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To move from brainy atoms (individuals) to brainy molecules (teams) needs the skills of team chemistry, otherwise known as facilitation, sometimes by someone within the team, sometimes by an external agent (catalyst), if the degree of personal involvement or complexity of the issue demands it. Some think that facilitation is a fairly passive activity and that it merely requires the ability to write on a flip chart or hand some Post-It Notes out. I once sat in on a session where the facilitator more or less pointed out where the toilets were and mentioned timings for coffee and lunch. This is rather more like the kind of guidance given to you on an aircraft before take-off and gives facilitation a bad name. Equally bad is the type of facilitation I have seen within one or two otherwise great companies, where open-ended brainstorming sessions are run more like a question and answer session. Simply stated, bad facilitation is not worth having, but good facilitation can transform a situation beyond the simple signposting or didactic brainstorming approaches implied in our examples. How should we know the difference between effective and less effective facilitation? Well this comes down to how we measure the output of a piece of facilitation. There should be a very high ratio between thoughts and deeds after the intervention, and ideally no gap at all between talk and doing, i.e. 100% conversion of decisions taken into purposeful action.
Great facilitation leaves no gap between thoughts and deeds.
A great team facilitator will adopt a range of styles that are consistent with the need, shifting shapes in response to the evolving need across the entire spectrum of behavioural styles available to them. I especially like John Heron’s model of intervention styles, since these cover interventions across the spectrum from directive to non-directive and flag the many roles that a great facilitator must cover:
Prescribing (directive): Essentially a ‘tell’ style. For example: “Take these pills and you’ll feel better.” Prescribing is probably the quickest way to get someone to do something. However, the quickest way is not always the most effective way. We know full well that we do not always take the doctor’s advice if it does not accord with our own wants, whims and fancies as articulated by the Dunning-Kruger effect, where people of low ability tend to assess their own cognitive abilities as being superior to experts and vice versa. It is perhaps for this reason that the other styles exist, since we are not that great at taking direct advice if it is dissonant with our prevailing paradigm.
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Informing (directive): Neutrally passing on information, ideas and knowledge. For example: “I can tell you that your team scored minus 25 on risk taking.” This gives people the chance to make their own minds up without feeling pressurised or manipulated. Informing does not draw a conclusion. It simply provides neutral information, leaving the recipient to draw their own conclusions and formulate actions. However, one then needs a lot of time for team members to process the information provided to them and come up with options and actions to address the need. There is, of course, always a risk that the information will be processed but no action will result or possibly the ‘wrong’ course of action. While informing might be more effective in the long term, it requires more time and processing power than prescribing.
Confronting (directive): Involves challenging viewpoints and requires the examination of motives. For example: “You said that you wanted to devise a creative strategy, but I’ve noticed that every time we try to do this you want to talk about what the company is doing about the Christmas meal.” Confronting should not be confused with aggression – it can be done with a soft pillow as well as a hard edge. Confronting is, however, one of the more difficult interventions that a facilitator can undertake as it usually results in some level of cognitive dissonance, where people are held to account or get ‘found out’. Done with skill, it can be very effective and relatively quick, but once again the Dunning-Kruger effect applies and people can become actively defensive or, worse still, passively so, which is harder to spot.
Non-directive interventions usually take longer than directive ones. After all they are literally less ‘direct’. However, they can be very effective in more troublesome situations. They also require greater levels of skill and sleight of hand techniques to make them work. The TV detective Columbo is a great place to study these interventions used in a particular direction. Columbo rarely confronts his suspects, using a series of much more subtle but clever interventions to smoke the culprits out. Far from a simple piece of entertainment, I discovered from the Metropolitan Police Diplomatic Protection Group that they use Columbo at Hendon Police College to train their top detectives for similar reasons that I have described here, contrasting the approach with some less effective approaches from other TV copumentaries.
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Cathartic (facilitative): Interventions that enable people to ‘get things off their chest’. For example: “Can we spend some time exploring what it feels like for you to lead this project?” Catharsis can be extremely powerful as a means of allowing people to relieve tension about things that are hard to express in more direct terms. One example of this is the use of extended metaphor, where the facilitator asks the team to describe the issue under discussion in metaphorical terms. Sometimes this level of detachment allows people to say hard to say or unsayable things. See also our discussion on 2nd and 3rd positions from NLP in Dialogue I.
Catalytic (facilitative): Providing a sounding board and helping others to come up with their own solutions. For example: “Would you like to explain more about the opportunities for business improvement?” Catalytic interventions build on the idea of catalysis in chemistry. A catalyst is used in small doses to promote a reaction, but is itself not involved in the actual reaction and remains unchanged at the end of that reaction. It is once again a detached position to take for the facilitator, giving others space to reflect, consider novel ideas and rethink old approaches.
Supporting (facilitative): Feedback to staff in which they are actively listened to and encouraged in what they are doing. For example: “I can understand why you would feel that the company is benefitting from your strategy to encourage innovation from what you have told me.” Supporting is often of great value when using the more challenging interventions in the facilitator’s toolkit. It provides the essential positive assets in the ‘bank balance’ between the facilitator and the team to draw on when dealing with more challenging elements of the team’s agenda. In general it is always wise to use plenty of pull strategies if you are also pushing for change and a sensible ratio is at least 2 : 1 pull : push. It is also important to consider the ‘rhythm’ of your interventions. After all, facilitation is like a dance at some level and keeping in step with those you are attempting to engage in the dance of change is important if you are to maintain a high conversion ratio of thoughts into actions.
Great team facilitators are both well prepared and also great improvisers to follow lines of enquiry, balancing the need for direction with the need to facilitate thinking and action within teams. Here are ten starting questions to ponder next time you are called to facilitate a team:
1. Why are we doing this in terms of the higher purposes for the team and the enterprise?
2. What are the needs of the situation I am working with (outcomes)?
3. Who are the people? What are their individual needs in terms of outcomes and the journey toward those outcomes?
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4. What are the team’s wants as a collective (routes, journeys, environments)?
5. How can I design a process that engages with team preferences (wants) without prejudicing the outcomes (needs)?
6. What information must be made available to the team before, during or after the intervention?
7. What techniques or combinations of techniques are most expedient to have as a starting plan, given the answers to the above questions?
8. Where are we planning to meet? What environmental considerations are important in terms of physical or psychological environment?
9. How much time is essential in order to do a good job? Is there any implied order or sequence of the issues that must be tackled?
10. What facilitation styles do the answers to the above questions demand of me and how best might this be conveyed to the team?
An important dilemma is deciding on the bandwidth of styles that you are able and willing to use. This requires that you know yourself. A key factor in determining how you will facilitate a team is your own personal preferences. This is what Charles Handy has called a ‘proper selfishness’, what Daniel Goleman calls ‘emotional intelligence’ or what the Swedish pop group ABBA called ‘Knowing me, Knowing you’. If the group need is outside your personal preference range, you have several choices to address this:
Act as if you can: Adopt the desired behaviours until they become part of your repertoire. Practice does of course make perfect, although this is not a strategy to use in areas of critical need for your team. This strategy is much better used with self-disclosure for authenticity.
Change the raw materials: i.e. get someone else to do it. Use a specialist to deal with a specialist need rather than attempting to ‘fake it till you make it’.
Use self-disclosure: Tell the team that this is not your forte and ask for their help/tolerance/forgiveness. Although this sounds like a ‘weak’ strategy, it has the side benefits that it is (a) very authentic and (b) ensures the team takes some level of ownership and gives you the support you need to succeed.
Above all else, it pays to have an awareness of your personal preferences with respect to facilitation. This allows you to make a conscious choice as to whether you feel able and confident to flex your style. All of the above assumes that you are working with an intact team of employees. But even this is under review in an age where team membership is transient. In some cases the team might be composed of people off the payroll or freelancers. How can you make teams work in such circumstances?
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The gig economy and teams
I asked Professor Charles Handy what he thought would become of large organisations and enterprises at the launch of his book The Second Curve. As is becoming of Charles, he simply shrugged the question off casually and said, “Oh, that’s easy, they will just become irrelevant”. In conversation with Peter Cheese and a group of CIPD leaders we concluded that while this was a trend, it was unlikely that our enterprises would disappear completely, yet we all agreed that they would need to reform structurally and culturally if they are to remain relevant. In particular, the declining half-life of knowledge, globalisation and the development of the gig economy make it much more likely that we will be working as portfolio workers in the future. We will also see much more floating team membership as a result of the gig economy whereby team membership will be at least transient and, on occasion, might be a single assignment or task. Individuals will need to learn how to join and mesh with teams rapidly. Leaders will need to learn how to form and reform virtual teams rapidly around shifting priorities, multiple geographies and with differing motives for participating in those teams. To make agile virtual teams work leaders must:
• Spend time clarifying goals that align the enterprise’s purpose with individual talents and how these talents can combine for effective teamwork. So much time and energy is wasted in unformed teams, yet the remedies are simple if leaders go slower at the outset to enable them to go faster when it counts and ensure new members are inducted quickly and effectively into the team.
• Create a climate/culture where virtual collaboration is natural, including the rituals and routines that support cohesion and talent sharing. In real teams, we can easily detect nuanced communications through body language, facial expression and other signals to gain insights into small but vital information on the health of our team. In a virtual team it is different. Much of the time there is no facetime. This means that leaders must judge the health of their team in other ways. Leaders must become adept at reading the minimal cues people give out across virtual communication devices. The good news is that the lack of a visual stimulus can actually help in terms of really listening to what is said and what is not said. I learned this directly when tutoring as an MBA student where much of my contact with students was by phone. What I lacked in specific knowledge about them was counter-balanced by ‘meta-knowledge’ of how they spoke. I could usually detect if there was something deeper that they wished to tell me if they called to discuss general progress and this work on the phone was an excellent arena for deliberate practice of Heron’s six facilitation styles.
• Manage differences and diversity. Requisite diversity is a fundamental business issue if you seek innovation and not a nice-to-have addition to the HR department’s remit. We explore this further in the section ‘Opposites attract’ coming up.
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• Structure their teams organically so that they can quickly reform and regroup around changing priorities. Paradoxically this requires the development of stronger team norms in terms of Tuckman’s model of forming, storming, norming and performing. So many dysfunctional teams I see these days are not ‘mature’ in terms of this model, with disastrous consequences for collaboration and performance. Although high turnover of team members can be stimulating, continuity and effectiveness are the casualties. Leaders make entry, exit and re-entry seamless and efficient.
• Develop rewards and recognition based on coopetition where all win for audacious results and great efforts, regardless of whether they succeed. The best teams and their leaders play the game of reciprocity really well. This is the ‘give and give’ game rather than the ‘give and take’ game. It is the ‘win-win’ quadrant of our Man-Machine grid where men/women and machines are maximising their coopetition. There is a virtuous circle of reinforcement going when teams use such strategies and the smart leader ensures that the circle is unbroken and fast flowing from purposeful action to reciprocity and reinforcement.
• Build support systems around teams, not the other way round. While humans are hugely adaptable, if we want enterprises that engage heads, hearts and souls, we need to give due consideration to the adoption of systems by people. Support systems at work should be light touch and not high maintenance. We have all had the experience of deciding not to use a system because the effort somehow outweighs the benefits.
• Leaders as synthesisers. Synthesis is the art of bringing diverse ideas together in a way that makes more sense and value than the individual ideas alone. The synthesiser sees connections between disparate items of information, provokes others to make these connections and signposts people on the systemic connections between where they have been, where they are, and where they might want to go next, so that people can see the wood and the trees. Good synthesis can identify issues people agree upon, issues that still need investigation or ones of inherent uncertainty.
How then do multi-disciplinary teams actually work in the knowledge age? We went to Arthur D. Little to find out. ADL have perhaps above all else been first movers in the knowledge economy. Here Greg Smith and Carl Bate share their views on how ADL harness collective intelligence to address VUCA problems.
In 2007, technology was an integral part of all projects as part of Arthur D. Little’s People, Process and Technology approach. Yet 90% of tech enabled projects failed to meet expectations. We reflected that either we were poor at doing them, that they are indeed difficult or that we were doing something wrong. We decided to explore the last hypothesis and evolved a number of unique features that set us apart from the crowd:
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• We ‘bake in’ human factors to our work at the outset. All too often technology projects undertake the tech implementation and then do the change management, which leads to adoption problems. This includes how we go about individual selection and the way we set our teams to work on client problems and opportunities.
• We are more concerned with what C.K. Prahalad calls ‘next practice’ rather than ‘best practice’, which is more to do with keeping up. Benchmarking can be seen as a ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ approach to strategy.
• We realised that we were conflating a complicated system with a complex system in terms of what we learned from the differences between Dave Snowden’s Cynefin approaches of simple, complicated, complex, chaotic and disorder. Snowden defines and describes four primary domains with the direction of drift in enterprises from complicated to complex:
Obvious. The relationship between cause and effect is clearly identifiable and understood by all.
Complicated. There is an identifiable relationship between cause and effect, but the relationship needs to be discovered through analysis or investigation.
Complex. A relationship between cause and effect can be identified in retrospect, but not in advance.
Chaotic. There is no identifiable relationship between cause and effect.
• We fundamentally start with gaining a whole system definition of a project, testing to destruction the various hypotheses that people come up with about what they consider the problem is. We challenge the ‘specious certainty’ of the ‘problem-solution’ paradigm: placing too much certainty on the capacity of new technology to deliver operating-model change; setting unrealistic expectations and outcomes and creating long-term plans that aim to deliver in the future what is actually required today; and having blind faith in immutable, up-front specifications and then failing to re-assess regularly enough whether to further invest, pivot or stop.
• Rather than leaping to solutions, we spend a long time with our project teams getting to the heart of a given problem using what we call ‘pattern breaking’ and ‘pattern matching’. Essentially these are a playbook of techniques that enable us to test hypotheses and converge on the one from which all others flow.
• We start with the end in mind, thinking about jobs to be done more than technology per se. This focus on ends means that our teams are smoother and faster with implementation.
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Because ADL are problem-led rather than solution-focused, they have not sought to scale the operation in the same way that other larger technology consulting houses have done. In the case study below, Greg and Carl explain how they put these principles to work, using a team that came together at BA and eventually ended up working at Arthur D. Little.
Flying without lights at BA
British Airways have all the resources they need and, therefore, they do not necessarily need external help. We therefore took the approach of asking them for an intractable problem to solve. One such wicked problem was that of the snow in 2014, which shut down the airline during the early days of the new London Heathrow Terminal 5. Since BA were responsible for the terminal passengers blamed them rather than BAA for the failure. Arthur D. Little were told that they had five months to develop a solution that worked to make BA fit and fast. This would have been impossible in the steady state operation, due to the complex procedures and protocols, so Arthur D. Little insisted on moving the development into a technology start-up environment, where five months would be sufficient to do what was required. BA CEO, Willie Walsh made a public statement and this triggered a number of strategic actions: “Next winter, we will fly if it snows.”
The main difficulty in realising a technology-based solution to the problem was around information provision, which was late, imperfect and often difficult to interpret. In the first six weeks we concentrated on building credibility and plausibility within BA that a solution was possible. It was not possible to develop the solution in this time but there had to be something which people could touch that developed confidence in the system. Once this had been achieved there were 14 weeks to develop an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). We aimed to iterate the product every four weeks, thus building in the possibility of 4 × ROI (Return on Iteration). The product went from being a crisis management tool for 80 people to a situation awareness tool for 15 000 people. In doing so, we had to work with the people in the unit rather than picking people who were attuned to the solution and then undertaking a change management project to gain adoption. This produced a certain amount of realism, which was valuable for the project. We were assisted by the mandate from Willy Walsh and we considered that we had a finite number of architectural exemptions and that helped us gain acceptance for the project. Negotiation was reserved for absolutely critical requirements to make the system work.
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Don’t take the cheap shots as they can turn out to be the most expensive ones. Don’t pick fights just for the sake of it. It requires a fine balance between confidence in what we were recommending plus humility to get people to sign up to it.
Storm St Jude provided an opportunity over two days to test the system and between 12 000 and 14 000 people reached their destination who would normally not have managed to do so. When BA stopped cancelling flights all the other airline’s performance improved and the press stopped bashing BA.
We used an old school approach – instead of using predictive analytics, we used descriptive analytics in near real time, which allow people to affect the outcome. We persuaded BA that prediction of unknowable incidents was a waste of time but the ability to help people make the best decision with real time data offered real possibilities of addressing the presenting problem.
In the event, this required Arthur D. Little to put together a team of diverse people in record time to deliver the project, combining specialists, generalists and gig workers into a team that could focus on the goal in a seamless way. Requisite diversity demands that leaders are good at bringing opposites, and even misfits, together in a collective effort and this requires that they are excellent at managing conflict.
Opposites attract
Gone are the days when a lone individual could envision and develop all the ideas to conceptualise and execute an innovative product or service. Innovation is now a team game and one where cross-disciplinary thinking and working are essential. In pharmaceuticals, we combine apps with traditional treatments as ‘Healthware’. Remote medicine is not far away. In financial services, Fintech may replace traditional banks that have always been interested in automating functions to reduce costs, provide better audit control, such as our example with CaseWare and improve customer access. Even the United Nations can no longer recruit weapons inspectors who are PhD physicists or chemists alone. They must be skilled in computing, biotechnology, physics and so on to function effectively and work as an effective team to face the complexity inherent in modern weapons and warfare. How then shall we combine our intelligences for SCA?
I wrote the title of this section and almost as soon as I did, Prime Minister Theresa May used the phrase to describe her potential relationship with President Trump. Nonetheless I am compelled to continue writing . . . Diversity is not a nice-to-have fluffy concept for the HR department to run events around and proclaim at every watercooler, washroom and website. It is a crucial business issue that separates the sheep from the goats in organisational life. Should diversity be distributed across the whole enterprise or concentrated in areas such as the R&D division? This is a hard question to answer with certainty, as it is highly situational and culture dependent. However a mathematical comparison gives some clues. A study was made on the innovation structures at Apple and Google and some differences observed.
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• In ten years Apple produced 10 975 patents from a team of 5232 inventors.
• Google produced 12 386 from a team of 8888.
• However Apple’s core shows a group of highly connected super inventors at the centre.
• Google’s structure is more dispersed, empowered and networked.
• The researcher Bernegger points out that there is more connectivity and collaboration at Apple with the average number of inventors listed on a patent as 4.2 as compared with 2.8 at Google. This translates into an ROI (Return on Innovation) of 9 at Apple compared with 4 at Google.
This example teaches us that requisite diversity is valuable for innovation, but also that where there is diversity there is a need for connectivity and collaboration as well, however this is organised. Context matters in terms of what works in a given culture. We explore the structural ramifications of this later on and in Dialogue III.
However, opposites are hard to tolerate in business unless you work really hard to hear ideas that do not accord with your own. The barriers to profiting from diversity are many and include a digital versus analogue approach to decision-making. What I mean by this is an on/off approach to making decisions rather than an approach that relishes contemplation and delay. Sometimes it helps to have a common language to describe differences and I have found Dr Meredith Belbin’s approach to this helpful and durable over many years.
Belbin was fascinated by how management teams worked or did not work. He summed up some of the concepts in his first book Management Teams: Why They Succeed or Fail. Belbin said, “Nobody is perfect but a team can be”. We must manage differences in biodiverse teams and a first step toward this ambition is to understand the raw materials you are working with. He identified eight roles in an effective team. These broadly break down into four higher-level functions, which offers a greater level of simplicity. Idea generators comprise the plant and resource investigator roles. Plants tend to be the pure idea generators, sometimes solitary and often untrammelled by current constraints. The resource investigator is the person that will get out and find someone or something that can realise an idea. Leaders comprise the coordinator, who makes sure there is good participation in a team, and the shaper, who nudges, cajoles, tells and sometimes manipulates to stop the team procrastinating. The third pair of roles are the checkers: monitor-evaluators are the arbiters of quality and good judges, whereas the completer-finishers are detail-conscious people who will plan to deliver a high-quality job. Finally the do-ers comprise the team worker who listens well, harmonises conflicts and supports the team, and the implementer who is stoic, getting on with the work. If a team has an obstacle preventing it from working then these general principles adapted from Belbin’s approach help it to succeed:
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If eight roles are too many for your team, I find that the Disney Creativity Strategy is another ‘pracademic’ model that helps teams focus on the roles needed in an effective team. The Disney Creativity Strategy is based on the adoption of typical roles seen in creative teams, allegedly from Walt Disney’s own observations of what made a team succeed or flounder:
• The Dreamer: whose thinking is unconstrained by limitations, conventions, etc.
• The Critic: whose role is to examine potential constraints to achieving the dreamer’s ideas. (Note: this does not mean they criticise – they employ critical thinking which is a subtle but important difference.)
• The Realist: whose job it is to synthesise the Dreamer’s dreams with the Critic’s constraints to come up with novel ideas that can be implemented.
There are many ways to use the Disney Strategy in teams: in sequence; in parallel; in situ; over time, etc.
TABLE 7.1
Team development follows a time-honoured process and leaders would do well to understand, manage and respect the process. A team does not just form overnight. It needs to be nurtured and goes through a series of rites of passage, whether or not the membership is permanent or temporary. Usually, a team is not effective until it has passed through its forming, storming and norming rituals. Only after the storm do team members normally work out exactly how their roles interlock and support one another. Once a team is at the performing stage the atmosphere becomes quietly productive, with occasional meetings to fix problems and check on progress. New members can help you renew, or a new problem can reinvigorate the team. In modern teams some of the members are transient and this can mean that the team never forms properly without deliberate intervention by the leader.
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GROUND CONTROL
Balancing head, heart and soul
To what extent do you attract similars or opposites in your working life? Does this differ in your private life?
How do you challenge your viewpoints and beliefs on a regular basis?