Observing culture

I had some tantalising opportunities to discretely observe organisational culture in action earlier this week, when I was an in-patient for 36 hours.

Artefacts

My bed had a good view of some double doors, leading to another ward. There was quite a lot of equipment in front of the doors. There was also a woven red cloth barrier (not just flimsy police tape) across the space reading "do not enter except in an emergency ". I could see a matching barrier on the far side of the doors.

Schein's "artefact" exhibit one. (For more on Schein, see: http://www.penny-walker.co.uk/…/a-z-of-csr-change-management)

What about the "observable behaviour"?

Staff regularly ducked under both sets of tape to use the doors. According to their uniforms (and lack of them), this was staff of a range of specialisms and levels. I didn't observe any staff doing so in pairs or groups. One looked slightly shamefaced when they caught my eye. No obvious emergencies were underway.

I observed about a dozen staff ducked under the barrier, at least two making the return journey as well, in the 36 hours I was there: some of the time I was asleep, or away from the ward for tests.

Espoused values

The clear "espoused value" was to not use the doors, with exceptions for emergencies.

Lots of staff were prepared to openly (although perhaps not in sight of other staff) disregard the combination of message and barrier. The barrier had not, however, been removed.

Basic underlying assumptions

I didn't get a chance to ask anyone about what was going on, but I have a few ideas. I'd be interested in your ideas and interpretations!

But as Schein himself was eager to stress, the observer is not the best person to interpret the meaning of the artefacts: people from inside the culture are best placed to do so.

Who are "we"?

When people are collaborating or working in groups, there is sometimes ambiguity about where things (like policy decisions, research briefings, proposals) have come from, and who is speaking for whom.  If you are convening a collaboration (or being a “backbone” organisation) this can be especially sensitive.  Collaborating organisations may think that when you say “we”, you mean “we, the convenor team” when in fact you mean “we, all the collaborating organisations in this collaboration”.  Or vice versa.  This can lead to misunderstanding, tension, anger if people think you are either steam-rollering them or not properly including them.

Who are 'You'?   

In general, think about whether to say “you” or “we”.  When you use "you", there's a very clear divide between yourself and the people you are addressing.  This is often going to be unhelpful in collaboration, as it can reinforce suspiscions that the collaboration is not a coalition of willing equals, but somehow a supplicant or hierarchical relationship.

Who are 'we'?

“We” is clearly more collaborative, BUT the English language is ambiguous here, so watch out!

“We” can mean

‘me and these other people, not including you’ 

(This is technically called ‘exclusive we’, by linguists.)

 Or

‘me and you’ (and maybe some other people).  

(‘Inclusive we’, to linguists.)

If you mean ‘me and you’, but the reader or listener hears ‘me and these other people, not including you’, then there can be misunderstandings.

For this reason, it can be helpful to spell out more clearly who you mean rather than just saying ‘we’.

What might this look like in practice?

These are examples from real work, anonymised.

In a draft detailed facilitation plan for a workshop, the focus question proposed was:

"What can we do to enable collaborative working?”

It was changed to:

“What can managers in our respective organisations do to enable collaborative working?”

The ‘we’ in original question was meant to signify “all of us participating in this session today” but the project group commenting on the plan interpreted it as “the organisers”.  The new wording took out ‘we’ and used a more specific set of words instead.

A draft workshop report contained this paragraph:

“We do not have an already established pot of money for capital programmes that may flow from this project. One opportunity is to align existing spend more effectively to achieve the outcomes we want.”

This was changed to:

“[XXX organisation] does not have an already established pot of money for capital programmes that may flow from this project. One opportunity is to align existing spend more effectively to achieve the outcomes agreed by [YYY collaboration].”

Both uses of ‘we’ were ambiguous.  The first meant ‘The convening organisation’.  The second meant ‘we, the organisations and people involved in agreeing outcomes’.  

The changes make this crystal clear.

Cometh the "our"

 The same ambiguity applies with ‘our’.  For example, when you refer to “our plan” be clear whether you mean “[Organisation XXX]’s plan” or “the plan owned by the organisations collaborating together”. 

Acknowledgements

This post was originally written by Penny Walker, in a slightly different form, for a Learning Bulletin produced by InterAct Networks for the Environment Agency as part of its catchment pilot programme.

For more exciting detail on 'clusivity', including a two-by-two matrix, look here.

 

 

 

 

 

Ritual and joining an established group

Yesterday I was at a family funeral. The rite was one I'm only a little familiar with: enough to follow, but not enough to know what was coming next. It's made me reflect on the rituals - acknowledged and unnoticed - that we perpetuate in groups and professions. So comforting and affirming for those in the know. Provoking anxiety, confusion or ridicule in the newcomer.

There was a written 'order of service', which included the information that no doubt seemed useful to those who wrote it - the things that would be different, or special, about the event. The things that would be the same as they always are, were not included. Which makes sense if you are already part of the group and you know what those things are, and means you are very lost if you are there for the first time.

What do we take the time to explain to people who are new to our way of working? What do we consider so self-evident that we don't think explanation is needed? How do we respond when someone asks or seems lost?

What do we open our minds to when we first join a group? What do we do to show we are interested and curious, yet a bit lost? What do we attack, without having the patience to observe and attempt to understand?

Decisions? Decisions!

This blog post pulls together some resources that I shared at a workshop last week, for people in community organisations wanting to make clear decisions that stick. Groups of volunteers can't be 'managed' in the same that a team in an organisation is managed: consensus and willingness to agree in order to move forward are more precious.  Sometimes, however, that means that decisions aren't clear or don't 'stick' - people come away with different understandings of the decision, or don't think a 'real' decision has been made (just a recommendation, or a nice conversation without a conclusion).  And so it's hard to move things forward.

I flagged up a number of resources that I think groups like this will find useful:

  • Descriptive agendas - that give people a much clearer idea of what to expect from a meeting;
  • Using decision / action grids to record the outputs from a meeting unambiguously;
  • Be clear about the decision-making method (e.g. will it be by consensus, by some voting and majority margin, or one person making the decision following consultation?) and criteria.
  • Understanding who needs to be involved in the run-up to a decision.
  • Taking time to explore options and their pros and cons before asking people to plump for a 'position'.

 

Sustainable Development Goals - what do they mean for your business?

In September 2015, the United Nations agreed a set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals.  Covering everything from gender equality to the ecology of the deep oceans, they form a comprehensive description of the key challenges we face in making sustainable development a reality.

The UN sees businesses as a key player in meeting the goals. Why should business bother? And where do you start?

I'm writing a series of articles for The Environmentalist exploring these questions, and the first one is out today (11th February).  It introduces the goals, and looks in detail at Goal 1 End poverty in all its forms everywhere and Goal 5 Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.

You can access the article, and plenty of other environmental news, here, either sign in with your IEMA login, subscribe or take a free trial.

Alternatively, there's a pdf of it here.

 

InterAct Networks - thank you for a wonderful ride

For over fifteen years, InterAct Networks worked to put stakeholder and public engagement at the heart of public sector decision-making, especially through focusing on capacity-building in the UK public sector.  This work - through training and other ways of helping people learn, and through helping clients thinks about structures, policies and organisational change - helped organisations get better at strategically engaging with their stakeholders to understand their needs and preferences, get better informed, collaboratively design solutions and put them into practice.  Much of that work has been with the Environment Agency, running the largest capacity-building programme of its kind.

History

InterAct Networks was registered as a Limited Liability Partnership in February 2002.

Founding partners Jeff Bishop, Lindsey Colbourne, Richard Harris and Lynn Wetenhall established InterAct Networks to support the development of 'local facilitator networks' of people wanting to develop facilitation skills from a range of organisations in a locality.

These geographically based networks enabled cross organisational learning and support.  Networks were established across the UK, ranging from the Highlands and Islands to Surrey, Gwynedd to Gloucestershire. InterAct Networks provided the initial facilitation training to the networks, and supported them in establishing ongoing learning platforms. We also helped to network the networks, sharing resources and insights across the UK. Although some networks (e.g. Gwynedd) continue today, others found the lack of a 'lead' organisation meant that the network eventually lost direction.

In 2006, following a review of the effectiveness of the geographical networks, InterAct Networks began working with clients to build their organisational capacity to engage with stakeholders (including communities and the public) in decision making.  This work included designing and delivering training (and other learning interventions), as well as setting up and supporting internal networks of engagement mentors and facilitators.  We have since worked with the Countryside Council for Wales, the UK Sustainable Development Commission, Defra, DECC (via Sciencewise-ERC see p10), Natural England and primarily the Environment Agency in England and Wales.

Through our work with these organisations InterAct Networks led the field in:

  • diagnostics

  • guidance

  • tools and materials

  • new forms of organisational learning.

After Richard and Jeff left, Penny Walker joined Lindsey and Lynn as a partner in 2011, and InterAct Networks became limited company in 2012.  In 2014, Lynn Wetenhall retired as a Director.  

Some insights into building organisational capacity

Through our work with clients, especially the Environment Agency, we have learnt a lot about what works if you want to build an organisation's capacity to engage stakeholders and to collaborate.  There is, of course, much more than can be summarised here.  Here are just five key insights:

  • Tailor the intervention to the part of the organisation you are working with.
  • For strategic, conceptual 'content', classroom training can rarely do more than raise awareness.
  • Use trainers who are practitioners.
  • Begin with the change you want to see.
  • Learning interventions are only a small part of building capacity.

Tailor the intervention

An organisation which wants to improve its engagement with stakeholders and the public in the development and delivery of public policy needs capacity at organisational, team and individual levels.

This diagram, originated by Jeff Bishop, shows a cross-organisational framework, helping you to understand the levels and their roles (vision and direction; process management; delivery).  If capacity building remains in the process management and delivery zones, stakeholder and public engagement will be limited to pockets of good practice. 

Classroom training will raise awareness of tools

There are half a dozen brilliant tools, frameworks and concepts which are enormously helpful in planning and delivering stakeholder and public engagement.  Classroom training (and online self-guided learning) can do the job of raising awareness of these.  But translating knowledge into lived practice - which is the goal - needs ongoing on-the-job interventions like mentoring, team learning or action learning sets.  Modelling by someone who knows how to use the tools, support in using them - however inexpertly at first - and reinforcement of their usefulness.  Reflection on how they were used and the impact they had. 

Use trainers who are practitioners

People who are experienced and skillful in planning and delivering stakeholder and public engagement, and who are also experienced and skillful in designing and delivering learning interventions, make absolutely the best capacity-builders. They have credibility and a wealth of examples, they understand why the frameworks or skills which are being taught are so powerful. They understand from practice how they can be flexed and when it's a bad idea to move away from the ideal. We were enormously privileged to have a great team of practitioner-trainers to work with as part of the wider InterAct Networks family.

Begin with the change you want to see

The way to identify the "learning intervention" needed, is to begin by asking "what does the organisation need to do differently, or more of, to achieve its goals?", focusing on whatever the key challenge is that the capacity building needs to address.  Once that is clear (and it may take a 'commissioning group' or quite a lot of participative research to answer that question), ask "what do (which) people need to do differently, or more of?".  Having identified a target group of people, and the improvements they need to make, ask "what do these people need to learn (knowledge, skills) in order to make those improvements?".  At this stage, it's also useful to ask what else they need to help them make the improvements (permission, budget, resources, changes to policies etc). Finally, ask "what are the most effective learning interventions to build that knowledge and those skills for these people?".  Classroom training is only one solution, and often not the best one. 

Learning interventions are (only) part of the story

Sometimes the capacity that needs building is skills and knowledge - things you can learn. So learning interventions (training, coaching, mentoring etc) are appropriate responses. Sometimes the capacity "gap" is about incentives, policies, processes or less tangible cultural things.  In which case other interventions will be needed.  The change journey needs exquisite awareness of what 'good' looks like, what people are doing and the impact it's having, what the progress and stuckness is.  Being able to share observations and insights as a team (made up of both clients and consultants) is invaluable.

The most useful concepts and frameworks

Over the years, some concepts and frameworks emerged as the most useful in helping people to see stakeholder engagement, collaboration and participation in a new light and turn that enlightenment into a practical approach.

I've blogged about some of these elsewhere on this site: follow the links.

  • What's up for grabs?  What's fixed, open or negotiable.
  • Asking questions in order to uncover latent consensus - the PIN concept.
  • How much engagement? Depending on the context for your decision, project or programme, different intensities of engagement are appropriate.  This tool helps you decide.
  • Is collaboration appropriate for this desired outcome? This matrix takes the 'outcome' that you want to achieve as a starting point, and helps you see whether collaborating with others will help you achieve it.
  • Engagement aims: transmit, receive and collaborate.  Sometimes known as the Public Engagement Triangle, this way of understanding "engagement aims" was developed originally by Lindsey Colbourne as part of her work with the Sciencewise-ERC, for the Science for All Follow Up Group.
  • Who shall we engage and how intensely? (stakeholder identification and mapping)

Three-day facilitation training

As part of this wider suite of strategic and skills-based capacity building, InterAct Networks ran dozens of three-day facilitation skills training courses and helped the Environment Agency to set up an internal facilitator network so that quasi-third parties can facilitate meetings as part of public and stakeholder engagement.  The facilitator network often works with external independent facilitators, contracted by the Environment Agency for bigger, more complex or higher-conflict work. This facilitation course is now under the stewardship of 3KQ.

More reports and resources

Here are some other reports and resources developed by the InterAct Networks team, sometimes while wearing other hats.

Evaluation of the use of Working with Others - Building Trust for the Shaldon Flood Risk Project, Straw E. and Colbourne, L., March 2009.

Departmental Dialogue Index - developed by Lindsey Colbourne for Sciencewise.

Doing an organisational stocktake.

Organisational Learning and Change for Public Engagement, Colbourne, L., 2010, for NCCPE and The Science for All group, as part of The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS)’ Science and Society programme.

Mainstreaming collaboration with communities and stakeholders for FCERM, Colbourne, L., 2009 for Defra and the Environment Agency.

Thank you for a wonderful ride

In 2015, Lindsey and Penny decided to close the company, in order to pursue other interests.  Lindsey's amazing art work can be seen here.  Penny continues to help clients get better at stakeholder engagement, including through being an Associate of 3KQ, which has taken ownership of the core facilitation training course that InterAct Networks developed and has honed over the years. The Environment Agency continues to espouse its "Working with Others" approach, with great guidance and passion from Dr. Cath Brooks and others. Colleagues and collaborators in the work with the Environment Agency included Involve and Collingwood Environmental Planning, as well as Helena Poldervaart who led on a range of Effective Conversations courses. We hope that we have left a legacy of hundreds of people who understand and are committed to asking great questions and listening really well to the communities and interests they serve, for the good of us all.

 

Facilitation and justice

I’m going to be thinking a lot about justice over the next few months, as it’s this quarter's theme at the weekly meeting of like-minded locals that I go to, at Newington Green's Unitarian chapel New Unity.

Today, we heard an extract from a sermon by Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, which was picked up in later years by Martin Luther King Jr and Barack Obama. 

“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight, I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”

And we reflected on what we can each do, to move us further along that arc.  More words from religious sources, this time in the Jewish tradition (Rabbi Tarfon):

"It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work [of perfecting the world], but neither are you at liberty to desist from it" 

What does this mean for facilitators?

What is the justice that we can seek to advance, in our work?

When the content is 'just', or not

We may choose, or be lucky enough, to work with groups whose content concerns what we consider to be justice.  Whether this is structural and social justice, questions of inter-generational justice of the kind that climate change throws up; or justice in the realm of victims and perpetrators and the criminal law; or justice as right relationship and fair dealings between people in dispute with each other. 

Or we may find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of helping groups get better at doing something we don’t entirely agree with – their ideas about fairness and right action may be different to ours.  We may be faced with hard choices at this point – time to remember our mandate! Did we come to the group to serve it as its facilitator, or were we contracted for some other role (mediator, arbitrator, content expert, trainer...)?

But in this post I’m interested in how ‘justice’ manifests in our process, as content-neutral facilitators.

'Just' process

There’s justice as fairness / equality, and there’s justice as getting some kind of outcome that is considered to be ‘deserved’. 

And when we look at equality, there’s equality of opportunity and equality of outcome.  And when we look at inequality, there’s systemic or structural inequality (manifested as patterns of unequal outcome for e.g. women, people of colour or marginalised ethnicity, people with disabilities, people with non-straight, non-cis sexuality and gender, people with fewer resources or unfavoured class status) as well as what might be going on in the room, in individual conversations and transactions.

I’d argue that underpinning our entire profession is the assumption that it is better (more just) for people’s truth to be heard than not.

A few aspects came immediately to mind:  the opportunity to have your say and be listened to with respect; power balancing so that those who are habitually dominant are not privileged in the conversation; ground rules or working agreements which reinforce a culture of openness and listening; reflecting back to the group when individuals or types of individual are being heard more or less than others.

Gently stretching our mandate

I think there are some greyer areas, where we can gently exercise our mandate more actively in pursuit of ‘justice’. 

Asking the client about the values or principles which they want to see manifested in the conversation and conclusions might prompt them to consider the subject matter through a lens that might otherwise remain unused. 

Asking for clarity on the rationale for who gets invited to be part of the conversation, and whether the rationale has been applied objectively, can help to bring in marginalised voices.  I write more about stakeholder identification and mapping here.

Setting aside time in the agenda or process for the group to explicitly consider its criteria for decisions gives an opportunity for assumptions to be shared and questioned, including assumptions about whose interests need to be considered.  Helping the group to understand the different decision-making methods (single decision-maker, majority decisions, vetoes, consensus) before they agree which to use brings unspoken assumptions about fairness and power to conscious attention. There’s more on that here.

Knowing our own prejudices

We need to be very aware of our own prejudices: who do we marginalise, dismiss or consider to be 'other'?  Where might we over-compensate, and swing the pendulum too far?  When do we judge the conversation and the points being made, according to our own (flawed, personal, partial) standards of justice?

Working in teams, especially diverse teams, can help us see our own blind spots.

 

The morning after the night before - debriefing events

A lot of projects have been completed in the last couple of weeks, so I've been encouraging clients to have debriefing conversations.

Although I always include some kind of debrief in my costings, not all clients find the time to take up this opportunity.  That's such a shame!  We can learn something about how to bring people together to have better conversations, every time we do it.

Structuring the debrief

I've been using a simple three question structure:

  • What went well?
  • What went less well?
  • What would you do differently, or more of, next time?

This works in face to face debriefing, telecons and can even form a useful way of prompting a debriefing conversation that takes place in writing: in some kind of joint cyberplace, or by email.

If we haven't already had a conversation about immediate next steps, then I'll add this fourth question:

  • What do we need to do next?

Referring back to the aims

Since, for me, the aims are the starting point for the design process, they should also be the starting point for the debriefing conversation.  To what extent did we meet our aims?  What else might the client team need to do in next weeks and months, to get closer to meeting the aims?

Evidence to draw on

It's really helpful for the team to have access to whatever the participants have fed back about how the process or event worked for them.  Sometimes we use paper feedback forms in the room, sometimes an electronic survey after the event.  Quantitative and qualitative reports based on this feedback can help people compare their intuitive judgements against what participants have said. 

In other situations, we make time in the process for participants to have their own conversation about how things have gone.  A favourite technique is to post up a flip with an evaluation question like "to what extent did we meet our aims?".  The scale is drawn on, and labelled "not at all" to "completely".  Participants use dots to show their response to the question, and then we discuss the result.  I often also post up flips headed "what helped?" and "what got in the way?".  People can write their responses directly on to the flips.  This is particularly useful when a group will be meeting together again, and can take more and more responsibility for reflecting on and improving its ways of working effectively.

What's been learnt?

Some of the unexpected things to have come out of recent debriefs:

  • The things that actually get done may be more important than the stated aims: one workshop only partially met its explicit aims to develop consensus on topic X, but exceeded client expectations in building better working relationships, making it easier to talk later about topic Y.
  • What people write in their questionnaire responses can be quite different to the things you heard from one or two louder voices on the day.
  • A debriefing conversation can be a good way of briefing a new team member.

And the obvious can be reinforced too: clarity on aims really helps, thinking about preparation and giving people time to prepare really helps, allowing and enabling participation really helps, good food really helps!

 

Magic whiteboard - you never forget your first time

So first of all I have to get this off my chest: a big GRRRRR! to venues which don't let you post up paper using blu-tack or white tack. Especially those which don’t have alternatives like exhibition boards freely available.  You are making it much harder for me to provide a service. 

Too often, as facilitators, we don't get the choice to avoid using venues like this because the client hasn't involved us early enough in conversations about what kind of venue is suitable.  There's more on venues here.

But, a couple of weeks ago, this annoying situation meant that I got to use magic whiteboard for the first time.

Magic!

In case you're not familiar with magic whiteboard... it is thin, flexible sheets of plastic - think 'plastic paper' - that come on a perforated roll like giant, unabsorbent loo paper.  You tear off a sheet and place it against a flat, smooth wall.  And it stays there, adhering through the magic (physics) of static electricity.  You can write on it with whiteboard pens, and wipe them off to reuse the sheets. You can also stick paper on, again using the power of static.

Practicing and preparing

This was a big, important workshop for a high-profile client, so I wanted everything to go without a hitch.  So I practiced ahead of time in my office. 

I wanted to find out how long the sheets would stay up. The answer is, two weeks and counting.  Will it also stay up reliably with paper clinging on?  Yes for A4 sheets and post-its, not with flip chart paper. 

I wondered how well the ink would show up.  I practiced with a couple of types of whiteboard pen, and found Pilot's Wyteboard Board Master are bright and dark enough. (Added bonus - you can get refills for the ink. See here for other adventures in refilling pens.) Other kinds of pen were clearly too pale to be of any use.

I wondered if I could prepare complex graphics and instructions ahead of time, and bring them with me.  I do this regularly for workshops, to save time on the day. But no, the ink smudges when the sheets are rolled or folder. Unsurprising, as part of the point of whiteboard pens is that they can be cleaned off the surface.  I may test this again with permanent markers, if the need arises.

How did it work?

In short, very well! 

The magic whiteboard was used for a large 'wall' for the open space space / time grid. We had three time slots and thirteen spaces.  Two rows of seven sheets were hung portrait style, with session times and space labels written on paper and stuck on.  Over the course of the organising plenary, proposals for sessions, written on A4 paper, were added.  Then people came and signed up to sessions, and the paper and magic whiteboard sheets clung to the wall without any hint of falling down. 

 

So yes, I'm hanging on to the rest of the roll, and will be using it again if I need to.

Do you #Dare?

The rather fabulous #DareConf is back in London next month.  It's taking place at the Arcola Theatre, which is properly local to me and a wonderful eco-building (think solar panels, wood-fired heating, DC microgrids - eh?!) and community space in its own right. 

So I was really happy that my friend and collaborator Jonathan Kahn invited me to do a session with him at #DareConf 2015.  We'll be in conversation, exploring what a facilitator can do to help a group find shared goals by discovering underlying needs.  Jonathan is really interested in power - how we wield it, how we give it up.  His facilitation style owes a lot to non-violent communication, and I'm learning loads from talking with him about the challenges and options when working in groups. 

(Regular readers will know that I'm really interested in anxiety and fear - how we display it and what we do to manage it.) 

This is a return visit for me, because I had fun sharing ideas on finding consensus at #DareMini last year. The live webcast was a new experience and means that people who weren't there can still check out "Stop assuming, start asking questions: how to turn conflict into collaboration".

#DareConf grew out of Jonathan's background in the digital profession and styles itself "people skills for digital workers".  Other contributors are firmly from this field: Rifa Thorpe-Tracey is a freelance digital project manager and organises SheSays BrightonLaura Morgan is Head of Product at Comic Relief (no, I'm not sure either).  And Holly Burns is a content strategist at Instagram, which I know is cool because my daughters (who don't do twitter or blogs) use it regularly. Although possibly not as cool as snapchat.

So as you can see, although I'll be hugely out of my depth digitally-speaking (plenty of opportunity for anxiety) I will at least be a local (plenty of opportunity for power) who knows which bus to catch and that people should pop round the corner to Dalston Eastern Curve Garden for a spot of bliss when we're done.

So if you're one of my neighbours - or even if you're not - do check out #DareConf.  Early bird discount until 7th September.

 

 

Some lessons from Citizens Juries enquiring into onshore wind in Scotland

I've been reading "Involving communities in deliberation: A study of 3 citizens’ juries on onshore wind farms in Scotland" by Dr. Jennifer Roberts (University of Strathclyde) and Dr. Oliver Escobar (University of Edinburgh), published in May 2015.

This is a long, detailed report with lots of great facilitation and public participation geekery in it.  I've picked out some things that stood out for me and that I'm able to contrast or build on from my own (limited) experience of facilitating a Citizens' Jury.  But there are plenty more insights so do read it for yourself.

I've stuck to points about the Citizen Jury process - if you're looking for insights into onshore wind in Scotland, you won't find them in this blog post!

What are Citizens' Juries for?

This report takes as an underlying assumption that its focus - and a key purpose of deliberation - is learning and opinion change, which will then influence the policies and decisions of others.  The jury is not seen as "an actual decision making process" p 19

"Then ... the organisers feed the outputs into the relevant policy and/or decision making processes." p4

In the test of a Citizens’ Jury that I helped run for NHS Citizen, there was quite a different mandate being piloted.  The idea is that when the Citizens’ Jury is run ‘for real’ in NHS Citizen, it will decide the agenda items for a forthcoming Board Meeting of NHS England. 

This is a critical distinction, and anyone commissioning a Citizens’ Jury needs to be very clear what the Jury is empowered to decide (if anything) and what it is being asked for its views, opinions or preferences on.  In the latter case, the Citizens’ Jury becomes essentially a sophisticated form of consultation. 

This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it needs to be very clear from the start which type of involvement is being sought.

Having confidence in the Citizens’ Jury process

To be a useful consultant mechanism, stakeholders and decision-makers need to have confidence in the Citizens’ Jury process.  This applies even more strongly when the Jury has decision-making powers. 

The organisers and commissioners need to consider how to ensure confidence in a range of things:

  • the selection of jurors and witnesses,
  • the design of the process (including the questions jurors are invited to consider and the scope of the conversations),
  • the facilitation of conversations,
  • the record made of conversations and in particular decisions or recommendation,

The juries under consideration in this report benefited from a Stewarding Board.  This type of group is sometimes called a steering group or oversight group. It’s job is to ensure the actual and perceived independence of the process, by ensuring that it is acceptable to parties with quite difference agendas and perspectives.  If they can agree that it’s fair, then it probably is.  Chapter 3 of the report looks at this importance of the Stewarding Board, its composition and the challenging disagreements it needed to resolve in this process.

In our NHS Citizen test of the Citizens’ Jury concept, we didn’t have an equivalent structure, although we did seek advice and feedback from the wider NHS Citizen community (for example see this blog post and the comment thread) as well as from our witnesses, evaluators with experience of Citizens’ Juries. We also drew on our own insights and judgements as independent convenors and facilitators.  My recommendation is that there be a steering group of some kind for future Citizens’ Juries within NHS Citizen.

What role for campaigners and activists?

The report contains some interesting reflections on the relationship between deliberative conversations in ‘mini publics’ and citizens who have chosen to become better informed and more active on an issue to the extent of becoming activists or campaigners.  (Mini public is an umbrella term for any kind of “forum composed of citizens who have been randomly selected to reflect the range of demographic and attitudinal characteristics from the broader population – e.g. age, gender, income, opinion, etc.” pp3-4)

The report talks about a key feature of Citizens’ Juries being that they

“...use random selection to ensure diversity and thus “reduce the influence of elites, interest advocates and the ‘incensed and articulate’”

(The embedded quote is from Carolyn Hendriks’ 2011. The politics of public deliberation: citizen engagement and interest advocacy, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.)

So what is the role of the incensed and the articulate in a Citizens’ Jury?  The detail of this would be decided by the steering group or equivalent, but broadly there are two roles outlined in the report: being a member of the steering group and thus helping to ensure confidence in the process; and being a witness, helping the jurors to see multiple aspects of the problem they are considering.  See pp 239-240 for more on this.

Depending on the scope of the questions the Citizens’ Jury is being asked to deliberate, this could mean a very large steering group or set of witnesses.  The latter would increase the length of the jury process considerably, which makes scoping the questions a pragmatic as well as a principled decision.

The project ran from April 2013 to May 2015.  You can read the full report here.

Thanks very much to Clive Mitchell of Involve who tipped me off about this report.

See also my reflections on the use of webcasting for the NHS Citizen Citizens' Jury test.

How to facilitate when you’re the expert: podcast conversation with Jonathan Kahn

In this podcast with my friend and colleague Jonathan Kahn, we discuss the challenge of facilitating discussions when you’re the expert. Jonathan is a digital expert, founder of Together London, and organised #dareconf mini last year where I presented. 

You can listen to the podcast, download the MP3 file, or read the transcript.

Transcript

Jonathan: This is Jonathan Kahn. I’m the founder of Together London, where I organize events about the people side of digital work.

Penny: My name is Penny Walker. I'm an independent facilitator, specializing in organizational change, stakeholder engagement and particularly, sustainable development. Today we’re going to be talking about facilitation.

Jonathan: What we’re going to do is we decided that we come from two different types of work. I work in digital, making websites and apps and that kind of thing, and Penny works in sustainability.

We thought it would be interesting to talk about some scenarios that we found in our work that have been challenging, and to hear the other person’s perspective on similar situations from the other industry, and ideas for dealing with that.

We tossed a coin, and Penny won. So Penny is going to be bringing her scenario to the discussion today.

Penny: Thanks, Jonathan. This is something that comes up for me very often in my work.

I’m an independent facilitator. I’m brought in to help clients with different kinds of conversations that they need to have. Very often, I’m brought in by the sustainability specialist in an organization. This might be someone who is at director level or possibly at a lower level in hierarchy than that.

They have a lot of expertise on things like carbon reduction, renewable energy, supply chain management from an environmental or social perspective, maybe they know a lot about behaviour change and how to get people to switch off the tap and switch off the lights, things like that.

They might have a lot of expertise in the environmental or social aspects of sustainability. They very often, don’t necessarily have a lot of hierarchical or power that’s given to them by being able to oblige people to do things. More often than not, they’d be an adviser rather than a ruler or enforcer. They are sometimes in a specialist function perhaps outside of the centre of the organization.

Quite often, they need to facilitate conversations. I’m thinking of a particular situation where, there was a client of mine, Nick, he was asked by his Board to get together a cross-organizational grouping of people from different parts of the organization to talk about their current sustainability practices and policies. This organization had quite a lot of public statements about the things it would and wouldn’t do from an energy or carbon perspective.

Those things have served them well in previous market conditions but new market conditions have come about. The Board were wondering whether or not they needed to refresh and how much emphasis to give to those issues.

It was Nick’s job to convene and bring together a group of people and get them to give their feedback.

But he was a bit stuck, because he wasn’t sure whether he would really get people’s honest opinions, or whether the fact that he had this expertise and this place in the organization might mean that people didn’t necessarily tell him the truth but maybe told him what they thought he wanted to hear.

Jonathan: To reflect back what I’m hearing there, it sounds like the organization already had quite a lot of policies and public statements about sustainability, which maybe seemed relatively progressive in the industry. And Nick was this expert who didn’t have formal authority for making stuff happen, but was an advisor.

Then, what happens is the board says, “Should we still be doing all this stuff? Does this stuff all make sense?” Perhaps “Can we afford to do this,” etc. The board’s then saying to Nick, find out what people think. And his concern is, “If I’m this sustainability expert and I say, ‘What do you think about carbon emissions,’ will I get an honest answer?”

Penny: Yes, that’s a good summary.

Jonathan: Why do you think that he was stuck in that way? What was getting in the way, for him, of fulfilling this request?

Penny: I think he had the insight to see that his own position in this system, if you like, this system of conversation that he was hoping to set up, meant that he might somehow skew it or that people might not be honest because they were concerned that Nick would have a particular perspective and they would want to maybe tell Nick what he wanted to hear.

I think he also picked up that some people might worry that if they were too negative about the sustainability initiative, this might have implications for Nick’s job, and would that stop them from being honest or perhaps encourage them to be more forceful? So there was something about, did Nick need to get out of the way?

But at the same time, there was an assumption that Nick needed to be the person to convene all this, because if it was done without him, that also might be seen to be undermining of his position. So he was the obvious person to make this conversation happen. He definitely needed to be involved in some way. I think people could see that.

But one of the questions was whether or not he should be in the room while the conversation was happening, or whether in fact it should be facilitated by people who didn’t have that particular brief. The down side of that would be that there was a concern that these people might be talking about the sustainability aspects of the organization without really understanding them very well.

They might understand how they impacted on their own particular job. They might not have expertise about some of the broader questions around sustainability. That might get in the way of them having useful conversations. Where does the expertise come in, in that situation?

Jonathan: It’s interesting. It sounds to me you’ve used this word, “convene” quite a few times there. It sounds Nick’s background is a bit less about convening, more about being an expert about sustainability itself.

Penny: Yes. I would say that that’s pretty typical. People want to bring in people - give them these positions in their organization - exactly for the expertise that they’re able to bring that may not be present in the wider staff body.

Jonathan: Is it furthermore the actual organization wants, people with expertise versus the people with convening or facilitation expertise?

Penny: Yes. Well, I don’t know if this is the case in your work. I often find that that convening and facilitation expertise isn’t really valued or recruited for specifically in organizations. It’s one of those hidden skills.

Jonathan: Exactly. We talk an awful lot about collaboration to the extent that it can become a buzz word. We don’t really talk about how you do that very often. The fact that this is a different skill set from designing things, writing things, or developing things, it’s about bringing people together, learning together, finding common ground, and all that stuff.

It’s interesting. At face value this problem for Nick is that he doesn’t know whether he can facilitate while also being an expert. The second part of it that I’m finding interesting as well is that the request from the board at face value is about sustainability. If you think about what they’re actually asking for, they’re actually asking for help with facilitation.

Penny: Tell me more about that.

Jonathan: Because they want to know what the people who work in the company in the organization think which doesn’t really have an awful lot to do with sustainability as such. It doesn’t really have a lot to do with, for example, technical information about emissions.

It has much more to do with what their perspectives are on it, whether values are, whether they are aligned on that stuff. That in a sense is, “Well, you know about sustainability, why don’t you just find out what they think.”

Actually, finding out what they think is a facilitation job. It’s obviously somebody who has interests and can do that. It’s not necessarily an obvious thing or an easy thing to do if your focus of self is on the expertise as oppose to the facilitation.

Penny: Yes, which is why to be fair to them, which is why they bring in somebody like me. They know that they might need to not only buy in the expertise, also, buy in the neutrality. As an independent contractor, I’m not beholden to any of the players in any long term way in the same way that someone who’s on the staff is.

Jonathan: Although in a sense you have a sustainability agenda that’s why you’re in it. You’re unlikely to push them towards not talking about these issues of whatever it is.

Penny: Yes. That is an interesting thing that other independent facilitators sometimes challenge me about is that if you come into the field from a particular background which I did. You have some expertise. You have some contacts. That’s where your own interest and energy is.

Actually, over the years, one of the things that I’ve learned to do and have some times to explain to people is that these days, my interest and expertise is in helping other people have the conversations they need to have.

The fact that I have that background, perhaps gives me better ability to see whether things are straying off the point or not. It helps me with the language, some contacts, and knowledge of the field. Indeed, there are conversations that I will sometimes say I’m probably not the best person to facilitate this because my own opinion is too strong.

Jonathan: Almost, “it is difficult for me to keep the role. I’m triggered by this. I’m not cool about this topic right now. I’m going to choose not to facilitate this time.” I think it’s interesting that you talked about neutrality. That to me doesn’t seem to be the core problem in the sense that anyone is explicitly regarding people as being biased.

What I’m seeing Nick having trouble with this is figuring out what help he can bring to this current situation? How he can stay true to his values? How do I ask people what they think about sustainability when it’s totally obvious, I think this? That type of thinking.

The parallel from my work is bringing people who are not experienced in say, design, into design processes and saying, for example, “From our point of view we should be using plain English for this but it’s full of jargon,” and the lawyers say, “Well, jargon is absolutely essential. If you don’t have precise language, it will be totally misleading and it will be a disgrace.”

The ability to actually ask them, go on a journey with them towards what we’re both trying to do, instead of saying, “You don’t understand design and you’re wrong.”

Penny: Yes. Tell me a bit more about what are the parallels that you see with Nick’s situation.

Jonathan: The parallels I see are that the requests that come down, has come down from the board…it seems like they’re looking for more understanding of what the employees of the company think, what their perceptions and attitudes are, opinions, I suppose and that he is uncomfortable in the current situation.

This happens in a similar way in digital when we get a request, normally from management, it can often be from the board, to design a new service or to make a change, or to make a budget change or whatever.

The request as it stands, doesn’t make a lot of sense to us, and we have trouble with engaging in that request, while holding on to our values. We might see it as cutting corners, or this isn’t the way it should be done.

A big one that comes up often is there’s this principle of usability testing or user-centred design, which says, “Assumptions a designer makes, is normally going to not quite meet a user’s need, because they don’t really understand the user’s context, because they’re not that person and they’re not trying to do this task.”

If we can subject everything we do to actual testing with human beings and see whether they’re able to fulfil the requirements of its own language, complete the task, then we have a much better chance of tweaking, tweaking, tweaking, until it does actually work for the person.

Often in organizations, they say things like, “There is no budget for usability testing.” What happens then is the professional says, the expert says, “This will basically be contravening my values to do this. This is wrong. I won’t do this.”

The only thing that I know really, that works in this situation is to treat the request as it comes from the boss or the person up in the hierarchy, as if it was a genuine request for help. So, not a demand to comply with rules and then to follow my orders, but actually a request to say, “Would you be willing to help me?”

Just because they’ve asked you to do something with no testing, that sounds to me like they don’t understand the value of this thing. The fact that we haven’t figured out common ground, that we are trying to meet user needs. We’re trying to meet customer needs with this.

Whether or not you believe it’s the case, you can behave as if you believe it’s the case. You can go to them and say, “You’ve asked me to do this, and I want to find out where our common ground is, what we both are trying to achieve here, because I reckon we’re both attempting to achieve these outcomes for these customers.

So, can we talk about what we might want to do to achieve that. Can I take you on a journey, as much as you telling me stuff?” What we tend to do is we put executives in front of users, struggling with, for example, jargon.

When the lawyer sees that the person using the website cannot physically comprehend the words, then they’re no longer going to argue, “This is the way it has to be,” because they do not want them to be able to not comprehend the words.

They just don’t believe until they see that normal people don’t understand legal jargon, or caveats confuse people, for example. They don’t realize that until they see it. We have to show that to them instead of telling that to them.

Penny: Right. In doing that, you’re helping them to see the world from your perspective. In order that, they can see that it’s worth seeking common ground.

Jonathan: It’s funny. It ends up challenging our perspective in the end because we tend to think of them as stupid, old people who don’t get it…

Penny: [laughs]

Jonathan: A lot of the time there is a lot of prejudice and judgment that we’re holding onto as professionals, as experts, and frustration, which has got nothing to do with that boss who just said, “This seems like a good idea. Why do we don't this?”

Penny: So, you’re projecting a lot of assumptions. When you hear that request, you’re building a lot of assumptions around it.

Jonathan: Yeah. That’s an important point. Exactly. A lot of it is in our heads. Sometimes there’s all these difficult political things, like there’s a project manager in between us, or there’s another executive, or whatever. There’s this difficulty of communication and it’s broken down to, “You must do this. There’s no discussion.”

A lot of this does come down to our own assumptions. It’s very scary to go to someone and say, “I want to understand what you need here. This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I want this to work for you.”

So, we actually avoid that. A lot of the time, the judgments we have are almost like a defence mechanism against engaging with these people.

Penny: That’s interesting. What are we defending ourselves against? The possibility that we might have to change ourselves, that we might have to alter our own description of the world and our own positions.

Jonathan: I think so. I think in terms of Nick worrying about his own perspective on carbon emissions, if it’s a very rigid perspective that we must reduce by this amount and this way.

There may be an element of he’s really trying to hold on to that and he’s scared of, “Will I be undermined if I opened myself up to all the complexity around this and all the different people and all the different needs?”

It’s like, “I may have to let go of some of my red lines,” or whatever. Or the usability person has to let go of testing every single time they design something, if there are other things going around that. Just imagining that that might happen is a scary thing to do.

Penny: Yes. I think jumping ahead to what the implications for your own identity as a person…

Jonathan: Yeah. Identity.

Penny: …the values that you hold dear, all of those sorts of things can definitely come in the way of people slowing the conversation down and having a properly exploratory conversation, where they’re properly listening to other people and sharing their own doubts and uncertainties, because there’s this sense that that makes you vulnerable.

Jonathan: Identity is really core, I think, because people…One of the things that I find…the underlying question here is, “How can I facilitate when I have expertise?”

One of the things I find difficult, that people find a lot of difficulty with, and I find difficult as well, is that when we think the only thing we’re contributing is the right answer. So, “It’s only because I have 10 years' experience in designing digital interfaces that I’m invited to this party at all.”

If I then switch around to saying, “No, my role is to help people to communicate in an equal way, then I’m no longer providing the right answer. How am I qualified to even be here? Why do they even want me here?”

Obviously that’s all in my own head, but that’s something that I see a lot, that they don’t believe that they will be able to contribute without that expertise and that right answer.

Penny: I think another thing that can also reinforce that anxiety is that people think, “If I’m not here contributing the right answer, the right answer won’t be found. This group of people will find the wrong answer if I’m not allowed to put my expertise into the room.”

It sounds like we’re really understanding well why Nick feels so stuck here. What are some of the things that Nick might do practically that could help unstick this situation?

Jonathan: This is an example that if Nick were actually here he may not be exactly workable but it’s an idea from digital. In the same way that we brought the chief executive or minister into the usability lab to watch how the user was struggling with the jargon or the experience, Nick has options here around taking the request from the board at face value.

If the request from the board is “find out what other people think,” how can he actually bring the actual members of the board themselves into a process in which they are participating. They can think as well; they’re also human beings. Instead of hearing it as “I’m going to outsource it. You find out opinions and then I’ll decide what I do with these opinions. I’m going to gather feedback from the troops.”

Instead of doing that, why couldn’t you invite them to participate in a process with everybody else as equals? Talk about their own hopes and fears, about their own reactions. Then take on the role. Assume that what they mean is, “Help facilitate a discussion between me, board member, and these people who I’m a little bit scared of for these number of reasons.”

Penny: I think that I can see how powerful that would be and I’ve experienced the power of that from time to time. I think it takes quite a lot of groundwork for everybody to feel confident that people will speak their truth in that situation. I’m sounding perhaps more sceptical than I want to, because the troops, as it were, might feel equally uncomfortable about speaking their truth in front of the board.

Jonathan: Also if you’ve never facilitated before and you put yourself in this really high-stakes situation, it can go wrong if you jump in. I actually heard a story recently of somebody who had got the CEO on a meeting which was not really ready for the CEO to be there and it had gone really wrong for that person. They were OK, but starting with the big-stakes thing cannot work. So I can think of a halfway thing.

Penny: Let’s hear about that, because I think that would be very interesting.

Jonathan: The halfway thing is, if you think about that as, shall we say, the radical option that you want to get to, before you get there, the question I would want to ask is to sit down with the people who’ve asked you and say, “Can you tell me what you’re hoping to get from this? What is it that you want to understand? What is it that you don’t understand?”

Just interview them. You can always put that from the perspective of, “I am not actually sure what it is you’re asking me and I would like to participate in this in a way that it means you and I are working together. And right now, I’m not quite sure I understand. So can we work that out?”

For your point of view that’s about building trust. So you want as much trust as possible and you want to be able to go into this without having this worry about what they really want or what they’re going to do with it, whether you can trust that the outcome of this process you are working will actually have an impact, etc.

You can always sit down with the person as if they’re human being and say, “Tell me what you’re hoping for here, what you’re afraid of, what you want, and what an outcome is that will work for you. You may actually be able to find a not quite so demanding version of what I just said that still involves them in some way. Lower stakes.

Penny: One of the other ways that I found that helps to build the confidence of the troops in this scenario is to give them an opportunity to have these conversations amongst themselves without either the hierarchy or the nominated expert in the room, so that they begin to be more confident, challenge each other, refine each other’s thinking. And then get to the point where they decide how they would like to share that thinking with the expert and with the hierarchy.

They might do that either through requesting that, say…I’ve been in situations where they’ve requested that the independent facilitator feedback on their behalf. I’ve also been in situations where they’ve nominated the more confident or articulate people among them to feedback on part of the group.

Or they’ve made posters so they can let their written, considered words do the talking for them as the prelude then maybe to some freer conversation, so that they almost are putting forward their interim thinking in order to then have a conversation that gives them a bit more confidence that they’re doing that in a controlled way. They’re not going to panic and say something they’re likely to regret. That can boost their own confidence.

Jonathan: There’s a world of things that you could do in the situation. I think the thing you just outlined there with people getting together in small groups and deciding what they want to do. The prerequisite for that to work is going to be trust. And I think there’s this underlying thing in this scenario about will they really say what they think? His fear is that he’s not going to have the trust he needs.

I think in terms of my suggestion to engage directly with the people asking you to do the work, the board, if you can make your job to bring as much trust to this process as possible, then there is a universe of things you could do.

As long as you can stand up to those people who you’re going to ask to work together in groups and say, “This is why we’re asking you to do it, this is why we care, and this is what we’re going to do as a result.”

You believe that this is true and you can’t believe that they’re going to believe you but you believe that there’s a chance that they’re going to buy it and you’re coming from a place of authenticity, they will be able to see that. Even if they are suspicious, they’ll be able to see you’re coming from a place of authenticity.

In a sense it’s almost like you’re working with the boss people to work out what you’re happy to do, and then you’re going to do that for real. You’re going to do that from the heart. That will come through to whoever you’re trying to engage with. Whatever the situation and the hierarchy and the history is, they will be able to see the way you are communicating at that moment.

Penny: Yes. Bringing your personal authenticity to it. Jonathan, we’re almost out of time. Is there any final words that you might say to Nick or people who feel they identify with that situation?

Jonathan: I think the thing I would say to Nick is that probably none of our solutions are exactly what you need, and that’s OK. I think engaging with the fact that there is a conflict between the expertise you bring from what you know and your ability to bring a group together or help a group work together to come to their own conclusion, is a very, very common challenge that a lot of people face.

It’s OK to find that difficult and you do have the resources to deal with that if you want to. My tip-tip-tip is treat commands from the hierarchy as if they’re cries for help and you can go in whenever you want to and assume the best of intentions and assume that you have common ground, even if you’ve got no evidence that suggests that.

And try and find out how you can work together, how you can find a common aim with this person who’s asking you to do something. Then hopefully from that you will be able to act with trust. Trust for the group and trust for yourself, and come from this authentic place when it doesn’t really matter where you end up, because people believe that the process was an honest one.

Penny: Excellent. Thank you.

Jonathan: Thank you very much Penny. That was good fun and I hope we can do that again.

Penny: Me too.

 

Criteria: deciding the basis on which the decisions are made

Prioritising among competing options is a feature of so many processes that I end up facilitating. It's certainly a key question in some current work.  

  • Which of the wonderful new project ideas for a radical disruption of the food system should be worked up in a scoping or R&D phase by this fabulous social enterprise? [Strategic planning day, mid March] 
  • Which issues should go forward to the Citizens' Assembly in the experimental action-learning phase of NHSCitizen? [Citizens' Jury, early March]
  • Which of the recommendations in a consultant's report should be the focus of a forthcoming workshop? [Planning meeting with a client team, mid February]

So there are a couple of things for the process designer to ponder here.  One is the tools the group might use to help it discern its priorities (dotting? multi-criteria analysis? diamond ranking?). Another is the criterion (or indeed multiple criteria) they choose to apply.

Tools I like 

So what are the tools that can help a group prioritise?  There are a few that I like.  

The first one (pros and cons) is a prelude to making a decision.  Its role is to slow down the deliberative process so that people don't assume a 'position' too early.  Nice and simple too: stick up some flip chart paper, one sheet for each of the options under consideration (write the options on so it's really clear).  Divide each sheet into two columns, one for pros (or 'what I like' or 'strengths') and one for cons (aka 'what I don't like', 'weaknesses').  Give everyone pens and sticky notes, and then there's a bit of a free-for all as people record their ambivalent views against as many of the options as they want.  The group quickly gets a snapshot analysis of every option, without anyone needing to be forced to be 'for' or 'against' an option too early in the process.  

The second is diamond ranking.  This is particularly good when there are lots of options, a large group and you want some conversation around the ranking.  It's not so good if you need a continuous ranking of all the options, but great if you just need precision about the top and the bottom of the ranking: for example as a way of going from a long-list to a short-list. 

And of course there's dotting, sometimes known as dotmocracy.  I'm quite a stickler for not calling this 'dot voting' as voting is, to me, a decision-making process whereas I prefer to see dotting as a way of aiding and informing decision-making: it's the conversation around the snapshot which is important. The group decides what the result means.  There's more here

Most complex - and appealing, in my experience, to academics, engineers and those who want the prioritisation to be based as nearly as possible on objective analysis - is the use of multi-criteria tools. There are plenty of ways of doing this, using paper-and-pen or more technology-based approaches. This kind of analysis is common, for example, on interview panels and can be useful if the decision-makers need to demonstrate how they came to their decision. 

My logical brain agrees that multi-criteria analysis should be a good way of analysing options - especially where traceability and transparency are important - but my heart absolutely sinks at the idea of facilitating it.  I'd love to hear from facilitators who enjoy using this kind of approach so I can stretch my skills here.  I see a number of difficulties with multi-criteria analysis: 

  • The time it takes to analyse all the options against the criteria.  People flag. They get bored and the quality of attention dips.  So perhaps it is an approach best used when there are only a small number of options or criteria.
  • The complexity of the process can introduce inequalities. Some participants may have a keener appreciation of the significance of the relative weighting criteria. It feels like a process where a sharper logician stands more of a chance of getting the outcome they want than an equally legitimate stakeholder without a PhD.
  • Not all criteria are equal.  The process design choices have to include a (prior) decision about weighting criteria relative to one another (or not); decisions about how to translate judgements into points for qualitative criteria; agreement on sources of information for those criteria which have objective or quantitative content. That's a lot of process to agree as a group, before applying the tool itself.
  • People game it or ignore it anyway, if it doesn't give the result they want. 

Where do the criteria come from? 

A crucial question for the facilitator / process designer, is where do the criteria come from, that the group then applies? Do the criteria get handed to the group by some other group or person, ready-baked? Does the group begin with a blank sheet of paper and devise its own criteria? Or a bit of both? 

Pre-cooking saves time (unless the group doesn't like or understand the criteria, or like or understand the people who came up with them, in which case it doesn't).  Some groups hate starting with a blank sheet of paper.  This is definitely a design choice that needs to be made with the group, even if the group's preference is for someone else to hand them a set of criteria to apply. 

Coming up with criteria and being clear on how to apply them is actually harder than it looks. Sharing assumptions (and flushing out crossed purposes) about what the criteria mean is crucial.  I have been in groups where it turned out that some people thought a high 'score' for a particular criterion was a good thing, and others thought it was bad thing.  Does everyone in the group agree that a particular criterion is a pass/fail test, or do some people see it as a consideration rather than a deal-breaker?

I've also been in groups where people have been invited to 'dot' their preferences, without clear agreement about what the prioritisation question is.  So some people were putting their dots against "the most important" option, and others against "the options we should talk about this afternoon". 

Prioritising = DEprioritising 

In my experience, this is the thing groups find hardest to do. Mostly, people want to be nice to each other. They don't want to disrespect other people's ideas: at least, not in front of each other. They don't want the fight that they fear will come when they say: we aren't going to do this.  So they merge ideas so as to retain them.  They end up with as many priorities at the end of the process as they began with, just grouped under fewer headings.  This may ease the pain in the short term, but if there really is a limit on how many options can be taken forward, their lack inability to deprioritise will come back to bite them.

Helping

How can a facilitator help in this situation? I think there's a responsibility to reflect back to group where its deliberations have led, and invite the group to discuss how successful it has been in meetings its stated aim of deciding among competing options.

 

 

 

 

What kind of workshop? Some metaphors

I've been working with a small client team to design a workshop.  The client team see lots of weaknesses in the current set-up that the group is a part of.  As the fighter pilot said when surrounded by enemy planes, it is a target-rich environment.  So where do we begin? 

We discussed jumping in and asking the biggest, baddest questions about the group's role and existence.  We played around with focusing on process tasks like revisiting terms of reference.  We thought about starting with easy wins.

The someone suggested a garden metaphor: the group and its work is a garden and - so he thought - the implication is that we want to do something evolutionary not revolutionary.

Maybe.

It got me thinking about the different kinds of interventions you might make in a garden - which could be radical as well as incremental - and we used these metaphors to help us reach a clearer common view about what the workshop should be like.

Dreaming of warm sunny evenings

Especially at this time of year, when nothing much is growing and the days are moist and cold, many gardeners will be dreaming of long summer evenings with a glass of wine and artfully placed candles. Scents and seating and shade. We could use the workshop to dream about the desired future, building a rich shared vision that inspires us during the hard months ahead. 

Rip it up and start again

Not all interventions in gardens are evolutionary.  People sometimes decide to completely remodel their garden: hard landscaping, tree removal, new soil, the works.  So a workshop could work on new plans: where to put the pond, as it were.  And people could even move on to project planning: when to get the diggers in.

Weeding party

Or the workshop could be like a work party: lots of practical immediate stuff to get on with: weed the borders, turn the compost heap, sew the broad beans and repair the fence.

Using metaphors helped us decide

Tossing these options around helped us decide on the kind of workshop we wanted, before we agreed on the detailed draft aims.  We went for the weeding party. Trowels at the ready!

What metaphors have helped you, in designing and planning workshops? 

That might happen, and it would be fine!

I've been doing some more one-to-one facilitation training this autumn, with someone who is a natural. It's been a real pleasure from my perspective, as most of what I've been suggesting has been practically useful and made sense to the person I've been working with. Which is always nice!

The four sessions we had were spaced out so that three came before the crucial event which was the focus of the training, and one came after. 

In the first session, we mostly worked on crafting really helpful aims for the workshop: making them crystal clear and (where this made sense) empty of content.  What do I mean by that?  For example, changing "agree to set up a working group on X" to "agree what action, if any, to take on X".

In the second session, we worked on design: which tools, techniques or bits of process would best help the group meet the aims.

And the third session was where it got real: going through the draft design and running little thought experiments. What if someone doesn't like this bit of process?  What if people can't easily divide themselves into the two groups the process depends on?  What if the round of introductions overruns?  It became clear in this session that the trainee had a lot of fears about things "going wrong" in the workshop.  I chose to make these fears the agenda for our session.

focus on fear?

I realise that I have an important relationship with fear. It's the emotion that butts its way in and uses up my energy. I know that a lot of people have this too. And a lot of people don't. So when I'm coaching, it's important that I notice when I feel afraid and consider whether it's my own fear, or something from my client that I'm picking up. And I know that many coaches would rather choose to work with the pull (enthusiasm, dreams, hopes, visions) than the push (what you want to avoid).  I try to avoid focusing on the negative, but in this session fear seemed so clearly to set the agenda!  I decided that to ignore the fears would be stubborn and unsuccessful.

What are you afraid of?

So we listed the fears on a flip chart, and then categorised them into three broad types: things that could be managed through preparation (e.g. design tweaks, process alternatives, 'things to come back to' flips, prepping a friendly participant to model brief intros); things that could be responded to 'in the moment' with body language and words that the trainee could practice in advance (e.g. interventions to respectfully request the conversation moves on); and things that might happen but would be fine. 

In my mind, this third category had echoes of Nancy Kline's possible fact assumptions: to which the response from the coach or thinking partner is "That's possible. But what are you assuming that makes that stop you?"  (For more on this, see Kline's classic Time to Think.)

And that would be fine

So the trainee's feared scenarios might come to pass: the group might decide at the start of the day that they wanted to add in a new chunky agenda item. And that would be fine. 

The always-negative-person might complain and grouch. And that would be fine.

My trainee might be at a loss to know what to do at some point in the day. And that would be fine.

This part of the session was all about taking away the fear of these possibilities, and replacing it with curiosity, confidence or some other more positive emotion.  Coupling that less fearful mindset with thinking through what she might do equipped her to be the great facilitator she turned out to be on the day itself.

 

 

There are phases, in collaboration

One of the useful analytical tools which we've been using in training recently, is the idea of there being phases in collaborative working.  This diagram looks particularly at the long, slow, messy early stages where progress can be faltering. 

Learning sets, debriefing groups: learning from doing

I've been helping organisations learn how to collaborate better.  One of my clients was interested in boosting their organisation's ability to keep learning from the real-life experiences of the people who I'd trained.

We talked about setting up groups where people could talk about their experiences - good and bad - and reflect together to draw out the learning.  This got me thinking about practical and pragmatic ways to describe and run learning sets.

Action learning sets

An action learning set is – in its purest form – a group of people who come together regularly (say once a month) for a chunk of time (perhaps a full day, depending on group size) to learn from each other’s experiences.  Characteristics of an action learning set include:

  • People have some kind of work-related challenge in common (e.g. they are all health care workers, or all environmental managers, or they all help catalyse collaboration) but are not necessarily all working for the same organisation or doing the same job.
  • The conversations in the 'set' meetings are structured in a disciplined way: each person gets a share of time (e.g. an hour) to explain a particular challenge or experience, and when they have done so the others ask them questions about it which are intended to illuminate the situation. If the person wants, they can also ask for advice or information which might help them, but advice and information shouldn’t be given unless requested.  Then the next person gets to share their challenge (which may be completely different) and this continues until everyone has had a turn or until the time has been used up (the group can decide for itself how it wants to allocate time).
  • Sometimes, the set will then discuss the common themes or patterns in the challenges, identifying things that they want to pay particular attention to or experiment with in their work.  These can then be talked about as part of the sharing and questioning in the next meeting of the set.
  • So the learning comes not from an expert bringing new information or insight, but from the members of the set sharing their experiences and reflecting together.  The ‘action’ bit comes from the commitment to actively experiment with different ways of doing their day job between meetings of the set.
  • Classically, an action learning set will have a facilitator whose job is to help people get to grips with the method and then to help the group stick to the method.

If you want to learn a little bit more about action learning sets, there's a great briefing here, from BOND who do a great job building capacity in UK-based development NGOs.

A debriefing group

A different approach which has some of the same benefits might be a ‘debriefing group’. This is not a recognised ‘thing’ in the same way that an action learning set it.  I’ve made the term up!   This particular client organisation is global, so getting people together face to face is a big deal. Even finding a suitable time for a telecon that works for all time zones is a challenge. So I came up with this idea:

  • A regular slot, say monthly, for a telecon or other virtual meeting.
  • The meeting would last for an hour, give or take.
  • The times would vary so that over the course of a year, everyone around the world has access to some timeslots which are convenient for them.
  • One person volunteers to be in the spotlight for each meeting. They may have completed a successful piece of work, or indeed they may be stuck at the start or part-way through.
  • They tell their story, good and bad, and draw out what they think the unresolved dilemmas or key learning points are.
  • The rest of the group then get to ask questions – both for their own curiosity / clarification, and to help illuminate the situation.  The volunteer responds.
  • As with the action learning set, if the volunteer requests it, the group can also offer information and suggestions.
  • People could choose to make notes of the key points for wider sharing afterwards, but this needs to be done in a careful way so as to not affect the essentially trusting and open space for the free discussion and learning to emerge.
  • Likewise, people need to know that they won’t be judged or evaluated from these meetings – they are safe spaces where they can explore freely and share failures as well as a successes.
  • Someone would need to organise each meeting (fix the time, invite people, send round reminders and joining instructions, identify the volunteer and help them understand the purpose / brief, and manage the conversation). This could be one person or a small team, and once people understand the process it could be a different person or team each time.

For peer learning, not for making decisions

Neither approach is a ‘decision making’ forum, and neither approach is about developing case studies: they are focused on the immediate learning of the people who are in the conversation, and the insight and learning comes from what the people in the group already know (even if they don’t realise that they know it). In that sense they are 100% tailored to the learners’ needs and they are also incredibly flexible and responsive to the challenges and circumstances that unfold over time.

 

Agree to differ

 

I'm listening to Matthew Taylor's Agree to Differ on iplayer.  It's hard not to get caught up in the subject matter - in this case fracking - but I'm listening out for process.

I agree with Matthew Taylor's contention that in most media coverage of controversial topics "the protagonists spend more time attacking and caricaturing each other than they do addressing the heart of the issue".  I also think that the orthodox approach, which is to set up discussion and disagreement as debate, with winners and losers and settled points of view, may be entertaining but is rarely a way of finding the best understanding.

In his own blog, Matthew writes about the origins of the radio series:

‘Imagine’ I thought ‘if we applied the kind of techniques used in mediation to shed much less heat and much more light?’ Vital to that method is requiring that the protagonists resist caricaturing each other’s position – something which immediately inflames debate – and focus instead on clarifying their own stance.

So what is the process that Matthew has followed in this refreshing radio programme?

  • Matthew is cast in the role of mediator, and our mediatees in this opening episode were George Monbiot and James Woudhuysen - one in principle at least in favour of fracking, and one opposed to it.
  • There was a round of introductions: personal, anecdotal and focusing on the very early inspiration rooted in childhood experience.  Matthew himself didn't provide the same kind of introduction: he's facilitating the conversation, rather than joining in. This helped to humanise George and James: it's hard to take against these small boys with the mutual connections to woodpeckers (you have to listen to it!).
  • Each mediatee was invited to give a short opening statement, uninterrupted. A bit like a courtroom or staged debate, but also with echoes of the uninterrupted opportunity to speak that you might have in setting up a "thinking environment".
  • We were told to expect exploration of the things the protagonists disagreed about.  This might seem counterintuitive: if what's being sought is agreement, how does exploring disagreement help. But wait...
  • George and James were asked to summarise back the essence of each other's argument, and to find something in it that they do agree with.
  • After a round of this, our mediator then summarised back what he'd heard about the remaining disagreement, and George and James had the opportunity to correct any misunderstandings in the summary.  James took the opportunity a couple of times.
  • At one point, Matthew sets out a ground rule, in response to James starting to say something outside the process: "The one rule we have here is that you're not allowed to say what you think George believes."  Nicely done, and an interesting insight into the process being followed.
  • This process was then repeated for a second area of disagreement.
  • So for each key part of the topic, we heard about areas of agreement (e.g. "in favour of nuclear and renewables" and "neither of you sympathetic to NIMBYism") and we understood more precisely the remaining disagreement.
  • At the end, Matthew summarised back what would characterise the most extreme positions - investing in or protesting against fracking. Which I found a bit strange as the sign-off: perhaps the demands of the medium for positions and opposition were too strong to be ignored.

Linearity in an aural medium

I wondered about the limitations of radio (or other aural-only media) in that you can only focus on one thing at a time: no post-it brainstorms or mind maps here, where all facets of a question can be presented at once.  I find this very useful in face-to-face facilitation, for getting everything out on the table from all perspectives, before beginning to sort it.  Does the "one-at-a-time" nature of speech reinforce the sense of opposition?

Well done Matthew Taylor for bringing a different approach to understanding a controversial question.  Future episodes are on vivisection and the future of Jerusalem. Catch them on BBC Radio 4 Wednesday's at 8pm and Saturday at 10.15pm, or on the iplayer.