Stephen Billing’s Blog

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