Category: facilitation

Thinking about systems change practices – letting go

Change Mind MapThis is worth repeating and pondering…

I don’t think there are cheap tickets to system change. You have to work at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off paradigms. In the end, it seems that leverage has less to do with pushing levers than it does with disciplined thinking combined with strategically, profoundly, madly letting go.

Donella Meadows from Places to Intervene in a System

In my line of work, the task is often defined as “help us hold an online event” or “teach us how to work together online.” But in reality, it is always about change. Changing practices or habits. Changing the entire environment within which we work, play and live. Changing our perspectives.

People often ask me to tell them my “success” stories and I tell them two things. One, they are never “my” successes and often we have learned more and more profoundly through early failures so that we would be ready and resiliant to find ways forward towards success.

Change can rarely be dictated nor predicted in a log frame or business plan. So when I saw the Donella Meadows quote, I went ‘yessss.’ Change is as much about letting go as anything else. Letting go of old habits and perspectives. She calls for “casting off paradigms.” Yes.

“…disciplined thinking combined with strategically, profoundly, madly letting go.” Look at that lovely tension. Discipline, strategy, and profound, mad, letting go.

So next I thought about my habits and practices in system change that try and live up to Meadow’s lovely suggestion. I used an image from a session at last year’s International Forum for Visual Practitioner’s session on facilitating community change to jog my mind. Carl Otter has a lot of great experiences to share.

1. Know how to fall down – and GET up again. If I can role model learning through my mistakes, I make the environment safer for my collaborators, clients and colleagues to do the same thing. This does not mean disavowing what we know, but recognizing what we don’t know AND at the same time, not letting either of those things stop us from learning forward into the change. Humility and confidence. And a lot of letting go.

2. Always, always learnto ask better questions, particularly around strategic intent. I used to be great at questions that opened up possibility, but realized I had a lot to learn about questions that helped focus on the strategic intent of change initiatives. I am one of those odd people who loves change and I can lose sight of the goal. In my practice this means being disciplined about not letting someone talking me into doing something with or for them without asking those strategic questions, particularly when it comes to using new technologies and methods. We have a lot of delusions that changing tools means we are changing our systems. Not often the case. I’m still working on this skill of better questions. I think this is more about the disciplined thinking part of Meadow’s recommendation.

3. Find ways to visualize the system. I am pretty new to systems thinking, or thinking about the system rather than just the short term task. But I find we get overwhelmed with trying to get our heads wrapped around the whole system, so anything that helps us sketch and visualize the system helps us then think about how we want to change it. I’m working on the visual practices right now, as well as the thinking ones. This is just simply a practice.

4. Elicit stories. Stories help us make sense of things. They give us lines of sight into others’ perspectives and widen our view of the landscape. They take time. We often want to go fast. I’m learning to design moments for story telling and meaning making into my practice. As a result, there is often less time for benefiting from other traditional learning resources such as papers, etc. There is some tension here, but stories seem to be paying off. I’m still looking for the balance point in any particular context. The corollary is take time for reflection, both personally and as a group. This blog is my personal reflection tool.

5. Bring the players into the room. We have this false sense that we know what is going on, for example, “out in the field.” We often don’t. There is a lot of wisdom to tap and honor.

What are your system change practices?

As a side note – Nexus for Change II is coming up where a heap of people will be thinking about whole systems change, if this is a topic that interests you.

Hat tip to Lilia for the link to the Meadows quote. Thanks, sistah! And through a bit of kismet and timing, a related post on Michele Laurie’s blog.

Roger Schwarz on Email Attitude

Roger Schwarz sends out a periodic email called [Fundamental Change] to let folks know about his workshops and such, but always includes a juicy gift. This month he has a great piece on how to use his “Facilitative Leader” approach in email. As I read the good advice I thought that this applies to any online media. Even voicemails left via Skype. Thankfully, Roger also allows reprinting of his material if it is properly attributed. He even tells you how at the end of the email. That is another useful practice to spread your work virally. Thanks, Roger. So here it is, reproduced AND linked back to Roger. By the way, unsolicited plug, Roger’s books are on the “core, easy to reach” part of my bookshelf. The Skilled Facilitator is a must have if you are a facilitator.

Now the good stuff. Please note, this has a different copyright than the rest of my blog posts. Please honor Roger’s choices!

Changing Your Outlook on Email

“How can I use the Facilitative Leader approach in email?”

This is one of the most frequent questions I get from people who attend our workshops. Most of us spend time every day on email and, for some, it’s our main mode of business communication. The good news is that you can apply the same principles and techniques in email that you use in face to face and phone conversations. Here are some tips for making your email communication much more effective:

Explain your reasoning. Just as you explain your reasoning in a face to face conversation, you do it in email. As I was writing this paragraph I received an email from a colleague who asked, “Will you need me to teach in the March public Skilled Facilitator workshop?” She then explained (I’m paraphrasing), “I can’t find any information saying whether my participation has been confirmed. I have another client who wants me to work on these dates. My preference is to teach in the workshop; I’m not trying to get out of it.” By explaining why she was asking, my colleague gave me all the information I needed not only to answer her question, but to avoid making inferences about why she was asking. By sharing her reasoning for asking, I can now give her an answer that speaks directly to her needs. Take the extra sentence or two to explain your reasoning whether you’re asking a question, sharing a decision, or taking an action.

Share your views and ask genuine questions. When you send an email, don’t simply state your views; follow it by asking a genuine question to learn. Instead of simply writing, “I think we should have the meeting off-site so we don’t get people drifting in and out,” continue by writing something like, “What problems, if any, do you think this would create?” By getting curious and asking a genuine question, you increase the chance that when people respond, they will be addressing your question and you will be crafting a solution that takes into account the range of stakeholders needs.

Test your assumptions and inferences. We make the same assumptions and inferences in our emails as we do in our conversations. In both cases they get us in trouble, when we act on them when they are not true. The first step is to become aware of the assumptions and inferences you’re making. To do this, read through your email before you send it, carefully looking for assumptions and inferences you are making. For example:

“I think we absolutely need to resolve this issue for the client before next Tuesday. I’m setting this as the deadline because I’m assuming that we are still planning to meet with the client next Tuesday and I want the issue resolved before we meet with them. Is my assumption still correct?”

Name your feelings, don’t let people guess them. One problem with email is that the reader can’t hear your tone of voice, see your facial expressions, or watch your other non-verbal behavior. That means that sometimes the reader can’t easily tell whether your comment “I think this project took a lot of your work and didn’t bear the fruit we expected” is one of compassion, frustration, or something else. It’s particularly frustrating when your intent was to be compassionate and the reader interprets your email you complaining or being annoyed. Don’t make someone guess; tell the reader what you’re feeling. Write something like,”I’m not frustrated with you about this, I’m concerned that others didn’t share information with you that would have helped you better navigate the project.” If you are frustrated, say that and explain why.

Stop typing, start dialing. We have so many text- based ways of miscommunicating with each other: BlackBerrys and other PDAs, Skyping, IMing, text messaging, and the standard laptop and desktop email. I’ve noticed that messages I send from my BlackBerry are shorter – and explain less – than messages I send from my laptop or desktop computer. It takes me a lot more effort to type on my small BlackBerry keyboard than on my laptop. I’ve noticed the same pattern for those who send me email. But some messages aren’t meant for email in any case. When you’re dealing with an issue that involves testing a number of assumptions, explaining much of your reasoning or asking others’ their reasoning, or talking about feelings, stop typing and pick up the phone. It’s much more interactive, so you can better explain your views and understand others – in less time than it would take to swap multiple emails.

Productive emailing,

–Roger Schwarz

Publication And Reprint Information

Unless otherwise attributed, all material is written and edited by Roger Schwarz, Ph.D. Copyright © Roger Schwarz & Associates. 2008. All rights reserved.

I invite you to reprint material from Fundamental Change in other electronic or print publications provided this copyright notice (“Written and edited by [Author], copyright Roger Schwarz & Associates, [year]. All rights reserved.”) and a link to http://www.schwarzassociates.com/ is included in the credits. Please send a copy of the publication along with a note referencing the reprint.

“Fundamental Change” is a trademark of Roger Schwarz & Associates, Inc.

Conference Call Practices for Learning and Knowledge

My friends John Smith and Shawn Callahan have put together a great resource for communities of practice, teams and other groups who use teleconferences calls. Conference call practices to generate knowledge and record learning

True to form in our informal network, Caren amplifies, and we continue to build on our old history .

Pretty cool…

Learning Over Each Other’s Shoulders

(Note: this  blog post dates from September 13th 2007 on my old blog. It had  been in limbo since August 30th. There was so much more to add, but I decided it is time to put it in the wild and not lock the partial thinking in the “draft” queue! Now I am republishing it today as I have a coda to add and the older blog post is hard to find…)

The Original Post

I have been part of quite a few informal conversations recently about how to “learn how to do this web 2.0 stuff.” Not just learn it, but learn it in the context of it adding something useful to our work and lives. The volume, the subtleties of useful practice, can feel overwhelming. Our sense of inadequacy can paralyze.

In Cali, Colombia, I led a workshop about facilitating online interaction and we used the Social Media Game to add context to this flood of “cool new tools with weird names. ” I think the most engaged moment was when people were in small groups, explaining new tools to each other and thinking about what might be useful in their work. It was still pretty abstract. We did not get hands-on. But people noted that the tool stuff was of a great deal of interest.

I always try and promote the people and process stuff, but the reality is that tools are often the “door opener” to the process conversations because they are more tangible. So being able to “look over the shoulder” as someone uses the tools in a social context would be really useful.

In Bogota, Colombia at the very well attended “Quality in eElearning” conference I had a side conversation about ways to usefully use Twitter, Wikispaces and del.icio.us with a couple of my co-presenters, and a separate conversation with Jay Cross about doing an “Over the Shoulder” camp. Inthe instance with Ulf-Daniel Ehlers it didn’t start out as a conversation. I had mentioned and showed a Wikispaces page in my presentation the day before. During the third day where we were relaxed in the “participant” role, I was sitting next to Ulf and noticed he was messing with a wikispaces page he had set up. I showed him a couple of things. He shared a few links. Together, we figured out how to embed del.icio.us links into a Wikispaces page from a great blog post I had found a while back. In the mean time, Virginie Aimard was looking over from the other side, following silently along on our digital journey. Back and forth.

A few weeks later I was the guest for a “10 Minute Lecture” for Leigh Blackall’s Online Learning Communities course, centered in New Zealand. (You can see the slides, audio and Elluminate recording here.) The theme was peer learning – a communities of practice perspective. Leigh had initially asked me to talk specifically about Peer Assists, but I felt a larger issue tugging at me – this “over the shoulder” stuff.

We talked about this mode of learning from each other. I really enjoyed the conversation and poof, the hour was up. But then the blog posts from course members started showing up – those who were in the live session and those who viewed the recording. There the themes of inadequacy, of the pressure of time to do this learning, of possibility. I felt this little frisson of learning, that was a bit of learning over each others’ shoulders. For me, it was then important to comment on each of the blog posts that mentioned my name, thus showing up in my feed reader, because learning from each other has that back-and-forth quality. It is iterative. Conversational.


And so this thinking, doing, experiencing, advocating for over the shoulder learning comes back to a reflective blog post. Because reflection is the final piece that cements it together.
Comments from the original post on Blogger:

2 Comments:

Anonymous Beth Kanter said…
Nancy: I love the idea of “over the shoulder” camps. At one point, durin my circuit riders – we used the term “shoulder-to-shoulder” to describe informal, small group computer instruction. So, what you are talking about is the network effect of this type of learning?

3:20 PM
Blogger annelizbeth said…
Fascinating…absolutely fascinating. I am currently engaging in an effort to provide a perspective on the state of “learning” for a npo client…will be sure to include your futuristic thoughts around where we are headed…!

7:43 PM

Today’s Update

I have been sick with the flu the last 10 days, eliminating any chance of finishing my year end work and having time for reflection. I have an RFP that I have to respond to this week so I was reviewing some of my pertinent materials – particularly those related to peer learning and online facilitation.

I realized I have never classified much of my work as “peer learning.” More often this has come under the rubric of learning from and with each other in networks and communities (i.e. communities of practice, etc.) I have had a bias for on-the-job, in-the-moment, just-in-time and informal learning, supported with appropriate formal and structured learning. These peer based options give us the opportunity to learn both in context and with the give and take that reveals the texture and nuances of those contexts.

It is beyond obvious to state that digital technologies have expanded our possibilities for these peer learning forms. So the reflective question going back, and the learning agenda question going forward is what will advance and deepen our ability to learn with and from each other in the coming year?

What do you think?

What are your most useful synchronous online facilitation practices?

It amazes me how much the online interaction world has moved to embrace synchronous interaction. And not just in the same time zone. It is becoming common for me to have meetings at 6am or 9pm with colleagues spread across the world. We’re using VOIP, chats and more web meeting tools.

In exploring design options for synchronous meetings, I have been thinking about a gradient of modalities and technologies. For one shot interactions where you cannot expect a lot of investment in learning tools or processes, the conference call (land line and/or VOIP) is still the dominant choice, but I try to include SOMETHING visual in the mix. It could be a document or slide deck sent in advance via email, or browsing a shared webpage. Skype’s latest, version 3.0, has a plug in for a shared white board. It can only serve 2 people, but it allows another modality. Likewise, they have a co-browsing tool (which I’ve not explored yet) which could be a really great addition.

The reason to have something beyond the voice is two fold: one is to increase our engagement and participation, particularly for those of us who are not great in an aural-only mode. With a visual, I’m less apt to start doing my email or staring out the window. For the same reason, I love my cordless phone because I find I listen to long phone meetings better when I can walk around and move away from my computer. It does something to my thinking. I’m still hard wired for VOIP calls and, despite the price, I am tempted to get a bluetooth headset for the computer.

The second reason is other tools can support the process of the meeting or gathering. Using a chat room to collectively take notes, or a wiki to evolve the agenda and take notes during a meeting. Co-editing WHILE discussing a document. Queing up questions in a larger phone meeting via chat so that a) you know you are on deck to speak and b) people have a chance to be heard, especially if they are less inclined to jump in to a conversation.

When you get to the place where you are doing larger meetings (over 8 or so), or are doing ongoing live meeting practices, it starts making sense to consider more sophisticated tools and pratices. This is where things like web meeting tools, co-browsing, and such can be useful.

What I notice about web meeting tools is that most of us don’t know how to make the most of them. We may learn how to use all the tools and features, but we haven’t had exposure to good facilitation practices. We try and duplicate offlinen experiences (be they useful or not) and not really take advantage of the medium.

People like Jennifer Hoffman and Jonathan Finkelstein are seasoned synchronous facilitators who have written about the practice. I’ve been reading Jonathan’s latest, “Learning in Real Time” and it is full of great advice, particularly in a learning setting. Jonathan covers the why’s what’s and how’s. His technical review of web meeting features is excellent.

In the “why’s” he talks about the “threshold to go live.” In other words, know WHY you are going live. There is still a heck of a lot of useful applications for asynchronous online interaction.

But let’s get to the facilitation bit (Chapter 5) where Jonathan dives into practices. I love his line “inflate a bubble of concentration.” In other words, when we facilitate synchronously we not only have to manage the software, the domain of the conversation, but we also are working to legitimately request and get the attention of participants who, for the most part, we cannot see. We have to do this across a diversity of styles and skills. It is truly a “ringmaster” job.

There are some great examples in the book, and if you are facilitating online get the book. What I notice is that Jonathan writes about something I learned from my colleague, Fernanda Ibarra. It is the masterful use of a shared white board to move people from being consumers of a meeting to being active participants. Fernanda showed me how she prepared a whiteboard screen with clipart of a circle of chairs. As people entered the web meeting space, she invited them to write their names under a chair. This helped orient them to and practie with the tool, created a sense of “group” and gave a visual focus as people entered the “room.” It was brilliant. I’ve riffed on that idea and found it very useful. We’ve done After Action Reviews with the white board taking the place of a flip chart used F2F. We’ve even had virtual parties. This brings together voice, text, and images.

But back to the practices and skills. What would you say are the top three skills of a synchronous facilitator? The top three practices? Why?

Other Resources:
Top Synchronous Training Myths and Their Realities – By Nanette Miner
InSynch Training and their Synchronous Training Blog
LearningTimes training