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

SUBSEQUENT DEVELOPMENTS

Ten years after the original committee was formed, effective collaboration is still very much alive in this community, with many tangible results to show for the work. The facilitator from Community At Work has remained involved to some degree, but to a large extent the many groups and subgroups of this school-based community have taken matters into their own hands.

The evolution has been gradual. For the first two years, the process unfolded in fits and spurts. With each small success, a new layer of deeper obstacles was revealed, leading to new rounds of misunderstanding and frustration. For example, a new policy regarding student violence was indeed put into place, but the policysetting discussion introduced a new controversy about classroom management and the competence of certain teachers. Thus, with each forward step, the group found itself once again returned to the Groan Zone.

In order to overcome those recurring dynamics of miscommunication and impatience, the group repeatedly had to slow down and focus on rebuilding mutual understanding. Gradually, by learning from experience with support from their facilitator, the group became better at moving through the Groan Zone and coming out the other side, into a convergence of views. As they gained the ability to recognize the Groan Zone for what it was, they became less resistant, each time a new context arose, to listening nonjudgmentally to one another’s biases and interpretations and subjective conclusions. They became better and better, in other words, at thinking from each other’s point of view.

A turning point occurred in the third year. What had begun as a discussion of a discipline policy had by then morphed into a much broader analysis of the relationship between school district policies and parent involvement in school governance. An official from the school district then secured funding for a facilitated steering committee mandated to strengthen neighborhood-based collaboration on school-related issues of importance to the entire community.

This model was hugely effective. Over the following two years, the steering committee created several operating procedures that made the collaborative friendlier to parents. More meetings were scheduled to fit the timetables of working parents. Child care during meetings was provided. Bilingual facilitation was introduced and, later, translation equipment was purchased to give those who spoke little English a more meaningful opportunity to participate.

As more time passed, the collaborative continued to evolve, turning its efforts toward a broader community improvement agenda. As of this writing, the

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collaborative has created, developed, and secured funding for two fully operational community-based organizations that provide health care and other human services to the family members of school-aged youth. What began as a simple issuefocused collaboration has resulted in many sustained improvements, not only at the original school site but also at other schools throughout the district.

INTEGRATION OF THEORY AND PRACTICE

This case provides a classic example of the problem of intersubjectivity and how to relate to it effectively.

As I stated earlier, the problem of intersubjectivity derives from a basic feature of the human condition: that each human being creates his or her own idiosyncratic, subjective construction of reality, grounded in unique personal life experience. Given this fundamental chasm of meaning, what does it take for a roomful of individuals with diverse perspectives to communicate effectively, especially when the issues are complex and the stakes are high?

To answer this question, many contemporary writers and thinkers have focused on the role of the facilitator. After all, a facilitator can treat individual differences seriously and yet still work effectively toward integration of those differences.

The case of the school-based collaborative demonstrates clearly the enormous contribution a facilitator can make. Here are some of the specific actions taken and judgments made by the facilitator in this case:

•Before conducting an actual meeting, she interviewed group members to understand their individual frames of reference. For many consultants, this is a routine step to take when beginning an engagement with a multistakeholder group.

•She was fully committed to using effective listening skills consistently and to fostering a listening attitude in others.

•She understood group dynamics and conveyed her understanding to the participants. She gave them language and shared points of reference to understand and communicate about the process dimensions of their experience together.

•She drew from a model that normalizes and validates, not one that pathologizes and prescribes. Specifically, she used the Diamond of Participatory Decision Making. This model is grounded in the belief that human beings should not be seen as dysfunctional for doing what comes naturally. Using the diamond, she

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normalized the difficulties that are inherent in collaboration and gave the group permission to relax and become honest about their frustration, without resorting to pseudo-solutions or giving up altogether.

•And most important to see: underlying all her behavior, she drew from her authentic, heartfelt commitment to tolerating the foibles and anxieties of group life in order to support the emergence and development of genuine warts-and- all collaboration.

This type of facilitation is a genuinely enabling process, helpful and supportive and grounding. But does that mean facilitation is the essential key to successful collaboration? I think not.

Whether a facilitator is present or not, the problem of intersubjectivity, in my opinion, has a profound underlying influence on a group’s capacity to collaborate. In other words, it is a primary phenomenon and should be dealt with as a primary phenomenon, not as a nuisance that can be disregarded unless it pops up here and there. To put it another way, the fundamental imperative of collaboration is to build mutual understanding.

Here are four principles that are particularly helpful in bringing this viewpoint into focus:

•Principle 1: For multistakeholder collaboration, building mutual understanding is not optional; it is mandatory. So long as participants in a collaboration have not acquired sufficient mutual understanding, their chance of success will be painfully low. Constrained by their own individual interpretations, trapped in their own individual frameworks of meaning, what more than a pseudo-solution should they expect to achieve? To be effective cothinkers participants have to be able to think from each other’s points of view, even when they disagree. By necessity, a serious collaboration has to transcend the problem of intersubjectivity, not be limited by it.

•Principle 2: The existence of the Groan Zone is a normal fact of life; making it visible to participants is a powerful, grounding intervention. It does not matter what you label it. If you prefer, you can use the term storming (Tuckman, 1965) or chaos (Peck, 1987), or a term of your own. But whatever one calls it, this period of struggle and impatience and frustration—this period, fundamentally, of poor communication—is a natural, normal, recurring phase of multi-stakeholder collaboration. When its existence is left unrecognized, participants frequently

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misdiagnose and misattribute their frustrations, which lead generally to ineffective interventions. By contrast, when the existence of the Groan Zone can be acknowledged and normalized, its effects can be observed and discussed and managed.

•Principle 3: It takes careful, effective listening to build mutual understanding. The subjective construction of meaning may be a problematic fact of life, but to an extent, careful listening can serve as its antidote. Under most circumstances, participants in a collaboration will probably never be able to know the private depths and crevices of one another’s inner worlds. But that level of intimacy is rarely required by the demands of collaboration. What does matter is whether participants can understand each another well enough to think from each other’s points of view. Careful listening is the behavior that enables that level of comprehension. A facilitator can be a great role model for this behavior and a workshop on listening skills can be a fine method of instruction; but in the final analysis, the key is to enable the participants to acquire and practice those skills. When people chronically are not listening, they are not collaborating.

•Principle 4: Collaboratives, and the skillfulness of the participants, develop over time. Building mutual understanding is not accomplished at a single sitting. Genuine mutual understanding unfolds and emerges, analogous to the peeling of the proverbial onion. For all participants, learning how to persevere, in good faith and with tolerance, is not merely a good practice. It is essential.

CONCLUSION

Exploring the problem of intersubjectivity—its nature, its extent, and its power— has been the purpose of this chapter. Building mutual understanding is the fundamental imperative of collaboration. If the purpose of convening and investing in multistakeholder collaborations is to develop bold, inclusive solutions that produce sustainable outcomes—if, in other words, the purpose of collaboration is to promote collective responsibility for our projects and our visions—then mutual understanding must be held as an ongoing, unflinching intention—as “true north” on the compass of effective facilitation.

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A Procedural Analysis

of Group Facilitation

c h a p t e r

N I N E

A Communication Perspective

Joe Chilberg

Group facilitation is a communication-based intervention since it prescribes and guides group member interaction and message behaviors. Understanding and recognizing the functions of communication for group facilitation can aid effective group facilitation. A communication perspective establishes the task and social functions of message behaviors and the role of the procedural function in initiating and managing productive group decision-making communication. The procedural function, the domain of group facilitation, is to engender participative and collaborative practices that enhance the quality of decisions and promote constructive and satisfying group relationships. This procedural function must consider the constructive nature of message behaviors in both the task and relational di-

mensions of communication.

This chapter presents a macroand microlevel scheme of procedural communication for analysis of process designs to illustrate the procedural, task, and social functions of communication. The scheme is then applied using three process designs (interaction method, nominal group technique, and synectics). The scheme

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offers facilitators, consultants, and group members a way of seeing decisionmaking events, activities, episodes, and acts through a communication schematic to enhance adopting, implementing, and monitoring formal or informal decisionmaking practices.

COMMUNICATION: THE HEART OF GROUP DECISION MAKING

The ideal outcome for task groups is to arrive at decisions that are acceptable and satisfying to group members. There are a host of techniques and practices offered to guide groups toward such ends. Regardless of the practice or technique, they all have one thing in common: they require groups to focus and coordinate group communication. They more or less provide a group process design that shapes communication toward particular ends. Communication is the common denominator of process designs.

When group process designs are used, they require guidance; they need to be facilitated. The central job of group facilitation is to guide and monitor the communication behaviors required by the process design. Whether the facilitator is a manager of a team meeting, chairperson of a committee, or a neutral third party leading a brainstorming session, this person’s job is communication.

A communication perspective offers a practical schema for understanding and facilitating group decision making. It provides the facilitator a way of “seeing.” That is, understanding the roles and functions of group communication can aid in the development, selection, and implementation of a process design. Furthermore, it offers a way to develop the facilitator’s eye, that is, to guide and monitor the message behaviors required for a process design.

MESSAGES AND THEIR DIMENSIONS

The central focus of communication studies is “the relationship between messages and people” (Zarefsky, 1993, p. 2). A major emphasis of communication research investigates how the characteristics of message structures and content affect communicators. Communication researchers seek to understand and explain how messages work—what influences the sources of messages and how messages influence receivers. It is widely accepted that messages have two dimension of information: content or task and socioemotional or relational information (Watzlawick, Beavin,

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and Jackson, 1967; Keyton, 1999). Message behaviors can be understood as performing task and relational functions coextensively. Thus, all member message behaviors have implications for decision-making tasks as well as individual and group relationships. While the task dimension of messages provides information and critical activities such as idea generating and evaluation, the relational dimension establishes members’ identities and intragroup relationships (Keyton, 1999) and moderates matters of power and self-esteem that can support or inhibit effective task communication (Collins and Guetzkow, 1964; Hackman, 1990; Poole, 1999).

The above perspective makes clear that effective group decision making is attained by communicating to develop effective group relationships that in turn support effective task communication. What may not be so obvious are the task and relational implications and requirements of a process design selected to facilitate decision making. The facilitator who understands and internalizes the task and relational dimensions of communication will have a critical advantage in selecting, guiding, monitoring, and intervening in the process of group decision making.

PROCEDURES AND THE FUNCTIONS

OF GROUP COMMUNICATION

Benne and Sheats’s influential study (1948) on group communication identified three main functions of message behaviors—task, maintenance (social and relational), and self-serving—and the types and purposes of message behaviors associated with each. Procedural message behaviors were minimal and folded into the task and relational functions, giving them an incomplete treatment and subordinate status (Chilberg, 1989). Although task and relational functions of communication are inherent in the procedural function, the importance of the procedural function for effective group decision making has gained attention. There is a significant body of research on the influences of formal procedures on group process, member relationships, and task outcomes that indicate procedures for discussion, decision making, and problem solving to enhance group performance. “At the same time ‘which procedure(s) should be used, and under what circumstances, remains unclear’” (Sunwolf and Seibold, 1999, p. 395). Off-the-shelf process designs provide more or less adequate information for their implementation, but the facilitator is frequently left to his own devices in advocating and guiding procedural

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choices, monitoring group members’ performance, and intervening with regard to group members’ task and relational message behaviors. Facilitators should be concerned with more than monitoring the step-by-step procedures of a process design; they should also attend to the relational implications of the procedures and actual members’ communication behaviors.

The facilitator who is cognizant of the task and relational functions of message behaviors required by procedures achieves a more critical understanding of process designs. Such understanding is an aid in selecting and facilitating a process design that fits a group’s task and relational circumstances. It helps the facilitator discern the fit of a process with a particular group and its decision goals, establishes task and relational message requirements, and provides a basis for monitoring compliance with or need for adaptation of the process design.

For example, a multistakeholder steering committee for a group decision forum established the problem to be solved by a group. When the facilitator stated the problem to establish the focus for the next step, an influential member expressed dissatisfaction with the problem statement. The facilitator solicited the objections of the member and soon recognized that the objection was based in a power issue: whose interests were going to define the problem to be solved. The facilitator offered a more inclusive phrasing of the problem that satisfied the objector and was acceptable to all present. The facilitator’s ability to read the messages of the dissatisfied member at both the task and relational levels contributed to her ability to resolve the dispute without a protracted discussion or additional process in an already time-constrained meeting.

A process design is valuable, but being able to “see” from a communication perspective can be useful. It is not enough to know if members are off-task or following the rules of good group citizenship. Communication is more than a conduit of information or just performing decision-making tasks. It also constructs, or “makes,” the group’s reality of itself, decisions, and the context in which it is embedded. “Group decisions [are] social products emerging from and embedded in a ‘social milieu’ (or ‘reality’) that is both created and sustained through communication” (Poole and Salazar, 1999, p. 172). Group communication can reproduce or alter group reality and decisions. The consummate facilitator maximizes constructive and productive interventions by providing and facilitating procedural messages that address both the decision-making tasks and the relational aspects of group communication.

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