Smart Meetings

We all want to get more bang for our buck, value for money, return on our investment. The time, effort and resources we put into working with others is no different.

There are several ways effective process design can lead to a good return on investment.

Firstly, have a really clear focus question. Take the time to sort out exactly what it is all these folk are getting together to work on. If it’s not important enough for them to be there, then they won’t, even if their bodies are.

Secondly, use a good process. This has to lead to outcomes both in terms of decisions made, plans formed or problems solved and in participants’ commitment to those decisions, plans or solutions. Participation is the way to go here.

Thirdly, document the outcomes and distibute them promptly. Sooner is better, and if people can take them away or find them in their email in-box when they get back to their desks, that’s the best.

Finally, follow up on the outcomes. Hold participants accountable for their actions: did they do what they said they would. Regular evaluation keeps us all honest.

I’ve just read the Wikipedia and Random House entries on James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds. These were pretty interesting, and I trawled around the net some more. So of course this makes me an expert…

The first thing that struck me was that Surowiecki’s argument makes sense, as far as it goes. In his words: “A ‘crowd’, in the sense that I use the word in the book, is really any group of people who can act collectively to make decisions and solve problems.” This use of the word derives from his writing on how markets work. He identifies four key qualities that make a crowd smart:

It needs to be diverse, so that people are bringing different pieces of information to the table. It needs to be decentralized, so that no one at the top is dictating the crowd’s answer. It needs a way of summarizing people’s opinions into one collective verdict. And the people in the crowd need to be independent, so that they pay attention mostly to their own information, and not worrying about what everyone around them thinks.

The next thing that struck me was the tangents and misunderstandings that many commentators derive from there. I suspect these come from two main sources. One is partly from Suroweicki’s examples of crowds, which include both people betting on a horse race and small teams working on a research problem.

The second source is the perspective (prejudice? predilection?) of the commentator. A good example of this is the set of criticisms that say crowds are more subject to ‘groupthink’ than to wisdom. This owes more to a particular soapbox, and ignores the fourth key quality above.

For me, it’s clear that Suroweicki’s ‘crowds’ are both similar and different to how I think about ‘groups’. This can be summed up in the difference between aggregating opinions and building consensus.

Funnily enough, good aggregation and consensus both rely on the qualities of diversity and decentralisation. The quality of independence is also shared, but used differently according to the methods used to arrive at a collective opinion. Aggregation works best when individuals don’t have much to do with eachother directly. They interact via betting pools, polls and the like. Conversely, consensus emerges from a process of dialogue.

The last thing that struck me was the confusion often shown between collaboration, consensus and compromise. But that deserves its own post.

Tom Schwarz commented:
For me there is a significant difference between nature’s phase changes (at thresholds) and that when a collaborative group’s reality transforms - once a group’s awareness has been expanded/altered - there’s usually no ‘going back’ - no ‘reset button’ .. why I regard collaborative processes as being able to lead to genuine transformations

So whereas nature’s phase changes are two way, you are pointing to one way happenings. Perhaps the natural analogy might be species creation or extinction, rather than the collapse and recovery of populations.

I reckon groups are products of their situations. Almost by definition, they form to change the situation in whole or in part. Changes and cycles in the group usually parallel changes and cycles in the broader situation.

For me, the gift of collaboration is that it draws on the resources of the whole group. It enables those resources to be allocted and used much more effectively. It is this that leads to transformation.

All up, a useful metaphor. Best to learn from it, rather than get carried away with it though.

At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, meetings have both costs and benefits. Figuring out both these aspects, and the balance between them, can help decide whether or not to hold a meeting.

These costs and benefits have three aspects: economic, political and cultural. Economic is fairly straightforward these days. What resources (including staff time, facilitation, venue/catering and materials) will we need to devote before, during and after the event?

What is the balance between getting people together face-to-face, versus online, versus working with them individually?

Political aspects are almost as straightforward. What decisions will be required, made in what ways and with what impacts?

This also influences the organisation’s culture. Genuinely participatory processes tend to build commitment from those involved. Conversely, command and control processes tend to lead to bum preserving.

Whichever way the decision goes, it pays to plan carefully so as maximise the return on your efforts.

David Tranter’s book Nature and Society makes a remarkable amount of sense. Among other things, he describes a range of thresholds in nature and links them to thresholds in society. I reckon properly designed and run collaborative events use this principle too.

Natural thresholds include the point at which reptiles have basked long enough in the sun to get their metabolism going, and the temperature/s at which water changes from solid to liquid to gas.

These thresholds are like gates, or windows of opportunity. As they open, new structures emerge that are subject to new laws. “But, however different those worlds may seem either side of the gate, they are just different phases of the same reality.”

Well managed participatory sessions can take a group on a journey from initial uncertainty to a point of clear purpose and commitment. The point for the group is that they have taken this journey together.

Their actual physical reality probably won’t have changed much during the course of the event, but their appreciation of that reality may well have been transformed. They can then keep responding creatively in the light of that transformation.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang from the Institute For The Future has posted an extended comment on Sandberg’s Cubicle Culture article. Pang shows a fine appreciation of the degree of planning involved in any good (facilitation) event.

He goes on to identify a second argument on the value of individual brainstorming, and speculate what the literature shows. The good news is that he’s at least partly right. Here’s one article mentioned by one of my colleagues, which treats the subject properly.

So what can we learn from all this? One thing is there’s a role for both individual and group work.

Having defined the topic, give individuals a chance to do their own thinking. This allows them to each get clear in their own minds and to get down their initial list of ideas.

Then get them to work together in small groups to come up with a consolidated list. This allows for both sparking new ideas off each other, for reducing overlaps, and for building agreement. Some facilitators call this one:pair:share.

A plenary session can then build a higher order of agreement across the group.

An article by Jared Sandberg (from The Wall Street Journal, reprinted in Post-Gazette.com) presents several interesting perspectives on brainstorming.

First it discusses the pitfalls of poorly planned sessions. These boil down to using the tool in isolation with little or no preparation or follow up. I particularly like the line:

In fact, great brainstorming sessions are possible, but they require the planning of a state dinner, plenty of rules, and the suspension of ego, ingratiation and political railroading.

Second, it discusses some perceived shortcomings of teams, which I’ll leave for another time.

Finally, it raises several issues around brainstorming in the larger organisational or community context. My favourite (misconception) noted here is that brainstorming is inefficient.

This is kind of like saying nature is inefficient when generating mutations which it will then test for survival fitness. The point is you need lots of variations and you can’t tell ahead of time which ones will best fit the situation.

For collaboration events to work, meeting participants need to know the importance of why they are there. Such events must have clear procedures (as Sandberg says) that take people on a journey toward shared understanding and outcomes.

Jim Belshaw commented:
…one of the interesting features of any well run training course is the way it teaches process skills over and beyond the immediate object of the course… That is, there has to be a congruence between the way you approach the training and the objective of the training.

ToP™ modules train people in participatory facilitation/meeting methods using participatory methods. They are practical and hands on:

• Demonstrating the tool or concept in question: experience what it’s all about in action.
• Exploring the process steps and/or underlying dynamics: discover why & how it works.
• Having a go at using the tool or concept: learn by doing, so you really learn.

Jim Belshaw commented:

I think that I would add learning by doing on the experiential side.

This is always good in a general sense, especially so where the exercise involves an on-going process. To make this work, you need to build in the culture and process elements up front.

This is true, both for facilitating training and for facilitating a group at work. Learning by doing is an explicit part of the adult and action learning principles used in the ToP™ Facilitative Leadership Program. Hence the flow of each Module starts with a demonstration of the subject, explores the theory & dynamics and then each participant gets to have a go.

With an ongoing process, the group can see a facilitation method and its variations in action. They can thus start to see through to what makes that process tick. Through consistently matching actions to words, the facilitator is “walking the walk”.

What tools can you use to help you put together a good process on behalf a group?

Three that I use are: the practical result, the rational aim and the experiential aim. Each is pretty much what it says. The first is more about outputs, the other two are more about outcomes. Let’s look at them in turn.

The practical result has to do with the product: the plan, the vision, the decision, whatever. Generally it is pretty concrete.

The rational aim has to do with the analysis, the ‘head work’. What is the change in the group’s thinking that comes about through the event process?

The experiential aim has to do with the mood of the group. Do they need to wrestle with something, get excited about the topic, or perhaps be reflective and thoughtful?

Using these tools helps me to design an effective process. They also enable me to get a feel of the group & its social dynamics and to prepare myself for the event.