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

Then the facilitator tests five-finger consensus again. If everyone shows a 5, 4, 3, or 2, the decision is made, and we move ahead. If there are any 1s, there is further discussion, and the originator of the alternative again has the option to make adjustments to the alternative. In the final review, majority rules. The decision is made based on the majority of the participants.

Weighted Score This process seeks to reach consensus by scoring alternatives across a set of criteria. The weighted score approach is most appropriate when there are multiple discrete criteria that need to be assessed in order to evaluate the relative value of the alternatives (Leadership Strategies, 2003). With weighted score, the facilitator steps the participants through this process:

1.Identifying criteria

2.Weighting the criteria—for example, 1 for criteria that are low in importance, 2 for criteria with medium importance, and 4 for criteria with high importance

3.Scoring the alternatives against the criteria—for example, 10 for the most favorable alternative for each criterion, with the other alternatives scored from 1 to 10 relative to the most favorable one

4.Applying the weights by multiplying the score by the criterion weight

5.Summing the weighted scores to arrive at a value for each alternative

Converge This process seeks to reach consensus through a “least change” method. When there are many parties involved and agreement from all parties is required to move forward, the converge technique can address a situation in which a small number of people are not in agreement with the majority (Leadership Strategies, 2003).

In this method, the facilitator asks each person not in agreement, “What is the least amount of change we could make to the most favored alternative for it to be acceptable to you?” Of course, some changes may cause others to disagree with the alternative. The facilitator continues to ask the question, and changes continue to be made until the group converges on a solution that all parties are willing to accept.

CONCLUSION

This chapter has focused on three consensus-building strategies: delineation, strengths and weaknesses, and merge. These techniques can help you move a group past disagreement to creating solutions for moving forward. As always, a facilitator must take care to understand the needs of the group and the nature of the disagreement to apply the appropriate consensus building strategy.

Remember the Italy/beach challenge for my wife and me? These days our favorite vacations are cruises. She gets the different ports of call; I get to sleep late most mornings. Consensus building works.

Christopher Alexander, who for decades has done research in the field of human behavior and well-being, writes: “There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named” (1979, p. 19). He continues, “The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of any person. . . . It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive” (p. 41).

Such moments occur in our visual work with people when the group feels whole and alive. Nobody can pinpoint the quality we experience together, so we refer to it as a quality without a name.

AN ILLUSTRATIVE STORY

OVERVIEW

HISTORY MAPPING

Ancient Origins

Twenty thousand years ago, humans created the first cultic cave paintings, images with which they retained and transported information (Horn, 1998). Images thus existed long before the recording of languages. Between fifteen hundred and three thousand years ago, spoken languages, which often were rich in imagery, were gradually recorded in scripts. Particularly in Egypt and China, ideographic scripts originated with integrated word and picture elements (Horn, 1998).

The ancient world was the birthplace of the spoken language. Until about five hundred years ago in Europe, most written documents (books and scrolls) were skillfully scribed and illustrated by specialists. With the invention of the letterpress, pictures were pushed further into the background as a general means of communication. They retained their significance in the cultural areas of art and religion and gained importance in special fields such as the mapping of discoveries on land and sea maps.

Modern Developments

The development of comics, photography, and film in the nineteenth century and animation, television, and electronic transmission of data in the twentieth opened a whole new world of pictures, inundating our private and public lives, without, however, crushing the predominance of words. What has been scarcely noticed is that a third language has slowly developed that links verbal and visual elements into a visual language.

Visual Language

Robert E. Horn (1998) defines visual language as “the integration of words, images and shapes into a single communication unit [and] the use of words and images or words and shapes to form a single communication unit” (p. 8).

For fifty years, visual techniques to support the work of groups have been developing at different locations independent of one another and with little cross-influence.

Around 1950, the architects William M. Peña and William W. Caudill from CRSS in Houston, Texas (Peña, Parschall, and Kelly, 1987), began capturing the statements of their clients graphically on small cards for analysis, communication, and documentation. The aim of this method was to gather quantitative data for building programs. When it reached Germany in the 1980s, we modified the aim toward gathering of mainly qualitative data to support group processes, and this became the starting point for our spectrum of services.

In 1972, a turbulent development in group graphics began to take place in San Francisco when David Sibbet met with other innovative people. A broad scope of visualizers emerged in which the work of Sibbet, backed up by the philosophy of Arthur Young and the theory of models, occupies a special position. (See Chapter Ten.) With regard to more image-accentuated developments, we mention Nancy Margulies and Nusa Maal, who combine visualization and the technique of mind mapping (Margulies and Maal, 2002; Buzan, 1996).

These developments offer a new language that touches people directly and in their entirety. It can be used straightaway in visualization, and everyone understands it.

BUSINESS WORLD MAPPING

Work

About two hundred years ago, the business world was invented in the form as we know it today: organized work, based on the principle of the division of labor, in increasingly greater units, extending to the point of globalization. It is apparent to many that this has not been good for humans. The Gallup organization, for example, regularly examines job satisfaction and engagement of employees, with alarming results.

As many as two-thirds of employees are dissatisfied to the point of being aggressive. Gallup compares eleven nations worldwide: none can count on more than 27 percent of employees who are loyal, productive, and psychologically committed to their work. The resulting deficit costs for the world economy are staggering. Gallup speaks of $350 billion per annum for the United States alone (“The High Cost of Disengaged Employees,” 2002).

There is something basically wrong in the relationship of people and work—a gap. We do not believe that employees will become satisfied through higher wages or shorter working hours, or even by the occasional exhilarating event at work. We have to understand the demand for another quality of business life.

Birgitt Williams got it right: “There is one WHOLE organization and if we can eliminate the divide, it functions at optimal performance. . . . In a holistic and integrated approach, one pulls together the multi-dimensions of the organization— spiritual, physical, mental and emotional” (e-mail to R. Kuchenmüller Dec. 23, 2003).

Meetings as a Model

Companies around the world conduct 11 million business meetings daily (Horn, 1998). What does it mean when millions of largely dissatisfied people meet and one of their tasks is to diminish dissatisfaction? This absurd situation is the playing field for facilitators. And working with images helps to pinpoint meetings in a holistic sense.

The difference that facilitators can make in this mass of meetings is to slowly change the way people meet with and experience each other.

In preparation for a meeting, sixteen employees were interviewed in advance. Their statements were noted visually on cards, made anonymous, and rearranged according to themes. Their manager arrived to look at the images prior to the meeting. He looked at the images for “leadership behavior” for a particularly long time. When the visualizer inquired curiously, “If somebody had said this to you personally,” he replied loudly, “I would have been furious!!!”

In fact, he did not get angry and was courageous enough to open the meeting using the images, a meeting that turned out to be unusually productive.

It clearly is easier to attack and offend using words than images. Visual language delivers the message directly to the heart.