Dear Collaboration Colleagues,

We’ve been talking up the International Association of Facilitators Conference for the past few months because this is the one association dedicated to the art and development of facilitation, a process and core set of skills that are a key component of business leadership, negotiation, conflict resolution, teaching and learning.

We asked some facilitation practitioners who attended the North America Conference earlier this month to report back. Specifically we asked “what did you take away that will be most valuable to your own practice of facilitation?” We’ve selected several vignettes to share with you in Gold Nuggets from the IAF Conference.

Thanks to all of you who participated in last month’s interactive discussion. It makes this newsletter a vehicle for sharing your knowledge as well as ours. We’re doing it again this month, and invite even more of our readers to exchange ideas in our Situation Room.

March has been an exciting month for us. Not only did we provide online tools to engage 450 attendees in brainstorming at the IAF, but we announced a new release, FacilitatePro 9.5, as well. We’re still trying to catch our breaths!

Merry Spring to all,

The Facilitation Enthusiasts at Facilitate.com

The Situation Room

Reporting back on our experiment in interactive discussion, we asked you our readers to participate in an idea exchange on how to handle a situation where two senior managers “show up” late to a teleconference and want to interrupt the discussion so that they can catch up. Click here to view the whole discussion on our interactive flipchart and add your own comments.

Our participants were clear about one thing: we do not interrupt the meeting flow and risk losing the group’s momentum. Several suggested explaining that the group needed to keep going after a very short summary, with an offer to provide further detail after the meeting. Another idea is to designate a “catch-up” person ahead of time to handle the update off-line using email or instant messaging. Depending on the situation, it might be appropriate to revisit meeting ground rules. And a good rule of thumb is to keep meetings to the smallest number of critical people.

This was so much fun, we’d like to do it again! Interaction is habit-forming, and before you know it – you’re part of a community of interest and a resource to each other. Here’s the next situation for you to ponder:

How would you handle this situation?

You have 10 minutes to establish trust among a new team.

You're managing a new team that will work together remotely over a long period of time. You know that trusting relationships will be important, but you have very little time on each call as it is, and these are busy people. You'd like to try a 10 minute trust exercise on this conference call – what might you do?

Please click here to post your suggestions to our interactive flipchart and comment on the other ideas you find there. We’ll report back on this experiment in idea exchange in the next issue.

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Advisor's Corner

Gold Nuggets from the IAF Conference

Prospectors panning for gold trained their eyes to spot the gold nugget. We use the term to mean that special insight that is particularly timely and makes the experience worthwhile. Here are some gold nuggets from the IAF Conference in Portland this month.

The Magic of Metaphors
Shelley Rueger
Program Manager, Hewlett Packard

Editor’s note: Shelley reports on a workshop that introduced participants to a five-step process developed by Simon Wilson and Carol Sherriff. The process begins with “catching” and exploring the group’s metaphor and ends with applying what the group learned to the issue under discussion.

As a relatively inexperienced facilitator attending her first conference, I was somewhat taken aback to find that my first pre-conference workshop, "The Magic of Metaphors, the Art of Archetypes" led by Carol Sherriff and Simon Wilson, would only have four participants - too few for there to be any way for me to "hide". My concern quickly evaporated. The subject matter was engaging - I went from being a skeptic, who thought this metaphor stuff was a bunch of hocus pocus, to seeing the potential for unlocking creativity in a wide assortment of engagements with a vast array of personality types.

Metaphors are built into human conversation. They give us an inside view of how people think. Groups and organizations have metaphors, and they can help us identify and talk about issues in a less emotional context. If we act as if the metaphor is true, we can work on an issue through the metaphor.

I have already been able to apply the knowledge I gained in several meetings - even with people who generally do not take to "soft" types of facilitation methods. For example, I was talking with a senior manager of one of our R&D groups about a sensitive issue regarding the performance of one of his teams. He described the situation that the team was facing as "McDonald's when a bus pulls up". Rather than ignore the use of metaphor, I kept him talking in terms of the metaphor instead of directly at the problem. I think we got further speaking that way than we would have if we had be outside the metaphor where the emotions were more raw.

Ground Rules that Go Deeper
Dan Hogan
Lord & Hogan

Editor’s Note: Dan reports on a workshop presented by Roger Schwarz and Anne Davidson based on their “Skilled Facilitator Approach” – a values-based, systems approach for creating highly effective groups and organizations.

Once again, I left the conference energized having picked up several new ideas. One stand-out was the Ground Rules for Effective Groups presented by Roger Schwarz and Anne Davidson. There are nine of these ground rules and they go deeper than commonly used ones like “be on time”, deeper in the sense that they give boundaries how to act and communicate. The ground rules are:

  1. Test assumptions and inferences
  2. Share all relevant information
  3. Use specific examples and agree on what important words mean
  4. Explain your reasoning and intent
  5. Focus on interests; not positions
  6. Combine advocacy and inquiry
  7. Jointly design next steps and ways to test disagreements
  8. Discuss undiscussible issues
  9. Use a decision-making rule that generates the right level of commitment

Here is an example. In some recent sessions I facilitated, there were engineers and drafting people who had to work together to create a quality product. But a few of these teams didn’t get along; they struggled to discuss even their own work process. Applying the ground rule to test assumptions and inferences, I pointed out that when someone says, “You are not hearing me….”, this is in fact an assumption that needs to be tested by saying something like “It seems to me that you are not hearing what I’m trying to say. Would you try to repeat what you think my point is?” These ground rules are so clear that when I used them in 5 different teams, they really set the tone for functional dialogue.

The Wisdom of Teams
Karen Bading
Infrasonics Coaching

Editors Note: Karen is describing her experience during the Plenary Session, which addressed the topic of organizational change through a keynote speech followed by idea generation via a series of short encounters in small groups.

There were many moments of learning and connection for me at the IAF Conference in Portland. What stands out are two parts of the opening plenary. In the Brief Encounters, thinking about strategies for organizational change, I heard half a dozen different answers to my question, “How do we help executives hold focus on a change effort long enough for individual behavior to change across the organization?” (Most answers had something to do with careful contracting with realistic time frames.)

In the closing activity, sharing tools and strategies around the table, my big ‘ah-ha’ was the approach of a facilitator working with a “team for team’s sake.” Rather than try to sell his resistant team on the group process, the facilitator simply began gathering information, both in meetings and informally. He then wrote a draft report with recommendations and it presented to the group, letting them be the judge of their wisdom as a team.

“We said all that?” they asked. As they saw how their ideas came together to create something greater than the sum of the parts, they were more willing to continue collaborating. I was humbly reminded that sometimes the work is the work.

Finally, the plenary spilled over into lunch conversations and I’m still pondering the chicken-egg relationship of culture and individual behavior in an organizational change effort. In a sense, culture is a summary of observed individual behavior, so unless behavior changes the culture is unchanged. I wonder if we start at the wrong end of culture change when we describe the vision for the transformed organization broadly rather than describing the transformed behavior of each stakeholder that will be observable evidence of the shift and putting our energy into creating those changes such that we can eventually see and hear a new organizational culture.

Keeping the Cart Ahead the Horse
Madeline Brane, PMP, CPF
Blue Shield of California

In his opening comments the IAF Chair, Cameron Fraser, highlighted two trends in facilitation:
1. An increase in the number of internal facilitators
2. The expanded use of virtual meetings

Since I am an internal facilitator who conducts frequent virtual meetings, this got my attention. I attended my last conference three years ago, and this demonstrated a notable shift in the role of facilitation. In the pre-conference workshop "Getting Great Results from Virtual Meetings", we explored different approaches to keeping virtual teams engaged while delivering productive results. An important principle is to first plan your session just as you would today, determining the objectives, goals, and processes to be used, and only then consider ways to incorporate virtual tools.

As an example, take a typical in-person facilitation session. Often we plan activities like brainstorming, ranking and rating to aid in accomplishing the goals of the session. These activities can be quite time consuming, and people may be worn out before it’s time to start reviewing results and planning next steps. With web meeting tools like FacilitatePro, you could perform these steps asynchronously prior to the meeting. Then you could conduct a virtual meeting using online tools like FacilitatePro, Live Meeting or WebEx to walk though results and plan next steps. The pre-session activities help get the team onboard and aligned on the work to be done.

Future IAF sessions will undoubtedly continue to focus on the exciting developments in virtual communication. I encourage you to incorporate the use of technology into your facilitation toolkit.

Turning Ideas into Actions
Cindy Ray, MBA, CPF
Coordinator Healthcare Improvement
Peacehealth

Editor’s note: the keynote speaker, who kicked off the plenary session activities, was Dan Cohen, co-author of “The Heart of Change: Real Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations”

The conference this year was well organized, interesting and of course, spending time with fellow practitioners is always inspiring. One thing that stands out for me about the conference was the theme "Bridging Ideas to Action". Over the last year and a half I have seen my teams generate some really great ideas but struggle to get them implemented due to organizational barriers. The keynote speaker was the perfect jumping off point for me to ponder how to continue to move our organization over the bridge to action. I gained a deeper appreciation for the following change principles:

  1. Think about possible barriers and their mitigations ahead of time
  2. Have clear parameters and ‘non-negotiables’ outlined ahead of time so people are clear about what will or will not be done
  3. Communicate, communicate, communicate, in all directions, in many mediums, all the time

And on a personal note, I had been mulling over an idea for a book for a while. The idea of bridging ideas to action was exactly the motivation I needed, in addition to talking with so many inspiring practitioners, to set foot on that bridge! I started on the book as soon as I got home and have the first five chapters hammered out already! Who knows - it may be available next year in the bookstore at the IAF conference. Thanks IAF!

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Have you added your ideas on our situation yet?

Come on, don’t be shy. All responses are anonymous, and besides, there’s no such thing as a bad idea!

Click here to participate.

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Buzz About Meeting Effectiveness

Note: We’ve discovered that people seem to enjoy the articles and blogs that we select because they contain interesting opinions or advice about facilitation and collaboration. It’s probably time that we let you know that this doesn’t imply that we recommend or endorse the effectiveness or accuracy of any particular statement or technique that you may find here.

And here's what popped up on the web:

02.22.2007 Meetings make us dumber, or do they?

"Meetings make us dumber, study shows - Brainstorming sessions backfire when group thinking clouds decisions". The title of this short article was attention getting, to say the least. The finding came from a study of consumer behavior that showed that participants had more trouble coming up with alternative brands in a group than when they were alone. The researchers inferred that this finding could also apply to decisions in the boardroom, in that “groupthink” could be a limiting factor in generating alternative ideas. What was quite fascinating (assuming you have some free time on your hands) were the associated poll and discussion board. Poll: Do you have too many meetings at work? Out of 5660 responses 81% said "My mind goes blank after a couple of them a day” and 59% said “Good ideas rarely come out of my meetings. The same people usually dominate the discussions.”

We picked out a couple of wise reactions from the discussion board, to wit: "I think the results of this study would be inconclusive if they first filtered out "useless" meetings, then of the people who attend useful meetings, examined their performance when working by themselves.” And: "A brainstorming session can be fun and productive provided materials are included to enhance the experience, respect is a ground rule within the group, and there is follow-up on ideas presented. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17279961/

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Facilitate.com: Of Interest

Rave Reviews for "Getting Great Results from Virtual Meetings"

"..very worthwhile experiencing the technology and seeing the different possibilities for integrating technology with our facilitative techniques. “
“Loved the group brainstorming, both virtually and in the game”
“Of particular value was doing the pre-work building up to the face to face session”
“I'm building awareness that there are key tools that could enhance my work...and it's within my reach...”

Contact us to bring this workshop to your organization.

FacilitatePro 9.5 launched at IAF Conference

Click here to view press release.
Any of you who have perused the side bar know that FacilitatePro is a web-based software tool that helps facilitators run more effective meetings virtually or face-to-face. Leveraging our combined decades of experience facilitating groups of all types through decision making processes of all kinds, we’ve included tools for anonymous brainstorming, idea generation and evaluation, prioritization and voting, surveying and action planning. With every release we’ve added more options for facilitators to enhance group dynamics, encourage innovative thinking and streamline decision making. With 9.5 we’ve added lots of new features from our customers’ wish lists as well as simplifying navigation so that even a novice facilitator can get off to a fast start.

We could go on and on, but instead we invite you to learn more about FacilitatePro 9.5 by taking a minute to read the Product Overview and visit our web site.
http://www facilitate.com/Announce/95ProductOverview.pdf

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