I am grateful to Ramesh Srinivasanย of IAF India, host of the new Candid Convos video podcast, for the opportunity to join him as a guest for this new episode of just under 45 minutes.
๐ก ๐ง๐๐ ๐บ๐๐๐๐ผ๐๐บ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ Institute of Cultural Affairs International ๐บ๐๐ฝ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐บ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐.
I am excited to be offering two sessions at the IAF Facilitation Summit next month, one with Adam Kahane of Reos Partners and one with Michael Ambjorn of AlignYourOrg – to join us, register now! #FacilitationSummit
Facilitating Breakthrough:
How to Remove Obstacles, Bridge Differences, and Move Forward Together, 7-8pm UK time
Adam Kahane has facilitated in more than fifty countries and in every part of the world, with executives, politicians, generals, guerrillas, civil servants, trade unionists, community activists, United Nations officials, clergy, and artists. His work with diverse teams of stakeholders trying to make progress on their most vital challenges has been praised by Nobel laureates Nelson Mandela and Juan Manuel Santos.
Kahane has just published a new book (his fifth) entitled โFacilitating Breakthrough: How to Remove Obstacles, Bridge Differences, and Move Forward Togetherโ, which offers a new theory and practice of facilitation. He argues that it is becoming harder for people to move forward together, and that although facilitation is supposed to help, the two most common methodologies โ subordinating everyoneโs interests to the good of the whole, or enabling everyone to do their own thing โ both block progress.
His book describes a new approach, transformative facilitation, which cycles back and forth between these two approaches, removing the obstacles that stand in the way of everyone contributing and connecting equitably.
โFacilitating Breakthrough is thoughtful, reflective, and inspiring. To achieve breakthrough results on high-stakes challenges, facilitators need to raise their game. This book explains how.โ – see publications.
Join us for this 60-minute conversation to engage with Adam and each other on some of the ideas raised in the book, and how they relate to our own experience.
Scaling Up Engagement & Dialogue
Exploring the ladder of engagement, and how we can climb it with those that we work with, 11-12.30pm UK time
Join us in exploring the ladder of engagement, and how we can climb it with those that we work with. Share your experience in changing the conversation, at scale, so we can all become better at it.
In this 90-minute workshop weโll explore together how the roles, skills and tools of the facilitation and communications professions can complement each other, and help us to scale up engagement and dialogue for positive social change. We’ll draw on some insights of previous work on the power of partnership between facilitation and communication, and weโll apply some of the tools of the two professions to generate new insights together.
Michael and I are contributors to The Power of Facilitation, a collaborative book project by a team of facilitators and visual practitioners to showcase the power of facilitation.
“The book project is a labour of love for allย contributors. Our mission is to promote the power of facilitation worldwide. We are making the book available for free in order to enable and encourage everyone to read it and to share it” – see publications.
If youโre a facilitator or communicator who wants to help organisations engage people at all levels to align behind a common strategy, read on – this articleโs for you.
Common challenges youโve probably noticed
Digital development is demanding change in the way businesses are run and how they interact with their audiences and their employees. No matter what sector youโre in, youโre likely to be facing at least one of these challenges:
Teams have less face-time as people share, work and interact more remotely.
Employees and customers are enjoying new relationships with employers and brands as we move to self-serving models: this creates the need to rethink communication and engagement with employees and how we structure customer service roles.
Employees want more opportunities to work with their employers to give back to society and the communities they serve.
Organisations want more agile approaches with empowered employees who understand both company strategy and customer needs.
A solution starts with a conversation
Solving these issues requires processes that connect leaders, managers, project teams and front-line staff.
The traditional top down approach is hopelessly inadequate, especially in large organisations. A cascade approach is too slow when there are multiple levels of management and a complex organisational structure. โTop downโ also contradicts the message that organisations need to empower their people to take more responsibility for the delivery of satisfaction and productivity.
Achieving that kind of collaboration across an organisation puts a premium on the need for quality conversations – conversations that help people work out how they can support strategic direction. The kind of conversation that encourages people to challenge, work out what they need to do to support change, and feel a high degree of ownership of the outcomes of the conversation.
Exploring the visualisation of strategy
Couravel has been usingย Big Picturesย to help leaders define strategy and then to help teams engage with strategy. The power of visual representation of strategic and market issues is well proven. It was first written about in theย Sears case studyย in the Harvard Business Review which introduced the Service-Profit Chain. At Sears, groups came to a better understanding of the marketplace and what they needed to do to support competitiveness by addressing questions posed by a visual representation of the High Street.
To explore its relevance today we asked 15 leaders from different businesses how developments in technology would affect their business in the next five years. Using ICAโsย Technology of Participation (ToP) Consensus Workshopย approach, they grouped their answers into seven main themes:
Collaborative working
Liberating structures
Empowered customers
Dynamic skill sets
Disruptive markets
New world of risks
Big data.
Transformation challenges to address
We then invited them to draw these themes and use their insights and imagination to create a synthesis picture in real time.
The textual list below presents information related to transformational challenges, while the picture conveys the same information visually.
Textual:
Always on and changing working patterns – timing and geography no longer blockages
Feedback is instant and we have to respond instantly
Enable paradigm shift in service design and operation – focus on understanding and improvement
Creating new skills to cope with technology change
Using data to inform decisions
Defining and mitigating new risks caused by over-reliance on technology
Identifying and responding to new competitive challenges
Visual:
What this gives the organisation is a visual representation of Digital Transformation and what it needs to do to navigate change.
To involve people in a conversation about how to respond to these challenges, the visual route represents an engaging starting point because it:
Invites people to interpret what is going on
Is easier to access (you do not need to understand jargon like โparadigm shiftโ)
Provides information more quickly
Leads to a less critical and more curious audience (lists invite a more critical, sceptical response).
Conversations around the visual
What is more important than the visual are the conversations around it; and they must be well facilitated. The visual becomes the focus for a conversation whereas questions draw people out.
For example, questions we used following the ORID framework of ICAโs ToP Focussed Conversation method include:
What can you see in the picture? What else? (Objective)
How do you feel about what you can see? Anything surprising, confusing? (Reflective)
Where do you see yourself fitting? ย (Reflective)
What could this picture mean for how we work with each other and our colleagues in other teams? (Interpretative)
What risks do you think technology creates for us? (Interpretative)
How might we be able to mitigate these risks? (Interpretative)
How could we use new capabilities to provide better services for our customers? (Interpretative)
What does that mean we need to do differently? (Decisional)
In the meeting in which we developed this image, we asked the people in the room:
What strikes you (remember they had just co-authored this picture)? (Objective/Reflective)
Can you see yourselves in the picture? (Objective/Reflective)
What does this mean for how you work in future? ย (Interpretive)
How does this affect your relationships with others in your business? ย Outside your business? (Interpretive)
How will this affect how you manage change in the business? (Decisional)
Using pictures to lead the conversation around Digital Transformation
This led to some penny-dropping moments for people involved in the leadership of change. For example:
It is increasingly difficult to define and think in terms of โvisionsโ as these rapidly become outdated in the face of global and disruptive competition.
Consultants working with clients are experiencing their own journey of change through the digital landscape and the relationship between client and consultant needs to shift from the expert to the consultative model (i.e. where facilitators operate most effectively)
This is also true of the relationship between customers and suppliers generally, but the changes are complex. ย In some respects, the relationship becomes more transactional and customers interface with technology to get what they want. ย This scenario sees people losing jobs as machines and robots take them over. ย But in other respects, the roles become more demanding and complex as the relationship becomes more akin to partnering: when customers want help it is because the technology cannot address more complex challenges (notice the bridge between suppliers and clients that is itself on wheels and constantly changing)
The value of tangible, visual outcomes that can engage people more because they are visual, different and not prescriptive and that can convey some of the nuances and challenges of change (notice the trolls waiting to sabotage change work)
The widespread application for approaches like this (see below).
Rethinking how we think about change
We need to rethink the process of change. If we want people to let go of past practices we have to pay more attention to the way individuals respond to change. To encourage people to collaborate to define new practices, here are a few โmust havesโ:
Fun
Novelty
Laughter
Celebration of past achievements
Reflection time
Generating our own ideas
Feeling valued and connected
Using the Technology of Participation facilitation approach and visual thinking tools such as Big Pictures, we can create the kind of approach to collaboration needed to support transformation.
This approach is valuable in most change situations including:
Introduction of new technology
Mergers and acquisitions
New strategy
New strategy communication
Brand evolution or launch/relaunch
Design of new organisational processes
Defining cultures, behaviours and values
Michael Pounsford CPF (author) is the founder of Couravel, which works with clients to clarify and communicate purpose, vision and strategy, to design and deliver engagement programmes, and to develop the communication capabilities of leaders and managers. He is accredited under the NTL International Organisation Development programme and is the President of the UK Chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators IABC (2017 โ 2018). He is also an IAF Certifiedโข Professional Facilitator.
Martin Gilbraith CPF (co-author) is an independent facilitator, trainer and consultant based in London. He is a Certified Professional Facilitator of the International Association of Facilitators, an IAF โHall of Famerโ and former IAF Chair and IAF Europe Director. He is a former President of the Institute of Cultural Affairs International (ICAI), and an Associate and former Chief Executive of ICA:UK, the participation and development charity. He has been facilitating and training, specialising in ICAโs ToP facilitation methodology, since 1986.
Michael and Martin will be running a session on the power of visuals and ToP facilitation to encourage open communication at the IAF EMENA Paris conference on Saturday 14 October – seeย Leading the Big Conversation at #IAFEMENA17 in Parisย andย register nowย to join us!
They are also planning a session for members of the IABC and the IAF to learn from each other and gain reduced cost entry to each otherโs events.ย See alsoย When communicators become facilitatorsย at IABC EMENA.
Trusted Sharing is a new platform for hosting in-depth asynchronous online conversations, and they have chosen to demonstrate it by hosting a conversation on the strengths and challenges large online events, using my recent blog post ‘How engaging can a large facilitated online session be?‘ as a starting point.
This was the question that intrigued me when I was first invited to work with with the Forestry Economics team of FAO, to design and facilitate an online conference this month on the Economics of climate change mitigation options in the forest sector.ย The answer, as it turns out, is pretty engaging!
Please join the conversation with me!ย I hope you will find both the conversation and the platform of interest, and that your experience will enrich the conversation for others. The conversation is open to anyone, and we are using many channels to invite interested and interesting people to join, so please feel free to share this post to invite others to join as well.
To join, it takes just a few minutes to register at Trusted Sharing. You can then return to contribute and review others’ contributions as often as you like.
In my last post I blogged on Power to the People โ why I am excited to be attending #EuroComm 2015, the April 12-14 Europe MENA conference of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) in London. Here I’d like to share a few of my reflections on that event, and something of the potential that I see for mutual learning and collaboration between facilitators and communicators, and for partnership between IAF and IABC.
I was struck at the event, as I was in browsing the agenda in advance, by the emphasis on the changing role of the communications profession, ‘from cascade to conversation’ (Katie MacAulay) and ‘from crafting and controlling messages to facilitator, coach and guide’ (Barbara Gibson). Highlights for me among the presentations were stories of large-scale staff engagement at HSBC Exchange from Ulrike Felber and on the Art of Participatory Leadership at the European Commisisonย from Ian Andersen, and on ‘bringing values alive’ at Newsweaver from Andrew OโShaughnessy.ย There was a lot valuable experience evident of engaging people at scale in change processes, from which I think facilitators could learn a great deal – particularly when it comes to engaging all those stakeholders who, for one reason or another, will never be ‘in the room’ to participate directly in a facilitated process.
I was also struck, however, that there seemed less awareness of the body of knowledge and experience that the facilitation profession has accumulated – in particular, the value of designing and leading a group through a structured series of questions and activities to achieve a particular purpose. Mention was made of using workshops to engage people, but (with the exception of the Art of Participatory Leadership) I gained little sense of their methodology or process design. While it was made clear that communications today must involve listening, and no longer just talking, I reflected that a third element that is key to making conversation productive as well as engaging is to ask purposeful questions. It seems to me that this is an area where communications professional may be able to learn from facilitators.
In spite of the emphasis in the content of the conference on communications as dialogue rather than broadcast, in terms of process I found the sessions mostly structured as presentations with dialogue limited to questions from the floor – between the stage and the tiered seating of a lecture theatre. I dare say that IAF facilitators could have learned a thing or two about making presentations engaging, but certainly I find that IAF conferences enable a greater depth and breadth of conversation.
It was partly for this reason that another highlight for me was the session on the future of the communications profession, which was held in a large classroom rather than a lecture theatre and facilitated as a number of parallel small table conversations. This session also highlighted for me the potential for the two professions and the two associations to learn from each other’s experience of common issues and challenges, such as upholding and raising professional standards and mobilising and managing volunteers and chapters.
@martingilbraith@IABC Watching the activity at this year's #eurocomm indicates there is a lot of potential for collaboration.
I was impressed (as you might hope) by the use of social media at EuroComm, including vox pop videos on facebook and especially the very cool Whova mobile app for conference networking – also by the speed and number of conference reviews published online, for example by Daniel Munslow and by the AB team, and by IABC on storify. So imagine my surprise when, as #EuroComm twitter statistics were projected at the closing session, it turned out that the most prolific tweeter with the widest reach was… me, the facilitator at a conference of communicators!
Already IAF and IABC members are able to enjoy reciprocal discounts at each others’ conferences, at least in Europe. I want to encourage members of both associations to take advantage of that, and connect with each other to further explore the potential for mutual learning and collaboration, and for partnership. The door is open – step through and see what you find!
