate on the strategic picture, the vision of the organisation, and inspire them to see need for change, This was preparatory to more detailed workshops that would follow in stage two where the nuts and bolts would be worked through.

The workshops were highly designed affairs, designed in fact by a PR firm and included magnetic boards, glossy handouts with inspirational stories of pioneers, video with a well known comedian, fancy posters and other similar artifacts.

So, guess what the managers wanted to talk about in this workshop full of vision, inspiration, pioneering, and clever artifacts? Laptops – i.e. would they have laptops? Car parks, i.e. would they have car parks. And even, would there be space in the fridge to put their lunches? I kid you not – I couldn’t have made that up.

At the time, I was pleased to hear this stuff because I could hear issues relating to status and identify, which I wanted to explore.

However, the change project team could only hear "irrelevant detail," and was disappointed in the managers who were not supposed to be interested in these things until stage two, when logistics of this nature would be covered in the next series of workshops they had planned. The change project team, who knew the answers to these questions, did not want to talk about these things, which they dismissed as “detail.” I’m sure you can imagine the conversation “Those managers just do not understand the big picture – they’re only concerned about themselves.”

Sound familiar?

The managers were disappointed, feeling they could not get answers to their questions and that the project team were hiding things from them.

The project team was frustrated with me for not keeping it “strategic” enough.

And I was frustrated with the project team for having so much emphasis on the flash artifacts and not recognizing that when one of the General Managers said “Up until now I had not considered the impact of this on my people,” that this was a break through, not something negative, it was not resistance.

We have a problem in our thinking about change projects, which is that so often they are supposed to go according to the grand plan. And this means that after all the elaborate project planning and gantt charts, when things don’t go according to plan, such as when managers are interested now in where they will sit, instead of "strategic" things, project teams don’t have an adequate response.

If, instead, you are paying attention to what is going on NOW and responding to it in a genuine way in a spirit of ‘joint enquiry,’ then you will notice when people are interested in these other things and be able to flex with their needs, answer them and then carry on together.

Look, Ma, no resistance!

I have just discovered the blog of Chris Mowles called Reflexive Practice, who, like me, is exploring organisations as complex responsive processes. Chris and I did our doctorates together and he is now on the faculty of the Complexity and Management Centre at the University of Hertfordshire where we studied together.

Coincidentally, as I have been writing my most recent posts about time seen as the living present (here, here and here), Chris has also been writing about the living present (here) – in his case about how our theories of time affect our meetings.

In his latest blog post, Chris points to how our desire to ‘make good use of the time’ in the meeting can lead to over-planning and attempts to tie things down to the last minute. He makes a good point that it assumes that we can anticipate how things will unfold at a certain time in the future and that our current thinking is adequate for the situation we will encounter when we meet together.

Chris comes to the conclusion that our meetings never unfold in a linear fashion but emerge as we struggle with each other over what we think we are doing and who we are. Skillful discussants then will allow for episodes of reflection, be alert to suggestions and conflict, be tolerant of ambiguity and and have an expectation that important and unplanned things may arise as a consequence.

I have written in a similar vein from the point of view of facilitation that tolerates and encourages this reflection and ambiguity.

Thanks Chris, I am looking forward to reading more of your provocative work.

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! 

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! 

I was pleased she said that, because it reminded me that it wasn’t always that way. I still feel exposed in this area quite often. In the past I’ve been known for my bluntness and for drilling in on things that make others uncomfortable. 

I have worked to develop my skills in this area. One thing that has helped greatly in dealing with tricky situations has been that I have come to see my work with clients as a process of joint enquiry. What I mean by this is that I take the position that the other person has a viewpoint to offer and I have a viewpoint to offer. If they are different, then a discussion about them offers the possibility for a new viewpoint to emerge. And changing viewpoints is the essence of organisational change. 

When you notice others feeling uncomfortable with a line of questioning, or a conversation do you:

a)    back off

b)    drill deeper

c)    comment on the discomfort

d)    other

My natural tendency is to drill deeper,  and while this can sometimes be a good thing, it also can get me into trouble at times.

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.

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.

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?