Schuman S. - The IAF Handbook of Group Facilitation (2005)(en)

most exciting work in which he had been involved during his twenty years with the organization. Several significant recommendations have been made and agreed to by the senior managers of the organization. As one project team member said, “Our key recommendation is quite simple but profound.”

Other significant positive shifts took place throughout the organization. The political entity that directs this organization requested a meeting with the organization’s management to talk about the planning and delivery process. Neither an off-site meeting nor a discussion between these groups has ever occurred during the history of the organization. Employees from different offices (who are geographically separate and report to different divisions) initiated discussions to explore how they can operate more in sync with each other. Most important, a number of issues previously deemed undiscussable were talked about openly.

It is hard to pinpoint the exact cause of many of these initiatives, and I am certainly not claiming that they all stem from the success of this particular meeting. What I am convinced of, though, is that small changes in organizations can produce large effects. Complexity science and the design principles we can derive from it have a lot to offer in generating these small changes.

CONCLUSION

Complexity science offers an exciting new framework to inform facilitation practice. Facilitators can use this thinking to create a new set of design principles for meetings that flow, promote creativity, and encourage new understanding to emerge. An awareness of complexity-based design principles can help facilitators create and choose better processes by deepening their consciousness of how and why certain practices work.

RESOURCES

In addition to the works referenced in the chapter, we recommend the following to practitioners interested in exploring the field:

Allison, M. A. “Enriching Your Practice with Complex Systems Thinking.” OD Practitioner, 1999, 31(3), 11–21.

Arrow, H., McGrath, J., and Berdahl, J. Small Groups as Complex Systems: Formation, Coordination, Development and Adaptation. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2000.

Arthur, W. B. “Increasing Returns and the Two Worlds of Business.” Harvard Business Review, 1996, 74(4), 100–109.

Ashmos, D., Duchon, D., McDaniel, R. R., and Huonker, J. W. “What a Mess! Participation as a Simple Managerial Rule to ‘Complexity’ Organization.” Journal of Management Studies, 2002, 39(2), 189–206.

Dooley, K. “A Complex Adaptive Systems Model of Organizational Change.” Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences, 1997, 1(1), 69.

Olson, E. E., and Eoyang, G. Facilitating Organization Change: Lessons from Complexity Science. New York: Wiley, 2001.

Osborn, A. Applied Imagination: Principles and Procedures of Creative Problem Solving. New York: Scribner, 1957.

Owen, H. “A Brief User’s Guide to Open Space Technology.” N.d. [http://www.openspace world.com/users_guide.htm].

Shaw, P. Changing Conversations in Organizations: A Complexity Approach to Change.

London: Routledge, 2002.

Tower, D. “Creating the Complex Adaptive Organization: A Primer on Complex Adaptive Systems.” OD Practitioner, 2002, 34(3).

facilitating workshops at the NTL Institute. For more than a decade, our mutual learning laboratory has been a strategic planning meeting called “future search.” From scores of these sessions lasting two and a half days, we have evolved an effective practice based on D/I principles from which we have derived a few simple techniques. We have employed these repeatedly in strategic planning and systems design conferences. Dozens of colleagues have adapted our methods to meeting formats of a few hours to several days.

In large, diverse groups, it is not possible to diagnose group needs or provide conceptual frames that every person will understand. Thus, we manage at the group level and make structural interventions. Rather than try to change any one person’s behavior, we seek to enable the whole to become more effective. This way of working has proved especially useful when we count diversity, group cohesion, and commitment as inseparable from good outcomes. The results have been amply documented in many cultures (Weisbord and Janoff, 2000). Although we believe there are many other effective ways to facilitate, this is the way we have found most satisfying.

We define facilitating as a form of leadership that helps work groups increase their cooperation, satisfaction, and productivity. We are talking here about interdependent groups—those where people meet to pursue a goal that none can realize alone. For us, facilitating has three equally essential objectives:

•Designing meetings so that the right people are in the room, they explore every aspect of the task at hand, they discover their common ground, and they accept responsibility for acting.

•Managing meetings so that the task stays front and center. Our key role is helping people contain their discomfort with differences enough to keep working. We get out of the way unless people are at risk of fighting or abandoning the task.

•Managing ourselves by containing our thoughts, feelings, and judgments long enough to allow meeting participants to find their way out of sticky situations with minimum intervention from us.

WHY A PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY?

Having a philosophy and theory of action can be very comforting when you wish, in Rudyard Kipling’s memorable line from his poem “If,”“to keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” We take comfort from having internalized a framework that helps us choose certain procedures and avoid others. Years ago, working with groups of ten or twelve, we invested much energy in diagnosing a group’s needs and prescribing the right corrections. In those years, we died a thousand deaths when people abandoned the task and clashed over differences. We sometimes found ourselves working harder than the people we were facilitating. Leading larger and more diverse groups for the past twenty years, we have had to rethink what we were doing. We found it impossible to foresee every person’s learning needs or to frame people’s outputs in ways every person could accept.

Fortunately, we have had a rich tradition to draw on. The umbrella for our work is biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s general system theory (1960), which has informed the biological and social sciences for half a century. We also see ourselves in the direct line of descent from Kurt Lewin, the “practical theorist” (Marrow, 1977), and Ronald Lippitt, who together with Lewin coined the term group dynamics (Lewin, Lippitt, and White, 1939) and helped found NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Science in 1947. We also count as a key ancestor Wilfred Bion, a founder in 1945 of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (Trist with Murray, 1990), who evolved a parallel theory of group development to NTL’s. We have also adapted to our practice the work of friends and colleagues we have known for years. In this chapter, we introduce a few of them: Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch on D/I theory in organizations, Yvonne Agazarian on subgroups, and John Weir and Joyce Weir on self-differentiation.

A Philosophy of Facilitating

We owe our philosophy of facilitating to the Weirs, who trained thousands of people in self-differentiation workshops over forty years (Weir, 1971). Self-differenti- ation means exploring the many parts of oneself. We resonate to the Weirs’ conviction that all of us do the best we can with what we have every minute of every day. Whatever people are ready, willing, and able to do now is what they are doing. We do our best to work with people the way we find them, not the way we

wish they were. This philosophy has had profound implications for our practice. We no longer mix the teaching of meeting skills with work on consequential matters. We no longer train facilitators to work with small groups in a large group meeting, inadvertently creating multiple centers of dependency. People are capable of managing their own work when they consider it important. Natural leaders abound in every gathering.

We set out to create conditions under which people will do their best using what they already have. This means structuring meetings so that people can bring in their experience, learn from each other, and take responsibility for themselves, their goals, their flip charts, and their results. When we structure a meeting correctly and maintain functional structures throughout, participants do all the rest for themselves.

A Theory of Facilitating

We start with biology, a description of the glue that binds every living thing to every other. A cell is the basic unit of life. At conception, the first cell divides in half, then in half again and again. Groups of cells differentiate, become specialized, and develop into organ systems. Plants and animals become complex entities. As organisms develop, they increasingly integrate their differentiated parts. Our psychological development follows a similar path. From seed to infant to adult—from playpen to boardroom—we learn and grow from a single cell to organisms capable of increasingly more complex tasks. As newborns, we experience the world as an undifferentiated mass. Soon we recognize others outside ourselves. As we mature, we make ever clearer distinctions between our internal states and our environment. The better our ability is to differentiate our feelings, impulses, ideas, and needs from those of others, the better equipped we become to form integrated organizations and communities.

Differentiation, in Webster’s Dictionary, means “to distinguish, classify, define, and separate,” which implies grouping like with like. The word also means “to isolate, exclude, ostracize, and segregate.” Integration means “to make one, harmonize, and blend,” the essence of unity. It also means “to centralize and orchestrate.” In purposeful meetings, we are faced with a variety of people seeking to integrate their stakes for a shared benefit. Our task is helping people differentiate without excluding anyone and integrate without forcing unity.

Organizational Implications

We notice parallels between the way nature spontaneously manages development and the way people choose to manage work groups, task teams, boards, and committees. We can consciously differentiate and integrate roles, functions, goals, and decisions by making choices based on what we are trying to do. Good results are not automatic. Lawrence and Lorsch (1967), in their seminal studies of organizations in various task environments, showed significant differences between more and less successful organizations. The best ones maintained appropriate differences among functions in such areas as goal focus, interpersonal requirements, and time horizons. In such cases, conflict among functions like manufacturing (short feedback loops, moderate interpersonal needs), sales (longer time horizons, high interpersonal needs), and research (long time spans, low interpersonal needs) are inevitable. The greater an organization’s required functional differences are, the greater is the potential for conflict. The best performers accepted conflict as natural and provided useful integrating mechanisms. The worst performers ignored conflicts or reduced differentiation to avoid them, thus frustrating people in all functions.

Task-focused processes largely succeed or fail based on the quality of people’s ability to manage differentiation and integration. Thus, people in integrating roles— project managers, for example—become more critical to success. Skilled integrators learn to validate the range of differences they encounter. They develop a midpoint orientation, seeing the value in a wide spectrum of beliefs and practices, and they create forums in which people can cooperate to reach their goals. We see facilitating, whether by line managers or specialists, as a major integrating role.

PRACTICAL USES OF D/I THEORY

Organizing and Designing Meetings

We always start by matching the goal with the right people. We have never developed enough skill to facilitate our way out of meetings where key people are missing. Who are the right people? That depends on the purpose. For meetings where action is called for, we advocate “the whole system in the room.” This we define as those with authority, resources, expertise, information, and need. We want in the same dialogue those who, if they chose, could act without having to ask permission from anyone not present. Although it is not always possible to have

them, this principle helps our clients know what they are giving up when key people are absent.

Next, we want a meeting agenda that enables all participants to experience the whole issue through one another’s eyes before seeking to work on any aspect. D/I theory tells us that to integrate, we must first differentiate, so we devise a plan where participants can make public their points of view and create a shared picture of the whole that no one had coming in. Only then do we seek to integrate what is learned into a joint action plan.

Three structures describe most of our repertoire. When differentiation is wanted, we have people speaking individually or working in affinity groups. For example, if the task is strategic planning in a school, we want to hear from teachers, administrators, staff, parents, and pupils, all clarifying their respective stakes. Our second structure calls for the same people to work in mixed groups that replicate the whole, giving them an opportunity to integrate their diverse perspectives. We always ask small groups, affinity or mixed, to report to the whole. Our third structure is the large group. Much integrating takes place in large group conversations following small group or individual reports. We use these D/I-based practices to design and manage task-focused meetings for any purpose (see Exhibit 15.1).

Exhibit 15.1

Principles Applicable to Many Kinds of Meetings

Get the “whole system” in the room. The quotation marks imply that we never get everybody. It is possible, though, to have in the same room people with authority, resources, expertise, information, and need. Simply calling such a meeting is often a radical change, making possible many others.

Explore the whole before seeking to fix any part. Each person has a part of the whole. When all have put in what they know, every person has a picture none had coming in, and they can plan together in a shared context.

Put the future and common ground front and center. You cannot chew gum and whistle, so problems and conflicts become information to be shared, not action items.

Invite self-management and personal responsibility for action. Groups are capable of doing a great deal more than they customarily are asked to do. Each time a facilitator does something for a group, he or she deprives others of a chance to be responsible.

Managing Meetings: Applying D/I Theory to Task Groups

Assume that the right people are in the room and the purpose is clear. (Should there be any doubt, we ask people to talk over the goal in small groups and raise their concerns immediately.) Once underway, we focus most attention on enabling every person who has something to say to speak. We ask each person to make an opening comment related to the task. We let people know that we will manage whole group conversations so that anybody who wants to speak can do so in the time available. We suggest that people manage small groups the same way. If a meeting becomes sticky, we ask people to differentiate their views. When all have a sense of where everyone else stands, prospects for integration increase.

Our facilitating methods emerged as we gave up years of more complex interventions. We now focus on a central concern that we believe is the key to managing large groups. We intend to keep the group whole and working together with commitment no matter what tensions are present. When a group knows its goal and knows where others stand, it will go where it needs to go regardless of members’ skills, motives, or idiosyncrasies. When the meeting is structured so that everybody contributes to a view of the whole before anybody tries to fix any part, we have very little to do. We believe our main job is to ask a simple question on rare occasions when a member may be at risk of becoming isolated, usually as the result of saying something others consider impolite, wrong, inappropriate, or divisive. Such incidents, if ignored, will immediately fragment a group and divert it from its task. The intervention goes like this: “Who else feels that way?”

There is a long theoretical rationale for this deceptively simple question that we will get to in a moment. The point is that when we focus on validating differences to keep a group whole, we make very few interventions. When we first realized this, we were startled by the implications. What about those years of pressuring ourselves to know what groups need? Using those diagnostic categories and stages of development? Pressing for hidden assumptions? Surfacing resistance and denial? Reframing statements the way we wished they had been made? At one time, we thought we earned our keep by showing off how insightful we were. Now we earn it by enabling the validation of all views, no matter how deviant, and getting out of the way. When we see what the groups we work with are accomplishing with minimal help from us, we know that this is a path we always wanted to be on.

We believe that group members develop their ability to solve increasingly complex problems as they discover new skills, insights, creative ideas, feelings, or points of view. All of these are potential resources. When a group can discover and contain

its differences (even those some may not initially like) and do this repeatedly, we call it a mature working group. Mature groups can solve both task and process problems, moving forward consciously, reflecting on how they are doing, turning either-or dilemmas into both-and integrations. Our structures serve to maximize each person’s discoveries. We intervene to keep people’s attention off us and on each other and the task at hand. When a mature group gets stuck, it takes very little to keep people working through differences and moving toward common ground. That describes applied D/I theory—when everything is going the way we like best.

Managing Differences: A Theoretical Rationale for Doing Very Little

Alas, rare is the work group that starts out managing itself in a mature way. For millennia, our species has been haunted by difference. Through the ages, people have stereotyped others—from another family, tribe, or village—in an eyeblink. It is our nature to judge people on characteristics we like or despise and to act accordingly. Whether this behavior is innate or learned is beside the point. Think how various societies dichotomize men and women, rich and poor, old and young, fat and thin, light skin and dark, physically able and disabled, short and tall, sick and healthy, housed and homeless, employers and employees—the list is unending. We tend to be emotional, not neutral, about differences. We move toward people who seem similar to us and away from those who do not. We do this unconsciously and nearly always based on the psychological phenomenon of projection.

Projection is the act of unconsciously attributing to others impulses or traits that we like or dislike in ourselves. We may engage in projection when we encounter hidden aspects of ourselves reflected back to us by those around us. “I can’t stand speeders!” says the envious inner-speeder watching a reckless driver whiz by. The process is as natural as breathing and often harmless. It can also be deadly, as anyone who has lived in Ireland, the Middle East, Africa, and inner cities the world over can relate. You need not go to exotic places. The tip of this iceberg can be observed in practically any meeting. Every get-together provides a forum for infinite mutual projections of the best and worst parts of ourselves (Weir, 1971).

That is the situation we find ourselves in each time we run a meeting. No matter what formal structures we have arranged, group members, from the first moment, organize into unconscious, unspoken, stereotypical, invisible subgroups. People have no way of knowing which subgroups they are part of, for they keep most projections to themselves. Every meeting, smooth and orderly to the naked