15 Apr Meeting in complexity
What is your approach?
Messy Meetings
We’ve been thinking about the ways in which people come together to solve complex problems. We are thinking about it because of @AdamKahane’s new book, and because we have been asked to help with a few complex problems:
- Help two teams solve a complex, multi-year cross-team problem.
- Help a group of banking support team members build skills and confidence to assist with conflicting waves of change.
- Help a group of local government support managers transform a politicised and stuck bureaucracy.
These jobs share two characteristics:
- They are messy.
- People are being called together – for fixed periods of time – with a facilitator – to try to resolve them.
How would you run the meeting?
Given a binary choice between “manage” the meeting or “facilitate” the meeting, we don’t think meeting management works. By the nature of a complex situation, no one person can see the way through. If they could, it would not be complex. We suppose by the time they called us they had tried the “expert” approach with the “boss” telling everyone what to do – and it had not worked.
A complex situation calls for a “probe-sense-respond” approach (see www.cynefin.io for more information). A probe is a small experimental question or action that you take to see what happens. It’s like sticking a pole into a tree to see what might fall out – especially if you think there might be a leopard up there. Better the stick than your arm, you know. Sonja Blignaut calls this “Waysfinding”.
When a group of people have paid a facilitator to show up, they have a certain expectation – usually that the problem will magically be solved in the time given to you. As the facilitator, you know that you might not get anything like a solution, but everyone might only get a better understanding of the problem.
If it is your responsibility to facilitate the meeting, how do you prepare? There are always constraints – certain people with a certain amount of time – and the hope of some issue getting resolved, when the dynamics are not clear to everyone. Everyone sees the thread they hold but cannot see the full carpet. Everyone sees their own part of the story but does not share one story.
How do you prepare? How much pre-design can you have?
A tentative approach
Our recipe of the day is:
- Have and share intentions – your own, built from the brief you were given, with time to hear others and align at the start of the session. It’s a fact that the person briefing you on a complex problem doesn’t know all the parts of the problem. There is a reason the other people will be in the room.
- Have a starting point – where to begin the probing. Provoke the group to draw out the perspectives. From a facilitation perspective, this means setting things up so that people can not only speak but can also listen with curiosity – which is difficult while everyone hangs on to their piece of the story and cannot relate to any other piece.
- Have an ideal process – some imagined way of moving through toward solutioning even as you anticipate derailment. For us, @otto Scharmer’s theory U is a comforting and useful guideline – taking the group from seeing their own part of the story more clearly, to seeing each other’s versions, to prototyping something united and new.
- Remain open to the excitement of detours – @adamkahane calls this “Looking for what’s unseen”. If something previously unseen takes centre stage, then it can no more be ignored than an elephant in your tent camp. You need to pay attention to it as it upsets your lunchtime plans.
- Have fallback techniques to keep moving when there is no more time and no consensus. For us, that is a copy of Liberating Structures in our bag, to be flipped through as we sit alone in a quiet room during a coffee break, rocking backwards and forwards and groaning to ourselves.
Every manager runs complex meetings – this is not just the space of Organisation Design and Development practitioners – what is your approach?
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Change has become an industry, with global players, to whom large firms pay license fees for approaches to change management. If you can afford them, they are superb. If you cannot, what can you do?
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