Schuman S. - The IAF Handbook of Group Facilitation (2005)(en)

are good or bad. A great place to look for the stories, history, and examples is in the preconsultation, before facilitated events. When interviewing individuals one- on-one, the facilitator can invite stories rich in history that will reveal the issues that affect organizational trust.

In the setting of group events, the facilitator must use caution when inviting stories and examples that reveal the organizational baggage that has damaged the level of trust in the group. The facilitator must be skilled at guiding groups from what can be painful past examples to planning for more positive behaviors and activities that will repair damage and restore trust. Depending on the culture of the group, this can be a real challenge. There are countries and regions where people have very strong feelings related to the past and tend to see only the negative things. They have sometimes lost hope of beneficial change and will not believe very easily that they can participate in building a different process or structure. Then, a good process to rebuild those levels of trust will be needed.

Appreciative Inquiry

We often take an “appreciative” approach to examining the history of the group. Appreciative inquiry (AI) is a powerful facilitation process for examining the history and stories of an organization. It has a very positive focus. The purpose of the tool is to facilitate the identification, recognition, and appreciation of the positive influences and experiences of a group in order to develop propositions and plans to use those elements for greater organizational success in the future. (See Chapter Thirty-Three.)

The keys to AI are the facilitative techniques that help the group identify the behaviors and actions that in the past resulted in major positive outcomes and success, for example, superior levels of trust and confidence. The AI process then facilitates the discovery of the key enablers within those shared stories and experiences. This is followed by specific facilitation steps that promote the group to develop provocative propositions that can enable similar successes in their current and future work.

It is a powerful technique to illuminate the possible actions that can be taken to move the group in a positive direction. As with many other facilitation processes, ultimate success can depend on follow-up and follow-through so that the great ideas—those “provocative propositions” created by the group—are implemented and brought to life by the organization or team.

Building Trust

99

Experiential Learning

A good way to engage and involve people about the processes of building trust, through demonstration of trustworthiness, is by using experiential facilitation and learning processes.

With experiential learning processes, people experience firsthand the impact of trust. They experience that trust is essential to accomplishing training activities successfully. The impact and importance are usually quite vivid. The experience in the activity provides a safe and comfortable platform for discussing the issues related to trust in the workplace. Facilitators can often weave powerful learning activities into the sessions with their client groups, provoking important thought and consideration about individual and group actions critical to building trust.

Experiential learning processes can accelerate the development of trust. It is the most powerful way to educate and stimulate the building of trust, first within individual team members and then within the team. We examine two types of experiential activities.

Outdoor and Adventure Training and Ropes Courses These types of experiences are employed by many facilitators in their work to improve levels of trust, cooperation, and teamwork within organizations. Many excellent experiential learning activities exist that can help groups experience the issues related to trust. (for example, see Meeker, Fischer, and Michalak, 1994).

Often the issues related to trust emerge from the discussions that take place after the activities, in the context of how the group makes decisions, solves problems, and executes programs, for example. The ability of these types of experiential activities to lead to improved levels of trust is a function of facilitators’ skills in helping the group relate the experience of the activity to the real work setting and issues that the group contends with on a day-to-day basis. If this is facilitated well, the group understanding of trust and their commitment to behaviors important to building trust can be significant. Without facilitation focused on the group’s actual work challenges, this type of event can simply be a fun (or not-so-fun) exercise.

Classroom-Based Experiential Activities These are a powerful alternative to the outdoor team building and ropes courses. They often are quite simple and can be woven into the design of many types of facilitated events and programs. Vision planning, strategic planning, mission development, problem solving, and many

100	The IAF Handbook of Group Facilitation

more types of facilitated sessions can often be greatly enhanced by adding some experiential activities to the session. For example, a problem-solving exercise can be used to facilitate the recognition of key principles that a group needs to apply in solving their immediate issues and challenges. Important lessons related to trust, confidence, honest communication, and cooperation can be revealed to the group members using the activity as the vehicle of discover. The key to success is the facilitation that helps the group associate what happened in the exercise to what needs to happen in their real work. That is the heart and soul of experiential learning.

THE BOTTOM LINE

High levels of trust within any group are a clear advantage. There is a lot to be gained by investing in facilitation processes to help individuals and groups understand and build their levels of trust. It is the key to effective relationships that will result in effective teamwork that works toward the objectives of the organization.

Many organizations recognize the importance of building commitments. It is common to hear talk of “creating ownership,” “increasing empowerment,” and “raising empowerment,” for example. This has a positive impact on a company’s bottom line. High levels of trust with your customers can improve loyalty, resulting in more business. Strong levels of trust with your employees increases motivation and your ability to retain the talent in your organization.

In the profession of facilitation, from the beginning steps of creating a good relationship with a potential client to the implementation and follow-up of facilitation programs, building trust is the great enabler.

Building Trust

101

Facilitation of Group

Brainstorming

c h a p t e r

S E V E N

Paul B. Paulus

Toshihiko Nakui

Most meetings or group interactions involve an exchange of ideas among two or more individuals in order to develop some solutions to a problem or make a decision. It seems a reasonable presumption that an effective interaction would involve a full exchange of the relevant information or ideas so that the parties involved could make their best decisions or develop their most creative solutions. Although there may be some groups or pairs of individuals who develop very productive creative exchange relationships (John-Steiner, 2000; Sutton and Hargadon, 1996), much evidence suggests that groups often have a difficult time reaching their creative potential (Paulus and Nijstad, 2003; Taylor, Berry, and Block, 1958). There has been an explosion of interest in the past fifteen years in ways to overcome the various factors that hinder group functioning in information exchange processes. We summarize the basic factors that hinder effective group functioning and empirically based means of overcoming them (see Brown and Paulus, 2002; Paulus and Brown, 2003,

for detailed reviews).

103

FACTORS THAT HINDER EFFECTIVE GROUP FUNCTIONING

Social Loafing

Whenever groups gather to perform a task or make a decision, there is an tendency for individuals to have a lower of level of task motivation in comparison to situations in which people are individually responsible for their tasks and decisions. This tendency toward social loafing or free riding leads to low levels of productivity (Karau and Williams, 1993) or poor decisions (Lerner and Tetlock, 1999). To counteract this motivation loss problem, it is important to increase the accountability of individual group members for group performance (for example, to make sure that each person’s contribution is identifiable) or ensure that the task has a high level of intrinsic interest to all members of the group.

Common Information Bias

Group members typically differ in their expertise on particular topics. They are likely to overlap in some domains of knowledge but have no overlap in others. So it is important for group members to fully share relevant knowledge in order to make the best decisions. Unfortunately, groups are more likely to share and repeat information or knowledge that is common rather than unique (Stasser and Birchmeier, 2003). This bias appears to be difficult to reverse completely, but clearly defining areas of expertise and using procedures that increase effective information sharing (such as nominal group technique or computer-based communication support systems) can reduce the effect.

Groupthink

Group members have a tendency toward conformity or consensus. That is, there is often a premium on reaching a quick agreement and the avoidance of conflict. This has resulted in some rather famous examples of groupthink (Janis, 1982)— the tendency of groups to come to a premature consensus without a full exchange of information or perspectives. Groupthink may be a problem in everyday group decision making as well (Paulus, 1998). It has been demonstrated that conflict in groups helps them develop more creative solutions (Nemeth and Nemeth-Brown, 2003). Effective group decision making may be aided by the use of a facilitator who effectively manages the conflict and leads the group in effective decision-making strategies such as exposure to outside perspectives, the use of subgroups, and second-chance meetings to reexamine decisions (Janis and Mann, 1977).

104	The IAF Handbook of Group Facilitation

Production Loss

Many group meetings may involve some degree of brainstorming. That is, there may be period of creative idea exchange without regard to evaluation of those ideas. The aim is to generate a lot of ideas for later evaluation by saying all ideas that come to mind and building on the ideas of others. This approach was apparently used by Walt Disney and championed by Osborn in various books (Osborn, 1957). The general presumption was that group brainstorming was an excellent way of increasing the production of creative ideas. However, research has demonstrated that for face-to-face brainstorming groups, this is not the case. These groups generate fewer ideas than comparable sets of individual brainstormers. The larger the group, the greater is the production loss relative to comparable numbers of individual brainstormers (Diehl and Stroebe, 1987). The production loss of interactive groups seems to be due in part to a broad range of factors, such as concern about group evaluation, competition of time for idea expression, negative influence of low performers, and cognitive interference (Paulus and others, 2002).

FACTORS THAT IMPROVE EFFECTIVE GROUP FUNCTIONING

Our research has focused on ways of overcoming the production losses that brainstorming groups experience. We believe these techniques will be useful for all idea exchange sessions, whether or not they use a brainstorming approach. In addition, they address some of the other hindering factors we have discussed.

A number of approaches can be used to enhance the performance of various groups. Certain group compositions may be more optimal than others for specific tasks. Group performance may also be improved by using motivational or cognitive stimulation strategies. The way the group interaction process or the task approach is structured may also be important. Specific facilitator behaviors may be useful in promoting effective ideation and decision making. We highlight each of these alternatives.

Group Composition

It is not very profound to suggest that not all groups will function equally well. A key issue, of course, is to match a group with its appropriate task. This requires knowing something about the task, the task-relevant characteristics of potential group members, and how these influence task performance. Although there has

Facilitation of Group Brainstorming

105

been some progress in this area, much remains to be learned. We do know that the ability of group members is an important predictor of group performance (Devine and Philips, 2001). For example, in brainstorming tasks, intellectual skill or orientation as measured by grade point average or openness to experience is related to higher levels of idea generation. However, social and personal characteristics are also important. Groups composed of individuals low in social interaction anxiety tend to perform well in group ideation sessions apparently because of low levels of concern about social evaluation (Camacho and Paulus, 1995). Individuals who are highly agreeable also tend to perform well in group settings (Bouchard, 1969), although this characteristic may also enhance the tendency toward groupthink. The ideal person in a group is one who is comfortable with honest exchange and feedback in group settings and can maintain positive group interactions while engaged in intellectual conflicts with other group members. So far, no one has investigated groups whose members have this composite of characteristics to see if these indeed would be “supergroups.” Also, it is not clear whether unselected groups can be trained to function in such a way.

With the current emphasis on the importance of teamwork in business and industry, corporations are trying to select individuals who will function well in teams and spend considerable time training individuals for effective teamwork. The success of these strategies remains to be demonstrated convincingly (Bradley, White, and Mennecke, 2003). One implication of the research cited is that one should compose groups that are similar in their group-relevant characteristics (for example, agreeable, low anxious, open to experience). This certainly makes sense for group tasks that require much open exchange of information or ideas. Yet it may also be important to have group members who complement each other in the critical skills needed for effective functioning and performance in problem-solving groups. A group in which all members are highly extraverted and want to dominate the discussion may be counterproductive (Berry and Stewart, 1997). It may be best to have a group that is composed of people who take on somewhat different roles. For example, in a group concerned with innovation, one person may play the role of encouraging all group members to contribute. Another may have a high level of cognitive ability and dominate the idea-sharing process. Another member may be more reflective and challenge the group’s premature consensus toward some alternatives. A fourth person may have the ability to integrate the shared ideas into an organized and coherent product.

106	The IAF Handbook of Group Facilitation

It is also important for group members to have diverse areas of expertise relevant to a particular problem in order to develop novel and effective solutions. Although there is some evidence for this presumption, much evidence suggests that groups that are diverse in terms of expertise and background may have difficulty working together effectively in part because of different biases and the difficulty of appreciating or understanding conflicting perspectives (Milliken, Bartel, and Kurtzberg, 2003). A similar problem exists for demographic diversity. There is increasing emphasis on the importance of this type of diversity in the workplace. Yet diverse groups tend to be characterized by negative emotional reactions and difficulties working together effectively. This may be primarily because of lack of familiarity with those “different others.” Increased experience in diverse groups may overcome these types of problems (Watson, Kumar, and Michaelson, 1993), at least if the interactions are in a positive context and are reasonably successful (Milliken, Bartel, and Kurtzberg, 2003). It is interesting in that light that gender composition of brainstorming groups has little impact, possibly in part due to the increased levels of interaction of both sexes in all different domains of life (a reduction in traditional gender roles). However, since almost all published brainstorming research has been done in Europe and the United States, the generality of this result (and other potentially culturally based findings) remains to be determined.

What are the implications of these findings for facilitator practice? In most cases, facilitators will have little control over group composition or little prior information about group-relevant personal characteristics. So they will need to be sensitive to the potential benefits and drawbacks of group composition. In concert with group or organizational goals, groups may be composed for certain aims. Selection of group members for specific tasks may make it easier for groups to function effectively. For example, agreeable people may be selected for consensus tasks, those high in openness to experience for creativity tasks, and diverse groups for tasks requiring diverse task and interpersonal skills.

Motivation

One the main problems of groups is a low level of motivation. Therefore, it is important for facilitators to be able to help group members motivate themselves to high levels of performance and set high goals. Groups tend to set low standards for success (Larey and Paulus, 1995) and tend to have the illusion that they are performing well when they are actually underperforming (Paulus, Larey, and Ortega,

Facilitation of Group Brainstorming

107

1995). However, providing periodic feedback about individual and group performance appears to motivate higher levels of group ideation (Paulus and others, 1996). Knowledge that one is individually accountable seems to limit the tendency to loaf. Competition with other groups can also motivate high levels of performance, especially if there is a strong level of group identification (Coskun, 2000). It helps if the group task is a highly involving one in which the group members have a strong interest. Most laboratory studies have involved assigned tasks. Allowing groups some choice in their task and the task process (self-management) may motivate them to perform at a higher level.

Cognitive Stimulation

Much of the work done by groups today is knowledge work. It involves the exchange of knowledge and the development of new knowledge or innovations. The basis for new knowledge development is the cognitive stimulation process that is associated with knowledge exchange. Exposure to the ideas of others can stimulate new ideas or lead to novel combinations of ideas. However, exchanging ideas with others can also be distracting. The interaction process may hinder the ability of individuals to experience their own cognitive flow of ideas since others repeatedly interrupt them. Individuals may tune out during the exchange process while they focus on mentally constructing or preparing their own contributions. Ideas from others may also lead individuals to limit their thinking and creative processes to the initial domains or perspectives that are shared. Therefore, they may not fully tap their own relevant knowledge or that of the other group members. The daunting task of facilitators is to develop a group interaction pattern that optimizes the stimulation aspect and minimizes the distraction aspect. There are two general approaches that have been successful: changing the form of the interaction and changing the structure of the interaction.

Form of Interaction The most natural way for groups to interact is face-to-face. This may have evolutionary significance since this is the type of interaction we have experienced since the origin of our species. With the advent of computers, virtual groups are now feasible. Recent developments in group decision support systems now enable group members to exchange ideas with one another and make decisions on computer networks. The advantage of such exchange systems is that individuals can exchange ideas as they occur and access ideas from others whenever

108	The IAF Handbook of Group Facilitation