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3 Preparation and design

If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first hour sharpening the ax. (Abraham Lincoln, US President)

Luck favours the mind that is prepared. (Louis Pasteur, scientist)

In advance

Many, possibly even most, of the problems that lie in wait to discomfit a facilitator are caused by lack of preparation, or the wrong kind of preparation. Here are some typical difficulties:

The event never got off to a proper start. The participants seemed confused about my role. One asked another in a loud whisper, ‘Who’s that woman? What’s she here for?’

I was facilitating an event for a group working in music and the arts. I was challenged 30 minutes in by a participant who wanted to know by what right I was leading the discussion since I clearly knew noth- ing about opera.

(Organization development consultants)

It was supposedly a team-building day. After an hour I noticed some restlessness in the group. Two of the journalists spoke up. One said that he’d thought the meeting was going to end at lunchtime and he had a piece to write so couldn’t stay. The other said he’d thought it was going to be about the relaunch of the sports segment.

(Internal consultant, BBC)

Rogers, Jenny. Facilitating Groups, McGraw-Hill Education, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/trident/detail.action?docID=557107. Created from trident on 2022-01-07 14:24:32.

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My heart sank when I realised we’d got to the end of the morning and had still only dealt with two of the items on our long agenda. The choice then was, hurtle through the afternoon or openly confess to the client and renegotiate – in other words have the conversation we should have had in advance.

(Team coach)

Note: if you are reading this as a manager or meetings-chair, then you are your own client and should go direct to the section headed Designing: basic principles (p. 64).

The case for planning carefully

The purpose of investing time thoughtfully is to prevent any of these common problems occurring. Specifically, it is to uncover the answers to questions like these:

• Who is the real client? • What are the underlying needs? • Where are the ‘elephants’ (p. 8) and what are they? • How is the culture of the organization likely to affect the outcomes of

the event?

• Who in the group really has the power and influence? • What might sabotage this event? • Who must be there – and who should not be there? • What is the true purpose of the event and how achievable is it given

the resources available?

• Can I work with this client and group?

There are several stages that it is vital to go through, usefully described as ‘the consulting cycle’ (see Figure 3.1).

The consulting cycle

It is essential to pay attention to all its phases. The most common mistake made by inexperienced facilitators is to jump from phase 1, ‘gaining entry’ to phase 6, ‘implementing’. When you do this it more or less guarantees failure. This chapter is about the first five phases of this cycle. ‘Delivering’ and ‘evalu- ating’ are the subjects of other chapters.

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Phase 1 Gaining entry

Critical question: are you the right person for the job?

The gaining entry phase is about establishing sufficient trust for the client to work with you and for you to feel that you have whatever the client needs. There are virtually always barriers to gaining entry. If you are an internal con- sultant your clients may believe that you lack the seniority to deal with their group. If you are an external consultant you may have to engage in a pro- longed sales cycle where clients appear reluctant to hire you because you cost real money.

This phase is about establishing your credibility. You will do this by listen- ing carefully to the client’s concerns, talking judiciously about experience with other clients (but without betraying their confidentiality) and clarifying in outline that you are available and interested. Remember that you can refuse the assignment at this stage if it appears unlikely that you can meet the client’s needs.

The gaining entry meeting will also help you establish who the real client is. The real client is the person who is footing any bills, who has the ultimate power to decide on the usefulness of the day and whether or not to implement any of its suggested outcomes. This is not necessarily the same as the person who initially contacts you. So your first question to yourself should always be, ‘Am I talking to the real client?’

Figure 3.1 The seven stages of the consulting cycle

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Phase 2 Contracting

Critical questions: Can we work together? Is what the client wants achievable with the resources available?

The contracting meeting comes down to two main areas: task and relationship. Both are equally important. At the task level, the question is What does the client want to get out of the event? From your point of view, you will have a matching question, What do I as a facilitator believe needs to happen during the event?

At the relationship level, the question for both sides, not often put so bluntly as this, is ‘Can we work together?’

Getting the task clear

Over the years I have been doing this work, I have come to rely on a few important questions for the client at this kind of meeting. If you ask these, you should find that they give you pricelessly valuable information:

What’s the presenting issue here?

What makes you feel that this event is essential?

What makes it an issue right now?

These questions give you some idea of what is on the client’s mind, and will tell you what the symptoms are, not necessarily the underlying causes. The answers may be things such as, ‘People don’t get on very well here’, or ‘We need to agree a new strategy for x or y product’, or ‘This is a new team and we need to take some time to get to know each other’.

Let’s suppose the event goes really well and this problem were solved. What would be happening? What evidence would you have that things were going really well?

This question lifts the client out of the possible gloom of the answer to the first question by concentrating on the positive and gives you vital further information about the scope and depth of the issues.

What’s preventing that ideal from happening now?

The answers here will give you some idea of underlying causes of the problem – they may for instance show that other departments are involved, that people other than those who are going to be present on the day are also important.

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What have you already tried?

It would be unusual for a client not to have tried many of the obvious solutions. Finding out what these have been will prevent you suggesting them and will invariably point you to the more serious underlying issues.

How might you (client) be contributing to this problem? Alternative version of the question: How are you getting in your own way here?

It is axiomatic that all clients, however wonderfully well adapted they appear, will have contributed to the issue in some way, even if it is only through benign neglect. Asking this question, and surfacing the answer, prevents cli- ents from believing that if only everyone else would change, life would be rosy. It is always useful for any of us to see that we are part of both the problem and the solution.

So how do you see the event I am going to be running for you helping to solve these problems?

The answers here give you some idea of whether the client’s hopes for the day are realistic or, as they often are, overambitious. For instance, it is highly unlikely that a team whose personal relationships are viciously antagonistic will end up wildly happy after a single event. If so, then a series of events is more likely to be productive, but the client may say that they can afford neither the time nor the money that this would involve.

What ideas do you have about what should definitely be in the day?

Many clients have much experience of being facilitated and will have a shrewd idea of what will work and what will fail. Some may have favourite techniques that they have seen other facilitators use with success. Listen carefully and measure the client’s ideas against your own judgement about what will work and what will not – including how you rate your own skill and familiarity with any particular techniques that are proposed.

Who should be present?

The most appropriate answer may well have emerged through the replies to the earlier questions. Clients may want a huge number of people, far too many to be successfully facilitated by one person, or they may suggest a group that seems too small because so many of the people who have a stake in the outcome are not going to be there.

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What do I need to know about the individuals who will be coming?

You will be talking to all these people yourself as part of your preparation (see ‘Gathering data’ opposite) but you also need your client’s views on them. This is the place to establish from the client’s perspective who might be challenging, who will be supportive and who might attempt sabotage.

Clarifying and building the relationship

Facilitating an event for clients mean that you share the power. You respect clients for their knowledge of the people and the issues. Clients respect you for your objectivity and expertise as a facilitator. So at the contracting meeting it will be important to discuss issues such as:

• Who makes the final decision on the design of the day? • What reservations do you have about working with me or about the

outcome of the day? (Clients always have some so it is better to get them said out loud.)

• How do you see my role?

At the same time as asking these questions of the client, you will have matters of your own that you will want to raise. The main ones are:

• What you expect from the client. These may be issues such as com- menting on your draft design, booking the room, sending instruc- tions about the venue, and briefing participants.

• What additional information you will want to gather, including interviewing participants.

• The boundaries of confidentiality.

Contracting traps

The main trap is of overpromising. If you really think it is impossible to cover everything the client wants, then the contracting meeting is the place and time to say so – not during or after the event, by which stage it will be far too late. If there is too little time, too little money, or both, then say so. It is rare for clients to hold out for everything they originally ask for when faced with respectful logic about how it is going to be impossible to deliver. For instance, if a manager asks you to facilitate a meeting where 30 people are going to be present, depending on the style of event, you may want to suggest that you need a co-facilitator and that this will cost money. The client may be reluctant

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to accept that this is necessary or may say that as much as they would like to do it, they do not have the budget. Your choices then are:

• Continue to make the case for the extra person and budget and hope that the client caves in.

• Ask if the client has anyone available internally who might make an acceptable extra facilitator.

• Rethink the design of the day so that you can do it alone competently. • Subsidize the extra facilitator yourself or bring in a trainee as an

unpaid helper.

• Wish client good luck and walk away.

The last option may feel like the most difficult, but sometimes it may be better than living with the feelings of dread associated with knowing that you cannot do good work on impossible terms.

There will also be issues about time-scales, fees, if any, and venues. The contracting meeting is the place to deal with them all. For instance, be clear about how important the venue is and surface any reservations about a venue you know to be shabby, noisy or uncomfortable. It is normally unwise, for instance, to hold an important awayday on site. People literally see things from the same old perspective, get distracted by thoughts of their emails and other allegedly important duties and find it difficult to give themselves wholly to the task in hand.

Phase 3 Gathering data

Critical questions at this stage: How can you acquire a reliable view of the issues as seen by the other participants? How can you build rapport with them? How far are the client’s views shared?

If you rely solely on your commissioning client’s view of the issues, you risk creating severe problems on the day: people challenging your role and author- ity, telling you that you have missed the ‘real’ problems, acting out, seeing you as partial because the only person you have spoken to is the boss. As a minimum, aim to talk to a representative sample of the people who will be present. You need your client’s active help to make this happen, fixing dates and times and alerting them to the contact. Ideally, talk to them all, assuming it is no more than a dozen people.

Interviews

You will need a minimum of 30 minutes with each person. If it is a large group then you can do the interviews in pairs or trios, but accept that you will get less

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candour. Make notes, but keep these to the main points. One of the other purposes of such interviews is to build rapport with participants, and you cannot do this if your head is in a notebook all the time. Again, there are a few questions that I have always found to be a useful core to such interviews with follow-up exploration on each one. Assure the person of non-attributable confidentiality; that is, you will not quote any individuals to the client or anyone else. Treat this promise seriously.

• Ask if they have any concerns about the interview and what they know about its purpose. Explain what the role of the facilitator is and what they will see you doing on the day.

• Ask about their role and history in the organization.

Now ask:

• What’s going really well here? Ask for specific examples. • What’s not going so well? Ask for specific examples. • If things were at their best, what would be happening? • What’s preventing things being at their best? • If you could ask an oracle any two questions about the future, what

would they be?

• What would having those answers do for you? • If this team/group/organization played a sport or game, what would it

be good at and bad at? Answers will tell you a great deal about how people see the group. For instance, a team whose members reply that they would be good at chess and bad at football will suggest that people see themselves as intellectual rivals and have difficulty cooperating.

• What are you hoping to get out of the day I will be facilitating for you?

• Is there anything else you would like to tell me? This last question is often the one that GPs call the handle-on-the-door question – the thing the patient has really wanted to say all along and can only muster courage to name at the last moment. Some necessary but uncomfortable truth is often blurted out at this stage.

Aim to include a verbal or written summary of their main themes on the day itself as well as feeding the themes back to your commissioner in advance of the event. Not only is this courteous for the people who have given you their time, but also most people are intensely curious to see where and how their own views fit in with those of others. The report itself is also a further stimulus to change.

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Observation

Observation is a simple technique and often overlooked. This could involve you sitting in on meetings, shadowing the client or touring the client’s area of operations. There are three issues with observation which you need to remember:

• your own biases • your presence will alter whatever it is you are observing • that it takes a very mature client to agree to the process

When you visit the client’s premises, notice everything: what is on the walls, the state of the rooms, how you are greeted and treated. These things will have become invisible to the clients, but they are valuable data for you. Some years ago I was asked to meet a team at a small public sector organization to discuss a project. I arrived in plenty of time only to find that I could not actually get into the building. As I pressed a buzzer outside, I could clearly see a post-room and people working in it. They resolutely ignored me – one actually shrugged his shoulders. The building itself was in the middle of what appeared to be a traffic island and gave every appearance of being a gated community, earnestly devoted to repelling hostile outsiders, despite the stated commitment on their website to easy access for their user groups. Once at last inside the building I was left to find my own way via a labyrinthine route to the meeting room. This told me about their culture and some of their problems just as quickly and vividly as could have been achieved through conversation.

Secondary data

These are already existing records; for example, turnover, absenteeism, annual reports, grievances and minutes of meetings. Expect some bias as all organiza- tions record data selectively. Access to records may also be a problem: ask for your client’s help if you encounter blockages. Remember that there are no such things as objective data: all are filtered by the collecting agent, con- sciously or unconsciously. When a client encourages you to collect data prior to the event, in the end they are paying for your hunches, your experience and your developed intuition. You are not doing an academic study in search of ‘truth’: your aim is to help move the group on in whatever way seems most achievable. Whatever route you take into a group will lead you eventually to the issues that need attention. The impact you can have will, however, depend on you and your style. This is more important than any specific methodology you use.

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Phase 4 Feeding back the data

Critical question at this stage: How far does the client agree with your synthesis of the data?

There is no point in collecting data for the event if you do not feed it back to the client in an actual discussion, not just an email exchange. At the feedback meeting you will need sensitivity that acknowledges the client’s anxiety, defensiveness, fear and hopes. The ultimate aim is for the client group to own the results as part of the preparation for the time you will be spending together. Your data-gathering may contain some shocks for the client. Even where there is nothing that is actually new to them, they may reel from seeing and hearing it from a third party. During the meeting remember that client criticisms and defensiveness are not aimed at you personally. Use descriptive rather than evaluative words: be specific, brief, focused and crisp. Do not hedge the tough bits, do emphasize the positive and agree changes to any report you intend to present to the whole group.

Designing: basic principles

Critical questions at this stage: How can I design an event that meets the client’s and group’s needs and is also interesting, thought-provoking and lively?

The overall aim of this phase is to consider the focus and purpose of the event you will be facilitating. Often it will need completely rethinking at this point, and a further discussion with the client will become an absolute necessity, as the experience of these facilitators makes clear:

I interviewed the senior team individually. Far from seeing the main issue as the quality of customer care at the front end of the organisa- tion, they all saw it as a poisoned culture stemming from the Board and Executive team, of which my client was a member. After some blustering and protesting, all very understandable, my client agreed that we needed a total redesign of the day.

A newly appointed boss wanted me to start the process of team- building. The interviews showed a preoccupation with one member: someone who everyone in the group believed had been the personal pet of the previous boss. This had been hinted at in my previous meeting with the boss but now it was on the table. We had to agree what, if anything, he was prepared to do, as to leave it to hang in the

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air on the day was no longer possible and the nature of the event itself needed a radical re-think.

In designing an event, there are a number of factors it is useful to bear in mind.

How people learn: the learning cycle

The old Chinese saying put it best:

I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.

A facilitated day is built on this assumption – that we learn most readily when we actively participate. The idea of the learning cycle is also helpful. This was first advocated by the US academic David Kolb (1984) and his ideas have been widely accepted since. The assumption is that to learn, we need to experience a four-stage process (see Figure 3.2):

1 experiencing 2 reflecting and observing: thinking about the experience 3 theorizing: seeing where the experience fits in with theoretical ideas 4 applying and problem-solving: testing out the ideas and experiences

and giving them a practical application

These ideas have been given further life by the work of Peter Honey and Alan Mumford (1992), who developed the idea that most of us do indeed learn best when learning encompasses the whole cycle, but that we also will tend to have one or two favoured styles. They developed a learning styles questionnaire to

Figure 3.2 A four-stage learning cycle

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identify which your favourite style or styles are. The categories reflect the Kolb learning cycle. You may be able to identify your own favourite through these descriptions (see Table 3.1).

Activists

Like Dislike Doing and experiencing. Give them a role play or a game and they are into it before you have even finished giving them the instructions. Eager participants in discussion

Sitting around for too long; too much theorizing; anything that looks like slacking of the pace; working alone; reading

Reflectors

Like Dislike Above all time – to think, to watch, to ponder. Want to see how others do things first. Enjoy reading. Need some solitude to absorb ideas

Being hurried; having to do things without preparation; going first; games and role plays where the intention is not crystal clear; crammed timetable; having to spend too much time with other people

Theorists

Like Dislike Ideas and abstract concepts; knowing where something fits in with a general framework; being stretched by new notions; reading; lectures; analysis and logic

Ambiguity; open-endedness; anything that seems frivolous; not being able to question and be sceptical; timetables that lack structure

Pragmatists

Like Dislike Activity that answers the question: what does this mean for me in ‘the real world’?; opportunities to problem-solve; concrete application; useful tools and techniques

Anything that looks woolly or abstract; anything that seems set too far in the future to have meaning now

Table 3.1

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These ideas are helpful. First, your own prejudices and inclinations will affect how you instinctively design the event. For instance, if, like me, your preference is to be ‘activist’, you will want to pack in far too much activity and will not allow for enough time to reflect. This will leave the ‘reflectors’ in your group highly frustrated. You may be drawn to theory – at the expense of the pragmatic – and so on. This, among many other reasons, is why it is an excel- lent idea to design an event with another facilitator as it guards against indulging your own prejudices and preferences.

Second, it is important to remember that all phases of the learning cycle need to be included. You can be flexible about this. You might think of the event as a series of mini learning cycles. For instance, you might have a 40-minute session in a facilitated event with a team where the activities listed in Table 3.2 happen.

This whole phase is relatively short, but each part of the learning cycle has been visited.

Varying the size of the group

Even where you are working with a small number of people, there will be advantages in varying the size of the group.

A group larger than six to eight people inhibits participation. In fact, par- ticipation diminishes sharply with the increase in the number of people. With six people, everyone will speak, even the most reticent. With eight people, two or three people will noticeably speak less. With 12, you will begin to see a

Activity Comments

Team leader gives 10 minute highly structured introduction to possible changes coming up in near future, linking them to changes in the industry

Will appeal to the theorists

Facilitator invites 10 minutes of immediate discussion and reaction

The activists will spring to life

Each member of the group now spends five minutes solo encouraged to jot some ideas down on paper on the theme of ‘how will this affect me?’

An activity for the reflectors

Whole group now discusses: what are the practical implications here for our business?

Will appeal to the pragmatists

Table 3.2

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pattern where the most confident individuals speak a lot more than anyone else. By the time you get to more than 20, discussion may be dominated by two or three people. Varying group size also varies the tone, pace and style of the event and discourages too great a concentration of learning styles of one type. If you are able to influence the numbers attending the event, 12 is a magically useful number of people. You can work comfortably as a whole group, but the group can also split nicely into two sixes, three quartets, four trios or six pairs.

Where you use small groups, think carefully about any reporting back to the larger group. There is nothing more tedious than hearing four more or less identical presentations on the same topic. Avoid this by using some or all these tactics:

• Asking each group in turn for one idea from their group and then keeping on going around the groups in this way until you have exhausted their ideas.

• Giving each group a different brief. • Strictly controlling the reporting back time to five minutes only.

Being realistic about time

In a whole-day facilitated event, you essentially have no more than six blocks of time available because you will be using at least 90 minutes for breaks of one kind or another. Never be tempted to try to stretch the time by lengthening the day or by asking people to go without breaks – the human brain and body simply do not cope well with this and the only result will be droopy or resent- ful people. I have a blank template in my computer with the typical slots shown in a grid. If you have the luxury of planning the day with a co- facilitator, then it can work well to draw out the same grid on a flip chart and to play with ideas by writing them individually on Post-it notes and shifting them around, adding some, removing others until you have a workable design.

Some design ideas There is an inexhaustible store of ideas for use on facilitated events. My aim here is to give a flavour of some of those I come back to time and time again and is not intended to be a comprehensive collection. While some design ideas are multi-purpose, most fall into natural categories that match the flow of an event and that is how I shall deal with them here.

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Warming up

Introduction from the leader/boss

The person who has commissioned you should start the event. Never let this morph into a full-scale speech or lecture where the boss drones on, killing the spirit of the occasion before it has started. Brief your client to spend five min- utes and no more than ten minutes reiterating:

• The purpose of the event: something that combines challenge with optimism. It is important to have an upbeat tone.

• The specific outcomes he/she is looking for. • The importance of everyone contributing their ideas freely. • The role he/she will be playing during the day; that is, as just another

participant.

When you have briefed yourself thoroughly, it is most unlikely that there will be any unpleasant surprises at this point. However, it is still possible. At one such event, despite having interviewed each member of his team, we had an explosion of emotion during the first half hour of an event I was facilitating for a directorate under extreme pressure after an unflattering report from its regu- lator. The moment the director, my client, had finished his five-minute intro, one of his colleagues suddenly dived underneath the table, pulled out a totter- ing in-tray, and shoving it forcefully across the table at his boss shouted, ‘This is what I have to deal with! This is my in-tray and real work! If you think I’ve got time for this rubbishy event, then you deal with it!’

The group froze with horror, but my response was to say quietly that if he really felt he needed to return to the office to deal with this ‘real work’, then he should feel absolutely free to do so, and I waited calmly while he decided what he would do. Naturally, he stayed, though it did not surprise me to hear that several months later he had left the organization on what were described as health grounds.

Creating ground rules

Making a verbal contract with the group is an important way of building trust. It is also the way that you are explicitly granted the informal power to run the event. A contract is a two-way process: what you (group) expect from me and what I (facilitator) expect from you (group).

Some powerful questions here are:

• How do you see my role?

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• What can I most usefully do here? • (Where the group is going to meet over a period of time) How should

my role change as we get further into our meetings?

• What do you definitely not want me to do?

This process surfaces the group’s expectations and needs. Commonly, they will suggest that you challenge time-wasting, control the over-eloquent and offer feedback. It may also be useful to agree a set of ground rules around how the group wants to behave. These ground rules typically have two themes:

1 Values-based behaviour: A typical set of such ground rules might con- cern confidentiality, openness, trust and how the group wants to handle strong emotion.

2 Practicalities: mobiles, pagers, punctuality, whether or not it is all right to leave early, whether, if you are running the session on the group’s premises, it is acceptable to return to offices during breaks.

Where groups are used to ‘being facilitated’ (or ‘awaydayed to death’ as one client described it wearily) this part of the discussion may be treated in a cynical, mechanistic way. If you think this is a risk, draw out from the group what behaviours will go with ‘trust’ and ‘openness’ by asking the following questions.

How would we know we were being ‘open’?

What are the boundaries of the confidentiality?

Words like ‘openness’ and ‘confidentiality’ can trip far too easily off our tongues as participants and we may take them no more seriously than New Year resolutions – broken in the face of the first temptation. In fact, assume that they will be broken. Confidentiality in particular is easily agreed during the event, but it may be difficult to draw realistic boundaries for it in practice. You may also want to explore with the group how they want you to work with them on such issues. For instance, where strong emotion is concerned, you might want to say:

So if strong emotion appears in the discussion, how do you see my role here?

Keep the flip chart of ground rules visible so that when the group reviews its process, you – and they – can assess how far such ground rules were actually observed.

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Your side of the ground rules process

The ground rules conversation is often conducted one-sidedly: a set of sugges- tions or demands from the group. In an adult–adult relationship the process of contracting should also model the partnership. Once you have heard the group’s suggestions, to which you may or may not agree, it is appropriate to make your own, to which the group may or may not agree. These will depend on your own style and on the purpose of the event. My own suggestions all have to do with accelerating the process of creating trust.

Only one at a time: one problem, one person, one issue.

Suggesting this discipline to the group can have considerable impact on its ability to think creatively and to solve problems. What it means is helping the group to refrain from:

• interrupting • drawing attention to their personal agenda • giving advice • telling irrelevant anecdotes (in my department we . . .)

Admitting to mistakes and uncertainties. If you do not understand or are puzzled, be prepared to say so. If you make a mistake, own up and apologize. If you are not getting what you want from the event, say so early and let us discuss it.

Say ‘I’ rather than ‘one’, ‘people’ or ‘we’. This encourages everyone to own their opinions and to speak directly and personally. Model this practice your- self and encourage participants to do the same and to monitor each other. The exception here is that when the group arrives at the action phase, ‘we’ talk is correct because it represents collective will.

Taking risks. Be prepared to go beyond the normal protocols of your meetings.

Acknowledging feelings. It is all right to express feelings whether of anger, grief, joy, exhilaration, pleasure, sadness, disappointment. Feelings are part of the normal spectrum of human existence and acknowledging them is essential to robust problem-solving as well as to learning.

Ice-breakers

You have to start the event somehow, and ice-breakers will help. This is because when we come to an event, most of us still have at least half our minds else- where. We may be preoccupied with work or personal issues, we may be apprehensive about what will happen on the day itself, we may be wondering

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if the whole thing is going to waste our time. Icebreakers help because they give everyone (including you) the chance to become ‘fully present’. They also help by obliging everyone to say something right at the start. The more the chance to speak is delayed, the less likely it is that the more reticent or less confident people will join in. Ice-breakers get people over the Inclusion phase of group development as speedily as possible.

These are the factors that will influence the type of ice-breaker you use:

• the subject and style of the event • the participants and your best hunch about what they will like or

dislike

• how well people already know each other • the time available

Ideally, the best ice-breaker will be in keeping with the rest of the event. So if your event is to have a high level of personal disclosure, then you might want to risk having an intensely personal ice-breaker. If the event has a sober busi- ness focus then something more sober will be required. Inexperienced facilita- tors often overlook the simple mathematics of the size of the group and the time available. So if you have a group of 16 people and your ice-breaker requires each person to speak for two minutes, that will take 32 minutes of your timetable. This might be too much in a short event or it might be an excellent investment in a longer one.

Sample ice-breakers

Here are some ice-breakers that have worked for me:

• Ask people to write down on a scrap of paper the things that may distract them from the event. You then ask them to crumple it up and put it in a cardboard box that will be taped closed all day, promising them that they can retrieve their paper later if they wish. Comments: confronts the distraction issue head on. The physical pro- cess of writing it down and discarding it models the mental process. No one ever wants to retrieve their paper later: why would they? A variant is to ask people to state the same thing verbally.

• Ask people to put themselves into birth-order groups – only children, elder of two, eldest of three, youngest of three or more; younger of two, middle of three or more. The task is: what has your birth order contributed to (your management style/your attitude to being in a team . . .) or whatever the subject of your event is?

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Comment: fun and surprisingly revealing. Gets people mixing in unexpected ways. Not so suitable for events where the focus is on business issues.

• Ask people to seat themselves in the order in which they joined the team/organization. The task: describe in no more than one minute what you noticed about this team/organization in your first week. Comment: an excellent ice-breaker for a day where one of the themes is change and how to manage it. People enjoy this one and it often says a lot about the organization. May take too long if you have a large group.

• Ask people to identify: • three things I want from this day are . . . • three things I can offer on this day . . . • my purpose in being here is . . . Comment: a reliable golden oldie. Not exciting, but works as a way of identifying what people want.

• Ask people to introduce themselves, name, job and what they would like to be doing if they were not doing their current job. Comment: the twist of asking for the third piece of information adds humour. People’s fantasy jobs invariably fall into the following cat- egories: rural escape (breeding puppies, living on an island); running a B&B or pub; travel; creative success (writing plays, novels, having an acting career) or splendid idleness.

• Ask people to find two other people in the room with whom they share a common interest. Encourage them to be creative and to go past the ‘middle-aged man with two children’ kind of response. Comment: only really suitable for groups of strangers; a good way of getting people to mingle at an early stage and produces a lot of good- humoured exchange. Like-minded people seem to have a nose for each other and this is a good way for them to meet sooner rather than later in the day. Negative: can seem contrived and mechanical.

• Tell people they will be swapping wallets. Give them the chance to remove anything that might be too personal or revealing. The task is to tell the rest of the group what they believe their partner’s wallet says about them. Comment: highly revealing. If you doubt this, take a look now at your

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own. A good way of conveying that you are working with the whole person and encouraging frankness. Negative: may be too personal for some people.

• Names ice-breaker: ask people to describe how they came by their name, either first or second name – or both. For example, how their parents came to choose their name, why they have changed, short- ened, lengthened their first or second names. Comment: another highly revealing exercise that is essentially about identity and how we see ourselves. A surprising number of people have changed the names they were born with for a fascinating variety of reasons.

Analysing

This is typically part of the early stages of an event. There are many excellent tools for analysis to help people grapple with what may seem like a plethora of conflicting ideas. These approaches are among the classics.

SWOT analysis

Do not be afraid to use this classic just because many people will have done it before (see Figure 3.3). SWOT stands for: ‘Strengths’ – what are we good at? Weaknesses – what are we bad at? Opportunities – what is around the corner that could be a useful way for us to go? Threats – what could threaten our success? It can be applied to the total situation a group is in, or perhaps more usefully, some particular aspect of it; for instance, marketing, branding, com- petitive positioning and so on.

SWOT analysis can be done as a whole group or in small groups; for instance, with each of four groups looking at one quadrant.

PEST analysis

This is another reliable framework for analysing what the environmental pres- sures on a team or organization (see Figure 3.4). It is particularly valuable for groups that have become too inward-looking and are in danger of forgetting that the most intense pressure for change comes from outside not from inside an organization.

Stage 1 Ask the group to look at political pressures for change in their indus- try/organization as well as economic pressures, social and technological changes.

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What’s going on in your world Politically – locally and nationally?

What are the regulators doing or likely to do? Where are the pressure groups? Who or what are the most significant driving forces here?

Economically – what is the state of the local, national and inter- national economy? Where are the driving forces here?

Environmentally – what is the global, national and local scene? Socially – what is going on; for example, with the birth rate, eth-

nic and cultural composition, and age profile of the local/national population? What are consumers and users likely to want – what are they pressing for now?

Technologically – what are the technological drivers; for example, in pharmaceuticals, media, communications, transport, the Internet and other changes in computer technology?

Figure 3.3 Strengths and weaknesses analysis

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What are driving forces inside the organization – what are the elem- ents that are changing? What is likely to stay the same?

Stage 2 Ask the group to think about the implications of each of these for their work. Again, this can be done as a whole or small group activity.

Stakeholder analysis

This is an effective exercise for groups planning for change and who may have lost touch with meeting the needs of the people who one way or another pay for their existence. This is often true of professional groups used to self- regulation such as doctors or lawyers, or of providers of internal services to organizations.

Stage 1 Ask the group to identify its stakeholders – the people who can influ- ence whether or not they get resources such as money, buildings, time, or

Figure 3.4 Another popular analytical tool

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decide whether or not the group may continue to exist. Normally, the stake- holders will be regulators, staff, clients/customers/users/senior management/ commissioners; media.

Stage 2 Now break the group into smaller groups and ask each to ‘be’ one stakeholder and imagine that it is two years from now. Your client group has been very successful. What has it done specifically that has pleased that stakeholder?

Stage 3 Bring the whole group together to hear a presentation from each stakeholder group.

Stage 4 Facilitate a discussion about what essential objectives come out of this for the group. NB it would be normal for there to be many conflicting object- ives, but reconciling that kind of ambiguity is what organizational life is about.

Scenario planning

In thinking about strategic planning, most organizations assume a ‘default scenario’ or a ‘rear-view window’ model that assumes the future is a continu- ation of the present and therefore predictable by studying current trends. Yet the default scenario is the one least likely to happen because sudden crises occur, combine with other unpredictable events thus producing shocks, sur- prises and discontinuities. Our responses are then dominated by panic and short-term thinking creating the quick fixes that merely generate further problems.

Scenarios are a way of organizing knowledge through stories. Scenario planning helps by looking ahead at uncertainties and untested assumptions. For instance, in the past people have confidently made these assumptions, all of which have proved wrong:

• The Cold War can never end. • The US economy will always be strong. • Home computers will never catch on. • The Labour Party will never be electable. • You cannot stop people smoking in pubs. • Lack of democracy in China will always prevent its economy growing.

Scenarios are stories, not predictions. No one can predict the future. Unlike traditional business forecasting, they do not extrapolate trends from the pres- ent. They present plausible images of the future. The purpose of scenario plan- ning is to help groups think hard about how prepared they are to face the

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shocks and crises of the future: how ready are we now if this future were actually to happen?

The stages are:

1 Identify the big questions: what are the real strategic challenges that face your team/organization? What are the big issues that will help decide your longer-term future?

2 Identify the driving forces using a PEST analysis. 3 What are the certainties?

In every scenario there are some certainties. For instance, you can predict the number of young adults there will be in any given population in 20 years’ time by looking at the birth rate now; most governments in Western countries have a constitutionally limited lifespan.

Look here at:

• slow-changing trends – for instance, in infrastructure, populations, development of resources

• constraints – for example, regulator activity, legal obligations, media pressure

• continuations – major projects that are highly likely to continue; obligations that must be fulfilled, for example, IT commitments

• clashes – for instance, the growth of numbers of older people at the same time as there is a government refusing to provide extra benefits from raising taxes; continuing migration involving young families against the needs of the indigenous population

4 Identify the critical uncertainties.

This involves looking at cherished assumptions and also at worst nightmares. What could cause changes in any of the driving forces? For instance, could public opinion suddenly or slowly change on some topic of critical importance to your enterprise?

Some examples are:

• Could there be a further economic collapse of some kind? What might trigger that?

• Could there be an immediate environmental disaster? • Could there be a serious pandemic? • Could climate change suddenly accelerate?

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• Could terrorist activity affect what we do? • Could there be a significant shift in government policy affecting

what we do?

5 Writing the scenarios.

Now develop three scenarios, a default scenario, an optimistic one and a pessimistic one using the factors you have identified. Write them as stories set five years ahead. Weave the elements together as a narrative and combining many of the uncertainties; for instance, an acceleration in climate change at the same time as immigration numbers increase dramatically along with a severe and prolonged recession. What would happen? Scenarios may be anything from 400 to 2,000 words. They are usually brief enough to be able to take in at a glance.

Finally, give your scenarios vivid and memorable names. 6 Discussing the scenarios: usually done in three separate groups who

then present to each other. In looking at the scenarios:

• What light does it shed on the strategic issue you started with? • How prepared are you to face this future now? • Where would your strengths be? • Where are your critical weaknesses? • What should you do now to prepare for this possible future? • How does this compare with what you are actually doing?

Appreciative Inquiry

Most problem-solving starts with what is going wrong – the word problem is itself the give-away. Paralleling the interest in positive psychology for indi- viduals, there has also been a productive method of working on change by looking at what is going well in a group or organization rather than on what is going badly. The label ‘Appreciative Inquiry’ (AI) was coined in the 1980s by David Cooperrider of Case Western Reserve University (Cooperrider and Whitney, 2005). AI has become a ‘movement’ with enthusiastic disciples, a body of literature and its own training courses; in effect, a whole philosophy of change rather than just a ‘technique’. This is just a brief summary of the over- all approach and is not intended to be a substitute for in-depth reading and training.

The assumptions are:

• In any situation, however dire, there will be something that is going well.

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• When this is analysed, this will have lessons for the future. • Focusing on the positive creates energy for change. • AI assumes that the group has its own answers – it does not need

consultants to tell it what to do.

Enthusiasts for AI usually suggest that you approach it using the ‘5 D’s’:

1 Defining The problem will be defined in a positive way – the language is important. So rather than saying ‘We need to address the culture of blaming and avoiding responsibility in this team’, you would define a positive outcome such as ‘Cre- ate a culture of reward and responsibility in this team’.

2 Discovery What is working well? Where are the success stories? What is motivating people? What stories can you tell about these successes? What conditions are creating this success? What can we learn from them?

3 Dream ‘Dreaming’ is about envisaging the future, based on the analysis that has come from the ‘discovery’ phase. How would we ideally like things to be? How might it look if we could apply all the conditions of the positive lessons to whatever the larger problems are?

4 Design This is the phase of working out the practicalities. To make the ‘dream’ real, what systems, processes, people, tools and skills do we need?

5 Deliver The action-planning and implementation phase.

The following example is from an organization development consultant:

I was brought in to work with a team of 20 people working on a multi- national project in an Asian country. The project was floundering. Interviewing everyone in the team revealed that no one really believed the project had much chance of success. There was a high degree of misery and a long history of difficult relationships between local and European staff all blamed on cultural, religious and lan- guage problems. However, applying the AI approach worked a kind of miracle that I could hardly believe. When I asked what in all this doubt and failure was actually working well, there was indeed one aspect of the project that was going brilliantly. When we asked this

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little group, all working in an outpost office, to tell their stories it was clear that they had engaged a totally different approach from every- one else, working in an essentially flat hierarchy, had talked through the cultural difficulties candidly and had taken a creative slant on the actual project work. We spent a morning just teasing out what these ingredients were. It was the lever to solving the much larger-scale problems of the project as a whole.

Six thinking hats

This idea comes from the work of Edward de Bono (1989). His thesis is that we in the Western world have become undifferentiated and undisciplined in our thinking. He suggests that discussions often disintegrate because we confuse facts with emotion and speculation with facts. We may also find it difficult to disentangle gloom about what might go wrong with creative ideas about how to solve problems. The name of the technique comes from the metaphor of ‘putting on your thinking hat’. De Bono suggests six. They offer a creative framework for looking all around an issue:

1 White hat thinking: what are the objective and verifiable facts? What data is missing? What might we have been assuming to be fact but is not?

2 Red hat thinking: what’s the emotion around this issue? What is our gut response? What are the negative and positive feelings it creates?

3 Yellow hat thinking: what is the most optimistic way of looking at it? What might be the best possible outcome?

4 Black hat thinking: what could go wrong? What are the risks? What is the worst that could happen? Where are the weak spots?

5 Green hat thinking: what are the most creative possibilities here? What madcap ideas might there be around it?

6 Blue hat thinking: thinking about thinking. How can we take a meas- ured and judicious view of the thinking that all the other hats has generated?

This is a flexible, enjoyable technique. At one point in our firm we did actually have sets of six baseball caps in the different colours for use at events. Ways of using the thinking hats approach include:

• Placing labels for the different ‘hats’ on six separate tables, dividing the group into pairs or trios and rotating them around the tables. Instruction: think about whatever the issue or problem is while ‘wear- ing’ the appropriate hat; write your conclusions on a flip chart.

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• Talking through the problem as a whole group, visiting each ‘hat’. • Dividing the group into six small groups and asking each group to

‘wear’ one of the hats and then report back to the whole group.

Here is a manager-owner running a city-centre business in the hospitality sector talking about the benefits of the thinking hats approach:

My business was facing a recession-created crisis. The hotel was doing OK but the restaurant was suffering. There was a general feeling of despair and a lot of unhelpful rumour. We spent the whole morning using the thinking hats. Using the white hat we identified growth in the lunchtime trade but a bigger decline than we had realised in the evenings. We had also tracked trends in room occupancy, showing that weekends were increasingly being undersold. The red hat yielded a lot of fear about possible job losses and a tendency to blame the directors. Black hat thinking saw us imagining further decline or even bankruptcy and also suffering because part of the hotel badly needed refurbishment and there was no way we could afford that. The most interesting hats were yellow and green, especially green where we came up with some amazing ideas. The upshot was that we decided to promote weekend breaks, make a modest investment in gourmet evenings through an informal dining club and also to dramatically expand our lunchtime trade through a ‘street food’ stall, – this one a high volume, low cost operation. This has been very successful. The positive publicity it generated raised morale and the whole thing was huge fun to do.

Five whys

This analytical tool works for problems that are not overcomplex. You start with the presenting problem and work backwards, asking a further ‘why?’ each time. Here is an example, used by a group of doctors:

• Why are we getting too few patients reporting for cervical smear tests after we contact them? Because they dislike the process.

• Why do they dislike the process? Because it is uncomfortable and embarrassing.

• Why do they feel it is uncomfortable and embarrassing? Because it is actu- ally uncomfortable and because they can’t guarantee seeing a woman doctor.

• Why can’t they guarantee seeing a woman doctor? Because our appoint- ment process is too rigid.

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• Why is it too rigid? Because we don’t make it clear in our letters that patients can request this and because we haven’t briefed our receptionists.

This group of doctors actually answered the first question with a number of other suggestions, including: ‘Don’t feel they are at risk’, ‘Don’t like the word cancer’, and so on. They tracked back each of these suggestions using the same technique. The result was a rapid level of agreement about a new range of tactics that significantly increased the numbers of patients attending for the tests.

The Myers–Briggs approach to problem-solving

This is a reliable protocol based on the thinking behind the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) that sorts people into 16 personality types each with its different strengths and blind spots. The MBTI suggests that all of us have pre- ferred ‘mental functions’ that are pairs of opposites. To take in information, you can be either ‘Sensing’, liking the practical, facts, detail and data of the here and now or Intuitive, liking what is intangible, possible, unique and focused on the future. To come to conclusions, you will have a preference either for ‘Thinking’, that is being objective, cool and rational or ‘Feeling’, where the emphasis is on relationships and human values. You do not need to be a trained MBTI practitioner yourself, or to have introduced the instrument to the group, to find it helpful.1 The MBTI suggests that most of us can overuse our preferred style and underuse its opposite. This can lead to lopsided problem-solving. In most groups you will have a mixture of all four prefer- ences. This exercise ensures that a more rounded approach to problem-solving is taken. The preferences are presented as a zigzag and suggests that in solving any problem you will need to ask:

• What are the facts? What are the data? This is the Myers–Briggs Sensing dimension – the realm of what you can see, hear, touch, taste and smell.

• What are the possibilities? If we had no restraints, what would be possible? This is the Myers–Briggs Intuitive dimension: what is intangible, around the corner, creative, in the future; what could happen?

• What are the logical implications of any choices we might make? This is the ‘Thinking’ dimension: the rational, analytical search for object- ive truth.

• What is the likely impact on people of any of our choices? This is the ‘Feeling’ dimension and concerns personal values and the human factors.

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Improving relationships

Many events that need a facilitator are about getting the relationships on a more healthy footing. Again, there are hundreds of approaches here. All of them come down to finding ways for people to listen to each other. Here are just a few.

Perceptions exercise

This is a powerful activity and can provoke strong feelings; for instance, dis- may, defensiveness, relief – the spectrum is wide. It works best where there is known difficulty between groups and also a willingness to begin the process of repair. The activity set out here is enough for a whole day’s work. It cannot be rushed.

Divide the group into its natural constituent parts; for instance, PAs, senior managers; professionals, administrators; customers, suppliers.

Stage 1 Each group has the same task, to discuss:

• What do we think the other group (or groups) think about us? • How do we see them? • What would we ideally like them to think about us? • What would we need to change in order to be seen by them in the way

we would like?

• What would they need to do to improve the relationship between us?

Stage 2 Each group presents its results to the other groups. The other groups can ask questions for clarification – no more at this stage.

Stage 3 Each group resumes a discussion to discuss the other groups’ percep- tions of them. This may be combined with:

Figure 3.5 Using the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator for problem-solving

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Stage 4 Each group decides what it can do at a practical level to meet what the other group or groups need.

Stage 5 Whole group agrees on action.

Prouds and sorries

This is a variant on the perceptions exercise. It can be done in a much shorter time.

Divide the group into constituent parts, as before. Give each group a sin- gle piece of flip chart paper. The task is to identify what they are most proud of as a group and what they are most sorry about; for example, where there have been collective failures or difficulties.

Now ask the group to treat each flip chart like a gallery and to pass slowly around the room reading them.

The final stage is to discuss the implications for each group in turn and then for the whole group.

Figure 3.6

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Feedback exercise

This variant is always done one to one. It works well when the group has been working together for some time but there are many intensely felt personal difficulties. As a facilitator you should emphasize that people make their own choices about how much risk to take in the level of feedback they give to each other. It is also helpful to precede this activity by some structured guidance on how to give and receive feedback.

Explain that everyone in the group is going to give feedback one to one to everyone else in the group.

The time available is strictly limited to four minutes per pair; two minutes each. This is in order to encourage people to get to the point quickly. Apply this time limit strictly.

The format is:

• What I particularly appreciate about you is . . . • What you might consider doing differently is . . . • Things would be better between us if . . .

‘Fishbowls’

Variants on these activities are also possible by using the fishbowl technique. What happens here is that one group sits in an inner circle and discusses a crucial topic, usually involving their perceptions of the other group. In the outer circle, the role is to listen carefully. As facilitator you will facilitate the inner group’s discussion. The whole group then re-forms and the people who were in the outer circle get the chance to ask questions for clarification. The groups now swap over, with those who were in the outer circle taking the inner seats. The same process happens again.

In the discussion that follows, your role is to facilitate the whole group’s understanding of the general themes that have emerged – usually that the views held by each group of the other have a large element of genuine mis- understanding and fantasy. The discussion usually also reveals that there are many simple, practical things that can be done if there is real willingness to change on both sides.

Drawing and other non-verbal techniques

• Give group members a range of art materials that might include pens and paints. You might also consider scissors, paste and magazines to cut up and make into a collage. Reassure them that no artistic ability is required. The brief may be tasks such as to create:

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• a picture that represents both the inner and outer ‘you’ • a heraldic ‘shield’ representing your life and values • something that shows how you lead your life now and how you

would prefer to lead it

• an image that represents how you see yourself in relation to the rest of the team, or how you see the whole team

Example (from a colleague):

I gave everyone a plain brown paper bag of the type used in sandwich bars. There was a pile of glossy mags, some scissors and paste for everyone. Each person decorated the outside of the bag to represent the person they thought the world saw, then a piece of folded paper to go inside, also decorated, this time to represent the more private person. They took it in turns to present this to the group. It was interesting and very moving to listen to what people said. That team has never forgotten the exercise – it cre- ated higher levels of honesty and trust than they had ever achieved before.

• ‘Statues’ This exercise is sometimes called a group sculpt. Each person in turn silently arranges themselves and other people into a living tableau that represents how they see the group; for instance, how close or distant they feel they are from others in the group. Then, with facilita- tor encouragement, they rearrange the group as they would like it to be, followed by a whole-group discussion.

The well-functioning team

This is an effective activity for an intact team, or a group that needs to work together during the life of a project.

Stage 1 Give the group a set or sets of postcards on which you have written the characteristics of an effective team, one characteristic per card. Aim for between 20 and 30. These could be items such as: effective leadership, open- ness; effective communication when together; effective communication when apart; honesty; clarity of purpose; friendliness; conflict dealt with effectively; high standards of work; honest, frequent feedback; performance problems dealt with; good communication with other teams; autonomy; effective dele- gation; praise for work well done; stretching goals; clarity about roles; pride in the team; celebrating success – you can add any of your own personal beliefs about what will make a team work. Now ask the group to choose what they believe to be the most important 10 characteristics.

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Stage 2 Write the chosen characteristics on the flip chart with a 1–5 rating scale and ask the team to rate itself for current effectiveness. Give everyone 10 self-adhesive dots. This gives an immediate visual response – instant democracy.

Stage 3 Facilitate a discussion about how the group can move from where it currently is to where it wants to be.

If you are licensed to use the MBTI, FIRO-B or other psychometric instru- ments, these are also wonderfully safe ways for the group to look at its relation- ships. The training for these instruments normally includes advice on how to use them with groups.

Figure 3.7

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Creativity exercises

Brainstorming

This works well when the group has got stuck, new ideas are needed or there is low energy in the room.

Stage 1 The generation of ideas according to the rules below.

Essentially, you prohibit evaluation so what happens is that new, funny, inspirational, off-the-wall ideas are created, one building on the other. The process should be fast and furious. If it is a small group, get people to stand up and cluster around the flip chart. Explain that:

• everything anyone says is written down on a flip chart with no edit- ing whatsoever

• everyone contributes their ideas • any idea however preposterous is allowed, indeed encouraged • no evaluation whatsoever is permitted at this phase – this includes

funny looks, raised eyebrows and gestures as well as verbal responses

Stage 2 Highlight the most interesting ideas using a different coloured pen. Stage 3 Agree the criteria for evaluating the ideas. Stage 4 Evaluate the ideas against the criteria; for example, by starring some

of them. Stage 5 Agree how to take the ideas forward.

‘Strawman’ discussions

A ‘Strawman’ is an obviously wrongheaded, ill-thought-through and incomplete idea. Its aim is to stimulate creative discussion. This is how it works. The group agrees that it is facing a problem. Common ones would be: declining revenue; an eroded customer base; narrowed profit margins; restless or unhappy staff; and predatory competitors. Groups are formed where they briefly invent ‘solutions’ to the problem. These might be ideas such as:

• give away a substantial number of our services • enter an entirely new market • create a virtual office and sell the real one • turn all staff into freelance associates • reduce prices by 50 per cent

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• appoint staff to the Board; negotiate a management buy-out • make a significant capital investment of some kind

Each idea has a sponsor who makes as good a job as possible of presenting it. The idea is then critiqued with the aim of reducing the strawman to nothing. In doing so, a surprising number of genuinely new and useful ideas will normally emerge because the discussion enables rock-bottom assumptions to be identified and challenged.

Games

A ‘game’ is a puzzle of some kind that has to be solved by the whole group. Games are a way of increasing the energy in the group – the activists love them – but mostly they offer a metaphor for individual and group behaviour. A game may reveal with startling ruthlessness and brevity how a team or group usually behaves, especially when it is trying to solve problems. Most games work by depriving the group of some essential piece of information and by providing an ambiguous and difficult problem to be solved within a time limit. Games work because they offer a low-risk way for the group to see itself – a kind of mirror for how they are. The insights are usually powerful. For instance, I introduced a team I was working with to the game Blindfold Square. The game is simple. All it needs is a blindfold for each person in the group and a long length of rope or clothes line. The group puts on the blindfolds and you tell them that their task is to make a perfect square, held at waist height, out of the rope. The combination of the silliness of the task and the deprivation of all the usual visual clues is what make this a revealing game. In this case, the game showed the following to the group:

• It over-relied on its boss – no one else in the group was able to take a lead.

• Some people stood on the sidelines far too soon and became spectators. • The most junior people in the team were not listened to, even though

they were the ones who came up with the best ideas about solutions.

• The team was sloppy about its quality standards.

This was what happened in the game, but it was also, they all agreed, exactly what happened in real life too.

Another well-known game is Red-Black, also known by a number of other colour names such as Blue-Red. The game is intended to explore issues of values, trust and negotiating style.

The group divides into two and goes to separate rooms. There are 10 rounds.

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The facilitator tells the groups that the only purpose is to end the game with a positive score and explains the scoring system (see Table 3.3).

The facilitator travels between rooms, telling each group how the other has voted and scored and keeping a tally of scores. There is an opportunity to negotiate new rules between rounds 6 and 7 and rounds 9 and 10, when each team nominates and briefs a person to represent them in a discussion run by the facilitator. Although it is obvious that everyone can win simply by ‘play- ing’ black every time, the temptation to dish the other group is usually over- whelming. In the debrief that follows, some helpful questions are:

• How do people feel now this minute? • What happened to principle? • How were minority views handled in the groups? • How far does this represent the way influencing and negotiating are

normally handled both by individuals and by the whole group?

• How realistic is it to suppose that there can always be a win-win outcome?

Making games safe and effective Games are emotionally arousing: do not introduce them if you feel you might be unable to handle what could follow. Participation should be voluntary – if people do not want to take part, let them be observers or absent themselves altogether if they prefer. Always explain the rationale behind introducing a game and devote ample time to the debrief where you ask about links from the game to the everyday life of the group. Take care with the physical and psycho- logical aspects of safety; for instance, if someone tells you that they would feel claustrophobic wearing a blindfold, just accept it. If you are working out of doors, assess the site for safety risks.

There are hundreds of possible games, all with their unique advantages

If the teams play They will earn these scores

Team A Team B Team A Team B

Black Black +3 +3

Red Black +5 −5

Black Red −5 +5

Red Red −5 −5

Table 3.3 The scoring system for the Red–Black game

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and disadvantages. Search the Internet for sites devoted to this topic, or even better, consult other facilitators about games they have found effective.

Decision-making techniques

The normal rhythm of a facilitated event is to start with the warm-up, then proceed to analyse whatever the problems are, then to use creativity tech- niques to expand people’s minds and loosen their attachments to old mindsets and then to narrow down the possibilities through decision-making.

Innumerable problems can arise at this point in the event, such as:

• The group believes it has the power to make a decision when in fact it does not; it is merely being asked to recommend.

• There is no discussion about what processes to use to make the decision.

• The discussion becomes polarized and tetchy. • Groupthink (see Chapter 2, p. 38) takes over and no one voices their

disagreement even if in fact everyone disagrees, so everyone agrees to what no one privately believes is the right thing to do.

• Inappropriate decision-making techniques are employed.

Voting

The oldest decision-making technique in the world is the vote. It is quick and it is apparently decisive. Why, then, is this such a bad idea for a facilitated event? Voting is divisive. The defeated group may feel bitter; the vote does nothing to help them live with the option that has won more votes so it may perpetuate the very divisions it has been designed to prevent. Voting encourages black and white thinking and also a premature close to discussing options, whereas shades of grey may be more useful and lead to more productive thinking. Finally, depending on what type of voting method is used, it can create pres- sure to conform; for instance, if a show of hands is used. If your group insists on voting, you can soften the worst aspects by trying any of these tactics:

• asking the opponents of each option to summarize the view with which they disagree. This forces attention on the positives in the opposite view

• setting up a pair exercise where you do the same as above • introducing a matched time period for each side to put their views • changing the usual 50 : 50 ratio to something different; for example,

60 : 40

• suggesting a recess while people consider their views

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Discussing the process of decision-making

Groups can quickly get into emotionally heated discussions about a decision. One of the main reasons this happens is that they have neglected to discuss how a decision is going to be made. Instead, the focus is on what the decision should be. People endorse one view and then back themselves into the corner of defending it at all costs. You can pre-empt this by insisting on a discussion of how the decision might be made, offering a number of alternatives, such as those that follow here.

Multi-voting This is a technique with many applications. Essentially, you are asking people to spread their preferences among several options. It is more democratic than straight voting and enables people to feel that at least their preferences have had an airing.

Creating criteria This simple tool is significantly underused. Where you can see that a group is likely to have trouble with a decision, ask them to agree criteria for making the decision first. Ask:

What would the features of a good decision be?

The answers may emerge readily, or they may again be the focus of disagree- ment. In this case, consider using a decision grid that allows weighting of the criteria. Table 3.4 shows one such list generated by an architectural practice that was considering what kind of building they needed for new offices. The discussion had generated a high level of emotion and it was clear that there were widely differing assumptions.

The facilitator then handed everyone four sticky dots, enforcing the rule that you could only vote once (i.e. one dot) for your favourites. This clearly revealed that there were four important criteria on which everyone could agree: cost, central location, an aesthetically pleasing building and a good fit with the company’s brand. Happy smiles all round.

The same technique can be used in a forced-choice protocol to decide between confusing or divisive options against the criteria. In this case the question is:

How well in your view do these options stack up against the criteria?

Give everyone a limited range of votes/dots (four in the example here shown

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in Table 3.5) again reinforcing the only-one-vote-per-item rule to stop people using all their votes for a favourite option.

Criterion Votes – one dot each per item!

Cost-neutral

Five-year lease, renewable

Centrally located: easy access to at least three tube lines

Disabled access

Purpose-built block

Natural light everywhere

South facing

Eco-friendly/obviously a ‘green’ building

Aesthetically pleasing

Doesn’t look lavish/over the top

Good fit with our brand: excellent ‘calling card’ for us

Enough space for visiting associates

Potential for remodelling: putting our unique stamp on it

Space for bike park outside

Table 3.4

Options Cost Central location Aesthetics Fit with brand

Keppoch St

Exmouth House

St John’s Building

Table 3.5

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To minimize any problems with using multi-voting, ask group members to vote by filing individually behind the reversed flip chart so that they have privacy, or use Post-it notes as ballot sheets that are handed to you. This pre- vents people being over-influenced by others and preserves anonymity. Some- times multi-voting does not yield a clear result, in which case you might want to narrow the options and repeat the process or else give differing weightings to the dots/votes.

The line-out

Where a group is divided on a decision, there will be a temptation to force closure by suggesting a vote or some other exercise that brings the discussion to what could be a premature end. If you suspect that this might happen, you could try the following:

• Ask one person in the group to pose the question as clearly as possible, setting out the two choices.

• Get the group to stand up. Tell them that there is now an imaginary line from one side of the room to the other. Each end of the line represents one of the two possible choices.

• Ask people to place themselves along the line according to where their own opinion falls. When they have done this, ask each person to say briefly why they have placed themselves where they have.

This exercise usually reveals a wide range of opinions with many people clus- tered in the middle and will normally bring a depth that could have been lacking in the previous discussion.

Force field analysis

Force field analysis is many decades old but none the worse for that. It was developed by Kurt Lewin (p. 28) the early exponent of organizational devel- opment and action research in psychology. The idea is that in any proposed change, the human ability to drag our feet will be visible and should be antici- pated. There will be forces pushing for change and forces pushing against – the forces of resistance. The chances of any proposed change taking root are increased when the forces in favour are more powerful than the forces of resistance (see Figure 3.8).

How to use the tool This structure is helpful:

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1 Describe the present state. 2 Describe the ideal solution. 3 What will happen if you do nothing? 4 List all the forces driving change towards the ideal outcome. 5 List all the forces of resistance. 6 How valid are each of these forces? Which are the most important? 7 Give a score to each of the forces using a numerical scale; for example,

1 = extremely weak and 4 = extremely strong. 8 Write them in on the chart, representing each according to its

strength.

Once you have got the group to identify the items on each side, the discussion is then:

What needs to happen to increase the forces for change?

What needs to happen to reduce the forces of resistance?

How might we inadvertently create new resistance if we strengthen the change forces?

If we did, how would we counter them?

Assessing buy-in

Sometimes it can happen that there is a false consensus. People withhold their objections, only naming them at the very last moment, or worse, when the

Figure 3.8 Force-field analysis

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event is over. This can matter hugely when the stakes are high and the appar- ently consensual decision is undermined later by rumour and backbiting.

To prevent this happening, test the buy-in to important decisions. Ask the group to vote anonymously on how far they personally endorse an important decision, giving their views a percentage (see Figure 3.9). Represent the result so that everyone can see it.

This may reveal that no one gives above 70 per cent to the decision, in which case it may be the wrong decision and the group might want to reconsider its verdict. There may be a wide range of votes – also a sign of trouble. Alternatively, there may be just one or two people who have given low percentages. If so, invite them to identify themselves. When they do, ask them what would need to happen to raise their levels of personal commitment. This will usually result in a productive discussion, often one that changes some relatively small part of the total package but greatly increases the chances of the decision having a positive impact because everyone endorses it.

The action phase Remember that any facilitated event is about change. To have any impact on the issues identified by the group, the event will need to end with an action plan. There are a number of familiar traps here:

• The action phase is rushed – people are already beginning to shuffle with their belongings ready to leave.

• The conscientious people volunteer for most of the tasks; everyone else is strangely silent.

• Leaders of teams get landed with much of it because they care most. • There are far too many items on the list. • The tasks are vague, enormous or both. • There are no penalties for lack of follow-through.

Preparation is once more the main way to forestall any of these pitfalls. As part of your preparation, ask straightforwardly what the group’s track record is of following through. Where there have clearly been problems, investigate the root causes. This is what one of my colleagues found when he asked these questions:

In doing my pre-event interviews, I discovered that there was wide- spread cynicism about whether anything would change, or indeed whether it was possible for anything to change. The general view was that they were suffering from ‘initiative overload’, that all previous awaydays had ended with long ‘to-do’ lists, none of which had ever actually been done. The whole team was in a state of inertia.

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To get around these problems, take a few moments to remind people of these traps. Ask the group for their own ideas on getting around them. Nor- mally, people will suggest making a variety of sensible strategies. For instance, restricting the list of actions to no more than some small number; spreading the load between the group; devising a method of accountability; making the actions specific and measurable; and suggesting short-, medium- and long- term actions.

A familiar grid will normally help this process (see Figure 3.10). Your role in the discussion is to challenge any tendency to overload individuals, to insist on specifics and measurables, to raise the whole question of how progress will be tracked and to ask the question, ‘What might sabotage these action plans?’ Then depending on the answer, ‘What needs to happen to ensure that there really is follow-through?’

Ask who is going to type up and distribute the notes from the day. The quicker these are sent out, the more likely it is that the action plan will actually be implemented.

Large group interventions

The most familiar form of facilitated event is the small group that is planning for some kind of organizational transformation in a traditionally top-down

Figure 3.9 Percentage buy-in to decisions

Figure 3.10 Action planning

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process. Typically, this will be the executive team. But there is another whole genre of events, usually known collectively as large-group interventions. Like so much else in working with groups, the philosophy and practicalities origin- ated with the Tavistock Institute (p. 29). In 1959 Eric Trist and Fred Emery, two Tavistock consultants, ran a five-day conference in Bristol with the newly created Armstrong Siddeley company. It was based on the principle that the group itself would know what was best for its future if it worked on establish- ing a vision of how it wanted to be and then worked on how to close the gap between this desirable future and the present. The number in the group was small. However, the thinking behind it, and the way that thinking was trans- lated into a workable methodology, was the forerunner of all the types of large group events from which we can choose today.

Devotees of large group interventions point to the many reasons that conventional approaches to change do not work: for instance, how they per- petuate the fantasy that leaders can control all the deciding and problem- solving, or that change can and should be based on the cascade principle. This is why conventional staff conferences will tend to have such a stiff, over- produced feel where information is meticulously combed of anything that could seem risky, taboo areas are carefully skirted and participation is kept to a respectful minimum. The whole event reinforces the idea that there are authority figures who know best and that change can be planned.

Large group interventions are based instead on ‘systems thinking’ – the idea that ‘the system’ is broader than just the organization or the immediate team: it will include clients and customers, competitors, regulators, partner organizations and other social networks. Change is assumed to be messy and complex with no easily discernible causes and effects. When you do not take the system into account you may make lopsided and short-range decisions. Large group interventions aim to tackle all these shortcomings by working instead from these principles:

• Change works best when you involve all the stakeholders even if there are areas of violent disagreement among them.

• Long-term change is more likely when the people who will have to implement it are also involved in diagnosing what the problems actu- ally are.

• Even if it is difficult, cooperation works better than domination. • Going with the flow is better than wasting energy on the futile task of

trying to be in control at all times.

• It is more productive to create optimism by working on possibilities and then working backwards to the present than to work ‘cold’ on solving problems.

• People want to take responsibility for anything that affects them.

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Involvement produces superior ideas and is more likely to produce change that sticks.

At the event itself, the principles are also the opposite of the overgroomed, tightly managed traditional conference. At a typical large group intervention the assumptions are that all perceptions are valid and all participants equal. Numbers of participants may be anything from 10 to 2,000. Open, frank dia- logue is the core of the event. People come as volunteers not as representatives. You do not need ice-breakers, presentations or games. It takes an enlightened client to commission one of these events. Clients have to be prepared to acknowledge a counter-intuitive truth that where they do not know ‘the answer’, it is better to let it emerge from listening to others. Indeed, in my own experience, selling the idea of this kind of event to a client who is understand- ably freaked by the apparent risks is harder than anything you will need to do on the day. These approaches have been widely used in communities where there are large numbers of people who would be regarded as marginalized; for instance, an aboriginal group in Australia working to improve access to educa- tion by their own people. Equally, they have been successful in hard-edged commercial environments such as Ikea where junior staff have generated many commercially successful ideas.

Types of large group event

Many different types of large group event have emerged in the last 30 years, all closely related to each other.

Future search This normally involves 60+ people with the aim of replicating ‘the system’ and then ‘bringing it into the room’ for the purpose of strategic planning. It was developed by Marvin Weisbord (Weisbord, 2004; Weisbord and Janoff, 2000). Usually, this is a two-day event with five phases:

1 reviewing the past as a giant timeline where personal, community and organizational events are tracked and charted

2 mapping the present where people sit in their professional or interest groups (typically eight people sitting at round tables) and examine their relationships with the question/organization commissioning the conference

3 creating the ideal scenario, often presented as a skit, this time working in so-called max–mix groups

4 identifying the common ground and creating a shared vision 5 drafting plans to implement the changes that will make the vision real

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Pluses: this is a highly structured framework inside which a great deal of variation is possible. It is ideally suited to any project that needs major impetus at its start; for instance, an organizational merger. Drawing on multiple per- spectives and mixing people constantly from different parts of the system means that barriers are dismantled and common ground is identified.

Minuses: the hard work is in the planning. It needs a dedicated project group that can give it enormous amounts of time. As a facilitator, this is where you will add value. As with all such large-scale events, logistics are complex; for instance, group membership is constantly rotated during the day according to a pre-agreed plan and this needs to be carefully considered in advance and then clearly signposted on the day. Staff time and the time commitment of those attending can also be a deterrent so it needs a zealous and influential in- house sponsor; ideally, someone who has already seen the benefits as a partici- pant elsewhere.

The Conference Model The purpose of the Conference Model is to fast-track the redesign of an organ- ization. Usually, the need for this will have been made apparent by some kind of crisis. Like Future Search, it usually involves between 60 and 80 people for each event, but unlike Future Search, there are four consecutive events, each lasting two days:

1 The visioning conference: this resembles a future search event. 2 The customer/supplier conference where the focus is on how cus-

tomers and suppliers currently see the organization and how they would like it to be in the future.

3 The technical conference where business processes are tracked with a view to simplifying them and improving quality.

4 The organizational design conference that gathers feedback from the other three events and decides on the new design of the organization.

There are many other variants of these events, including Real Time Strategic Change and Simu-Real.

Open Space

This is my personal favourite. Compared to other large group techniques it needs no elaborate planning. I find Open Space exhilarating – and terrifying. Every time I run one I wonder if this will be the time the model doesn’t work – but so far it always has. Open Space was invented by Harrison Owen (1997) in the 1980s when it struck him that people constantly described the coffee breaks and mealtimes as the most productive parts of any meeting. Why

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not, then, turn the whole event into something informal that tackles all the subjects that people really want to talk about? It is a method that is designed to solve complex problems in the shortest possible time and can work with as few as 10 people or as many as several hundred. It may last half a day or as long as three days.

What happens in an Open Space The organization has a perplexing problem, possibly one that is full of conflict and which has defeated everyone. The problem is posed as a set of questions. Typically, this would be: What is the future of X? (the issue). What do we need to do to resolve it? An invitation is sent out to everyone who might care about finding the answers, but attendance is voluntary and no one comes as a ‘repre- sentative’. The group sits in an open circle or two concentric circles. The facili- tator stands in the middle and introduces the ‘rules’. These are:

• Whoever comes is the right people. • Whatever happens are the only things that could happen. • The law of two feet means that if you are not getting what you want,

move on to somewhere else.

• Butterflies and bumblebees are fine: butterflies are people who stand around looking beautiful and may attract others to come and join them. Bumblebees go from group to group bringing ideas with them as they go.

• When it’s over, it’s over.

The facilitator describes what will happen during the rest of the day, then reminds people of the question/problem and invites anyone who has an idea that they feel is related to finding the answer to the problem to come forward, say their name, briefly name the topic and write it on a piece of paper. At first only the most confident come forward but through encouragement, patience and perhaps a little coaxing, eventually many dozens of possible topics are identified. This process may take up to 40 minutes. There is a large blank timetable running along one wall and ‘The Marketplace’ follows. This is where the people who have nominated topics choose a room and stick their piece of paper to the blank space on the timetable. Many topics will be similar so some negotiation takes place at this point. People then take themselves to the rooms and topics that interest them, roaming from room to room if they wish. The groups facilitate themselves and produce a flip chart sheet of recommendations. These in turn are attached to another wall. In a one-day Open Space, about three-quarters of the way through the event, the whole group will reconvene. As facilitator you and your client will have met at some point and identified the main themes. You may then go through the whole

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process again or it may be obvious which the action points are. Project teams are then assembled around these themes – again on a volunteer basis – and discuss next steps. The event ends with a ‘closing ceremony’ where anyone who wishes to speak can walk into the reassembled circle to pick up the ‘talk- ing stick’ (a microphone if it is a large group). All the flip charts are typed up and swiftly distributed to everyone who attended, together with progress reports from the action groups.

Advantages and disadvantages of Open Space The beauty of the Open Space approach is that there is no place for cynicism or acting out. There is a buzz of optimism and energy. If as a participant you have a topic that you feel is vitally important, then you will have your chance to raise it and if you do not take that chance then you have to live with the consequences. You cannot moan that ‘no one ever pays attention to the real issues’. Senior people in the organization can get some salutary shocks. In one organization where I ran an Open Space, the executive team discovered that far from being the heroes to their people that they had imagined, they were widely held in disrespect – and they found out why, then what to do about it. In another company, complacency about customer service was well and truly banished as the most junior staff enthusiastically redesigned the delivery pro- cess, resulting in a 100 per cent increase in profit the following year. One of the most moving Open Space events I have ever facilitated was for a British organ- ization operating in a country that had formerly been part of the Soviet bloc. The question for the event was: What do we need to do to guarantee a successful future for this operation? The event ran in four languages: English, Russian, the language of the country and German. It involved every single person on the staff from the most senior managers to the cooks and drivers. On the second day, several staff approached me shyly to ask whether it was really true that they could choose which groups they went to, and really true that they could wander from group to group. As one of them said, ‘You’ve got to remember that memories of the Soviet era die hard and democracy is still very young here’. In two days this organization had created, or possibly recreated, com- mitment to its overarching purpose, had sketched out a viable business plan, had involved all staff in what it should contain, had planned improvements to its services, had agreed training plans for everyone and had also enjoyed itself hugely.

The disadvantages of Open Space are that it cannot work when senior managers secretly believe they already have the answer to the question. When you describe it to clients, it can sound flaky: ‘Hippy heaven’ as one of my clients snorted in response to my first attempt at persuading her to undertake it. They may feel uneasy about the apparent lack of structure, or tell you than ‘no one’ will come forward with ideas (I have never known this happen). In

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fact, there is an underpinning structure, but it is a process and not a content structure and this can unnerve people who like to feel in control. As a facilita- tor you have to be able to hold on to your courage at the point where the ‘Marketplace’ starts. It can seem chaotic and noisy, but trust the process: it works, and miraculously people quickly go off to their chosen sessions. Follow- up to the event is important, but this is no different from the care you need to take at any other facilitated event to ensure that the energy and impetus of the day is not lost in good intentions that never result in change.

Large group logistics These are powerful approaches to problem-solving. However, they create logis- tical demands. If this is not your forte, you will need to work with someone specializing in these troublesome practicalities. You need at least one very large room – hotel ballrooms or public assembly rooms are ideal. You will need one well-equipped breakout space for every 10 people and enough wall space for substantial numbers of flip charts. With a large group you will need many sets of flip charts, dozens of pens and also microphones. It helps to have several laptops available so that the output of sessions can be keyed in immediately and then emailed to every participant.

There is only space for an introduction to these methods here. For a com- prehensive account of the various large group interventions and how to run them, consult the excellent book by Barbara Bunker and Billie Alban (1996). Even better, beg or blag your way into another facilitator’s session in order to see at first hand how powerful the methodology is.

Note

1 My own book on the MBTI (2007b) gives more information on the 16 person- ality types.

104 FACILITATING GROUPS

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