Reflections of a Change Agent

How to Start a Movement - Followers, stand up!

2010-04-27T08:07:00.000-07:00

Turns out that tribes, and movements, need followers, not just leaders :) Having just posted that tribes need leaders (people without role power to step up and promote an idea or a change), I just came across this - that movements need followers! Of course we know that, but the way that this is presented is excellent (video link below).

Derek Sivers maintains that while the leader is over-glorified, the guy who should get the credit is the first follower, because s/he's the one who transformed that "lone nut", the initiator, into a leader, by standing up and joining in, or joining the cause.

"When we’re told we should all be leaders, that would be ineffective. If you care about starting a movement, have the courage to follow and show others how to follow. When you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first one to stand up and join in."

Check out this TED video.

Tribes - They Need Us to Lead Them!

2010-04-17T16:44:00.000-07:00

I'm loving this book: Tribes: We Need You to Lead US, by Seth Godin. The premise is that tribes are groups of people waiting for a leader, someone to identify a compelling goal, to promote it and to convene people interested in that goal. The leader also has to create avenues for communication between the group members, so that they're talking to each other - and the group takes on a life of its own! Godin captures the mood exactly, recounting that the Greatful Dead held concerts "not just for fans to hear their music - but to hear it together." Brilliant. There's even a restaurant in New York that only opens once in a while, and you sign up in advance to go there; people are going not just for the food, but to be with their tribe members!

Godin proposes that anybody can be a leader; it's not about your position - it's about creating something that people believe in, generating exciting ideas - and that can come from any level of a company or organization. Leaders are people who question the status quo, he says. How nice to find validation for those of us questioners!
So I've chaired a professional development organization for facilitators, executive coaches and OD practitioners (Organizational Development), the Boston Facilitators Roundtable, for 10 years, and I'm thinking we've become a tribe! People come to meetings because they enjoy learning together; there's a wonderful buzz when you walk into the room. When I started, 10 years ago, I created an online listserv and encouraged members to talk to one another, not to me! because I believed that we needed that interaction to build the community- and that listserv now hosts a dynamic exchange of ideas, questions, and resources. So I'm loving this description of how leaders mobilize a tribe:

translating a shared interest into a goal that people are passionate about
providing tools for members to communicate
leveraging the group to allow it to grow

I agree with Godin that great leaders shine the light on their teams rather than on themselves. We can easily sense when a leader is serving a group vs. serving their ego. "Great leaders don't want the attention, but they use it." Way to go, Seth.

Strategic Plans - collecting dust?

2010-04-17T16:07:00.001-07:00

How many times have you heard that a company’s strategic plan is collecting dust on the shelf? I just heard it again – thankfully this time, the senior staff know that they don’t want to produce another place-holder on the shelf. They know that they need to focus on implementation, and they need to develop a workplan for ongoing check-ins on their progress. They understood their mistake in not focusing on implementation - and they needed someone to explain that to them.

Sometimes companies don’t know what they don’t know – so they hire someone to facilitate the strategic planning process, without realizing that this generates a change management process, and that they might need ongoing assistance with change management. At the same time, it’s incumbent on us consultants to make this clear – strategic planning is just one piece of a longer process, and the company really needs to pay attention to managing the change. That includes project management, managing the people side of change, and a communications plan, that says who needs to be kept informed of our progress, what they need to know, and how often they need to be updated.

If we help companies manage the change and implementation, they’ll have more room on their shelves – for the books that we recommend, or that we write!

Setting the Bar High for Organizational Learning

2010-04-17T16:02:00.000-07:00

How many CEO’s do you know who keep a daily blog of the workings of the organization, or of a hospital? (see footnote) Can you imagine making public the reflection and problem-solving process in the organization? What a great example of organizational learning Paul Levy is setting at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston. In a remarkable display of transparency, Levy writes:

Regular readers know that I believe in administrative, as well as clinical, transparency in our hospital. I have trouble understanding why this is unusual, but I know that it is. I just can't imagine trying to solve the problems of an organization and having a common sense of purpose and direction unless everybody is aware of what's going on.
Levy has openly discussed problems facing the hospital, from budget issues to health coverage, to surgical errors - all of this open to the public eye. Some people who submitted responses to Levy’s blog disagreed with the open discussion about the surgeon who operated on the wrong leg last year (July 2008). This could have implications for insurance payments, and for malpractice suits, to name just two. In a high-risk environment, the disclosing of errors can be tricky.

On the one hand, leaders in a learning organization want to identify the problems and glean the lessons to be learned. On the other hand, surgeons or clinical staff whose errors are publicized might be less likely to reveal errors in the future – whereas the hospital wants to maintain an open environment where errors and problems can be discussed, at least among the staff. That’s why hospitals have Grand Rounds, so the physicians can learn from the successes and mistakes of their colleagues. In terms of making errors public, it’s also critical to maintain the public trust – so a hospital wants to have a very low error rate – and, being transparent about errors might also serve the public trust. It’s a tough balancing act.

As a leader on the cutting-edge, Levy is taking on that challenge, and seems to be having some success on that balancing tightrope. He understands - and makes is his job to explain to his staff, as a good leader should, - the connection between calling out problems and maintaining a safer workplace:

We need to improve the way we organize work at the hospital to make it more efficient and less expensive. We have taken some baby steps in this direction with BIDMC SPIRIT. This program incorporates "Lean" type of thinking by encouraging people to call out problems in the work place, analyze those problems to their root cause, and invent solutions. If done right, this kind of continuous process improvement makes a safer and more pleasant workplace for our staff.

I’m keeping my eye on Paul Levy’s blog- seems pioneering and “leaderful” to me!

Footnotes:
1. In fact, there are several blogs of CEO’s, including those of Whole Foods, Marriott, NU Horizons – but they don’t seem to have the same organizational earning focus of Paul Levy’s.

2. The Boston Globe reported in July 2008 that “Figures from the Department of Public Health show that in the first five months of the year, hospitals and doctors statewide have reported five wrong-sided surgeries.”

What do surgery and flying airplanes have in common?

2010-04-17T11:14:00.000-07:00

Answer: they’re complex systems, wherein no one person can manage all the multiple events, problems, component parts. And, the way to improve the chances of success – successful surgery and a successful flight – is to use a checklist.

In his book Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande once again astounds with cutting-edge thinking, making connections between unexpected domains, and presenting tools for improving organizational effectiveness. I’ve blogged about his previous books, Better and Complications – and his new book is a suspenseful page-turner. Did you ever wonder what’s in those black boxes on airplanes, which are used to reconstruct mishaps during flights? Ever wonder who listens to those things and what they learn from them? Gawande is your guide – and then he applies the concepts to medicine. It’s all about learning from mistakes: how can we glean the learnings and apply them to the future?

Skyscrapers??
Imagine that you’re working on a construction site building a skyscraper (yeah, it’s a trip reading this book!) How do they coordinate all those systems – electrical, structural, mechanical, etc? Well, they have a construction schedule that lists all of the thousands of tasks, the timeline, and who’s responsible. But how do they handle the unexpected problem that inevitably arises? They have a second schedule called a “submittal schedule”, that details tasks of communication: who needs to talk to whom, by when, who else needs to know about this? Two checklists that work wonders and help manage the complexity.

Just out of curiosity, doctor, how do the nurses, doctors and all the specialists in the Operating Room fare on communication? Turns out that oftentimes surgical teams don’t know each other’s names. The checklist includes – get this – having everyone introduce themselves!! The researchers found that that one element improves the way the team works together (no surprise there). It also helps if you go around and let each person express whatever concerns s/he has about this patient and this surgery. Getting people to say their name and to voice their concern increases their willingness to speak up during the surgery, which can only benefit the outcome.

“Cleared for takeoff”!
That’s all part of the checklist (introduce yourself, express any concern). Before they start the surgery, the nurses have to prepare the surgical instrument kits. The innovation of the checklist was to put a checklist in the kit, to remind them to go through it. There’s also a card (a metal tent) in the kit called “Cleared for takeoff”! Before they can start operating, they have to go through the checklist, and the nurse has to remove the metal tent. That metal tent ensures that the operation doesn’t start until the nurse gave the OK and removed the tent. The other brilliant piece of this? It’s the nurse who gives the OK rather than the doctor, which Gawande calls “a subtle cultural shift”.

Remember those Crucial Conversations (the book by Patterson, Grenny et. al.)? That book talks about how you get the nurses to have those crucial, difficult conversations with the doctors, which is difficult in the hierarchical culture of hospitals and operating rooms. I’m sure Gawande is aware of this, just curious that he doesn’t mention it in this book. You clearly need to train nurses to speak up, to give them the authority, to make it OK to speak up, to get doctors used to listening to the nurses. Now, armed with both books, and both sets of skill building, these clinicians will be better able to handle the unexpected – and those surgical errors should go way down! (The research already shows the improvement).

Shared Leadership... and Balkan Dancing!

2010-04-16T11:29:00.000-07:00

Obvious connection, right? ;0 So, I'm a Balkan dancer - these are usually line dances from Bulgaria, Macedonia, Greece, Albania, etc., with one person leading a line of dancers. These range from the easy, Pravo Horo, to the more advanced, Jove Malah Mome. Notice in Pravo Horo that the leader calls out a new step - and the dancers, who know the dance, know to change the steps. These are choreographed dances, so there's a pattern to them - but not everyone knows the steps! In some videos, you can see the dancers looking at the leader's feet, and they either know the step, or try to figure it out while they're dancing! To see a lot of people who know what they're doing, check out the Folks Art Center of New England! (Try this one: 4th Saturday Dance, February 2009, with the Pinewoods Band).

Why am I telling you this? Because I saw a fascinating lesson in leadership in the dance group that I've been part of for over 10 years. There used to be 1-2 people who knew all the dances, and the rest of us deferred to them to lead the dance. That meant that we didn't need to learn them well enough to lead them - we relied on the 1-2 experts. But if they didn't come one Thursday night, we were stuck! and didn't know when to start or how to lead the dance. We weren't cross-functional!

Then those 1-2 experts stopped attending the dance - and guess what happened? We all learned how to lead the dances - and it's not just 1-2 people; there are 8-10 people who lead the dances, and there are several people who can lead any given dance. We're sharing the leadership!! So if Sue isn't there on Thursday night, Pam, Ruth and I can lead Sue's dances. Isn't that amazing - if you leave people to their own devices, they'll figure out how to lead, and they'll even share the responsibility. It's much more fun this way, because several people get to lead dances.

Not only that, lest we think that leadership and expertise has to reside in one person, we sometimes collaboratively figure out the dance steps - I may remember the first one, Dan remembers the second, Alan remembers the third. So we combine our knowledge, and voila! we have a dance. I love this approach, because we all take responsibility, and know that we have backup. At the Saturday night advanced dance, I'll often say to my friends: ok, you remember this part, and I'll remember that part, so we can bring it back to the Thursday night dance.

I'm thinking shared leadership is the way to go! :)

Women are circular, Men are Linear :)

2010-04-16T08:36:00.000-07:00

Have you noticed that a lot of developmental models are linear? Erikson’s stages of human development are linear, and women researchers have pointed out that women’s lives, and probably many men's lives!, don’t follow those socially-predicated stages. We don’t all follow the sequence of go to college, graduate, get a job, get married, raise children, and their associated skills : developing trust, autonomy, intimacy, etc. Many academics who work on developmental theory, tend to think of human development as circular – we go through one stage and accumulate some knowledge and skill, and move on to another stage – and we often circle back through those stages, gaining new insight from the lens of our current level of maturity. So it’s a lifelong revisiting of those stages, and a cumulative building of those skills.

In a nod to circularity, I was fascinated to come upon the book “The Female Advantage”, by Sally Hegelsen (1995). From her research with male and female organizational leaders, it turns out that many of the men whom she interviewed structured their organizations in a hierarchical way, whereas many of the women structured web-like, circular structures.
At the same time, the trend towards flattened structures, focusing on innovation and information exchange has meant that many organizations have moved away from the hierarchical model. There is also more stress nowadays on the interrelatedness of all things, which fits with the female model. That trend notwithstanding, the research shows a distinct web-like structure that women managers have developed. In that web, the leader is in the middle, the management team is the next ring, and so on, moving out in concentric circles. The idea reflects the reaching out and sharing information across the circles, rather than reaching down, and hoarding information at the top.

Frances Hesselbein is famous for her role as director of the Girl Scouts from 1976-1990. She describes a circular management chart, in which the wheel of jobs spins – management jobs are rotated every few years. This job rotation works well with team building – teams are formed as needs arise, and then disbanded. People serve on different teams and in different positions, which leads to a feelings of common enterprise, and “cuts down on the tendency to form cliques and fiefdoms.” The leaders in the middle see their role as transmitting information – their senior staff are not so much reporting to them, but sharing ideas and projects with each other, and disseminating information outward. This kind of sharing highlights group affiliation over individual achievement – and shifts concern to the group or the whole.

That’s just a teaser for this book. Does this web structure resonate with you?

Asking Doctors Tough Questions

2010-04-15T08:36:00.000-07:00

In previous posts I mentioned the issue of getting doctors to wash their hands, and how hospitals are trying to do that - from an initiative to get patients to ask their doctor, to getting nurses to remind them. So I was quite interested to see this new article from the Wall St. Journal: Finding a Way to Ask Doctors Tough Questions .

For me it raises the question "Whose responsibility is it to get the Doctor to Wash his hands?" The organization's or the patient's? If the organization fails to make this happen, then it seems to fall on the patient. Is that how it should be? Is that even the right question? Or, should we consider this a brilliant solution: the distribution of responsibility to clinicians and patients?
This article points to the need for patients to advocate for themselves, which includes requesting medication and asking pre-surgery questions. Some hospitals have patient advocates, which is a great way to address this issue, because in medical situations where when we feel vulnerable it's hard to speak up. So one side of the solution is advocacy - speaking up for ourselves or getting advocates to speak up for us.
I'm still wondering about the need for the hospital staff to take on these issues, of improving the way they deliver care. I'm fairly sure it's a both/and situation (not either/or) - hospitals need to try to get the clinicians to change their behavior, at the same time that patients need to advocate for themselves.

What about disparity in health care delivery? I noted with interest this sentence from the article: "The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's ... is providing $300 million in grants for community programs designed to get consumers to take an active role in their own care, especially those from certain racial and ethnic backgrounds."

Does this both/and approach mean that the solution rests with the racial and ethnic groups who need to be more vocal, because the research shows that they don’t get the same quality of health care as white, mainstream Americans? Doesn’t the bulk of the responsibility lie with the health care industry to improve their delivery of service, in re. disparity? Having worked on a project to reduce disparities in treatment and prevention of tobacco use, I can see the need to focus on the operational side, on delivery of services. Hopefully there will be more funding put into addressing disparities, which has already begun to happen.

Thanks to Janet Britcher for forwarding the article :)

When Deviance is Positive!

2010-04-14T08:39:00.000-07:00

Speaking of Handwashing in Health Care Settings… Have you heard about Positive Deviance? Deviance in this case means going against the norm and achieving positive results. Sometimes, if things aren’t going well in some departments, you can look around to see if anyone in the organization is having success with that one issue. If they are, they must be doing something right! You want to figure out what they’re doing, and then you want to get other people to imitate that.

Atul Gawande is a surgeon in a Boston hospital, and he’s written 2 fabulous books on learning in health care institutions: Complications and Better. He describes how doctors, nurses, and administrators can learn – from their mistakes, from surgical errors, from places in the hospital where things are going right.
As I mentioned hand-washing in my last post, I thought I’d make this connection. Gawande talks about this in his book Better. It’s been difficult for hospitals and clinics to get doctors to wash their hands between patients – they claim that they don’t have time because they’re so rushed, or that they don’t like to wear gloves. But patients are still getting infected, and one cause is the spreading of germs by doctors who go from one patient to the next without washing their hands or without wearing gloves.

So they searched for departments in the hospital with low infection rates, and they asked, “What are people doing here that makes this successful? What are the conditions for that success?” They found departments where the nurses felt comfortable asking the doctors, and where cleaning dispensers were in convenient locations – and they had their answer. Turns out that when they asked the staff to help figure it out, the staff easily identified various problems, and they became invested in solving the problem. The solutions ranged from operational: installing more dispensers (easy fix) – to training and development (longer term): when the reluctant nurses saw that other nurses were asking the doctors about washing their hands, they began to ask also. Just the fact of asking the staff to help figure it out got them engaged in the problem, and their suggestions were taken seriously – and they began to replicate this across the hospital, and reduced the rate of infections!

Anyone else using Positive Deviance? :)

Oops, They operated on the wrong knee…

2010-04-13T08:38:00.000-07:00

Did you see that some surgeons operated on the wrong knee of their patient last week? (Feb. 18, 2009, Providence, Doctors & Nurses Disciplined), NECN said that “After the botched procedure, the hospital began requiring surgical staff to use permanent markers to mark where the doctor is supposed to operate.” In a similar case (Surgery) at Beth Israel Deaconess 2 years ago, the patient’s leg was marked and they still operated on the wrong leg.

The Sr. VP of Health Care Quality at BIDMC said “that medical workers used a marker to correctly label the side of the patient that should have been operated on but that, somehow, the surgeon failed to notice the marking… Perhaps most crucially, the team of medical workers hovering in the operating room neglected to conduct what's known as a "time out" before the surgeon first placed his scalpel on the patient. Time outs are safety procedures that require the operating team to verbally call out, "Right patient, right procedure, right location."
There’s a conversation that needed to happen. Problem is, in health care, some critical conversation don’t happen, that result in serious mistake, like wrong-side surgeries. There are people who’ve been studying this phenomenon, the authors of “Crucial Confrontations”. They have found that problems arise when important conversations don’t happen, between doctors and nurses, nurses and nurses, doctors to doctors, etc. – because they’re afraid to confront colleagues who make a mistake or cut corners. Even pharmacists are afraid to confront doctors who’ve been hostile in the past.

The solution: teach people to engage in difficult, crucial conversations. In situations where the stakes are high, like hospitals, communication skills are very important – as important as clinical skills. There are those power issues again (see Handwashing post). People need to learn what holds them back, they need tools that will help them have those conversations, and they need to experience what it feels like to engage those who have more political or organizational power.

The results: they’ve seen better patient outcomes when they have these conversations. You can read their fascinating research on SilenceKills.com.

Using Social Networks for Behavioral Change

2010-04-11T16:25:00.000-07:00

If you're trying to immunize people, or to implement a behavioral change, like safer sex, or reducing smoking, how do you apply the science of Social Networks if you don't know what the network looks like?
The authors of "Connected" put it this way: It is often not possible to discern network ties in advance in a population when trying to figure out how best to immunize it. (pg. 133)

So they asked a number of random people to name their acquaintances - and then immunized those acquaintances. Turns out that the people who have many network links are more likely to be nominated as acquaintances, as opposed to those with few links. So the people who were nominated by the randomly selected people are more likely to be near the hub than the randomly selected people! Brilliant! Can't wait for an opportunity to apply this (smile).

The Surprising Power of our Social Networks

2010-04-10T15:54:00.000-07:00

Have you noticed that emotions are contagious?   If there was any doubt about that, this fascinating book lays them to rest: “Connected: The Surprising Power of our Social Networks and How they Shape our Lives”. Great explanation of how emotions and moods can spread from person to person. When I thought about the contagion of feelings, I was reminded of college days when everyone was studying for finals. I used to leave campus because I felt affected by the panic and anxiety among the students – now I find out that there was a scientific explanation for my behavior!

The authors apply their theory to many fields, including relationships, finance, and health care.   In relationships: how did you meet your partner? We tend to marry someone who’s a friend of a friend, or within our extensive social network.

In finance:   If you see a long line outside a bank, chances are you’re going to ask “what’s going on?” and you might join the line to withdraw your money too! Just like Black Monday, the stock market crash in 1987 – when we see other people selling their stocks, we anticipate a downturn, and we sell our stocks. In health care: obesity, sexually transmitted diseases. Obese people tend to have obese friends; we’re influenced by the behavior of our friends and our friend’s friends. So if I’m with a friend who eats a lot, I might eat more than I usually do. In addition to behavior, we change our norms – I might not eat more, but if my friend and her friends become obese, my notion of acceptable body size might change – the norm itself changes.

When the authors and others study social networks, they gain an understanding of how ideas, behavior and trends spread – and they can use this in service of stopping the spread of bad things, like germs or diseases. People working in public health have been using this approach for several years, for example, to get people to practice safer sex, and to use condoms. In order to get the message out with the highest effect, they find and talk to the person or persons who are hubs of those networks – those in the middle who have the most connections, and those who connect different groups of people. Those are the opinion leaders, the influencers.

Likewise, if we’re trying to promote change – social change, healthy practices, or improving a practice in a company or an organization – we would do well to use those influence leaders, both to assess the climate and interest in change, and to advocate for the change.

Have Webinar, Will Travel

2010-04-09T16:27:00.000-07:00

In this age of limited resources, companies are scaling back on travel. But they’re achieving “virtual travel” by providing web conferencing and webinars!

Have you participated in any webinars or web meetings recently? If so, you've probably noticed that the field is advancing before our very eyes. In my attempt to keep up, I started participating in webinars sponsored by various companies, such as publishers and professional associations. It’s great because you get to see how these things are run. I’m always interested in knowing: How interactive are they? Can the participants speak to the presenter or host? How do you ask questions?   This exposure is helping me get over the “virtual hump”, and now colleagues are asking me what functionality is out there!

Here’s what I’m discovering about interactivity: Turns out that many webinars are minimally interactive, with presenters talking for 30-40 minutes. Oftentimes, the webinar allows only one-way audio, to listen to the presenter. If you want to ask a question, you type it in, usually at the end of the session, for the presenter to respond to. In one recent example, I learned that the host is adding an Instant Messaging feature, so you can IM the presenter during the talk. In these presentations there’s often two lead roles: the presenter (content expert) and the host (the sponsoring organization). The host helps out by managing the software, fielding the questions and passing them on to the presenter.

Increasing the interactivity: Most conferencing software now includes polling and/or survey functions, so that the presenter can check in with participants during the session. The more participatory sessions are conducted with collaboration software, for example: Webex, WebIQ (now WIQ), Facilitate Pro. We should be clear what we mean by “collaboration” – are we sharing documents? allowing people to edit the document – one at a time, or several at a time, like a wiki? or simultaneously writing our ideas and submitting them to a shared whiteboard?   The purpose of your online meeting will help determine the functionality that you need; for example, for a presentation, you may only need the presenter to show their slides. If you want people to be able to make comments on the slides, they need editing rights. If you’re brainstorming ideas, you’ll want everyone to be able to write on a whiteboard.

What are the challenges of “going virtual”?   First of all, you’ll want to learn the different capabilities of the software platforms; if you want to host a meeting or a webinar, you have to learn how to use the software, or find someone to partner with who can take on that role.   You have to get familiar with the audio and video features – are you using 2-way audio, so people can participate in the conversation? How do you deal with unwelcome noise?   You may need to limit the number of participants if you’re going to allow for discussion.   If you want to have breakout groups, you have to plan for that; you might have to pre-assign people to small groups, and decide whether they’re going to work on the same task or different tasks. Some platforms allow now allow for breakout groups, which is a wonderful feature (i.e. Webex training center, Maestro Conference).

Want to learn more? You can take advantage of free webinars, such as: American Management Association (amanet.org); HR.com; Pfeiffer Publishers (pfeiffer.com).   See you online!

How many KINDS of People do you Know?

2010-04-08T16:29:00.000-07:00

If you were looking for innovative ideas for in your company, who would you ask? Say, ideas for improving the supply chain. Where, from whom, would you expect people to get those innovative ideas?
Turns out someone has done some research on that, as reported in a fascinating new book "Here Comes Everybody - the Power of Organizing Without Organizations", by Clay Shirky. Shirky describes the research of Robert Burt, University of Chicago, who has written a paper called "the Social Origins of Good Ideas". (pg. 230-231) The people with the best ideas (as judged by the managers) were those who had connections to employees outside their immediate department - their social network extended beyond their own departments. The ideas of employees whose network focused within their department lacked the diversity of thinking and clash of ideas that sparks innovation.
Shirky explains that social networks can have 2 kinds of capital: bonding and/or bridging capital. Bonding capital refers to the connections within a homogeneous group, whereas bridging capital refers to connections between various heterogeneous groups. The employees who had access to innovative ideas had bridging capital to other departments. When ideas were floated within a department in this electronics company, they were often rejected.

What's the takeaway from this? Well, if knowledge is socially constructed, then the potential power of collective knowledge is enormous. For the purposes of innovation, we should look for cross-pollinization of ideas, considered across departments, or across stakeholders. For the purposes of knowledge building, we should look for sharing ideas across our networks.
There was a recent discussion about this in a LinkedIn group. Many of us belong to Communities of Practice, and several of us belong to more than one. Some of us serve the function of “connector”, bridging across those communities or networks, connecting people, and bringing ideas from one community to another. As Naava Frank said, “It is important to help people become aware of which communities they are members and how their role as knowledge brokers can strengthen all of their communities.”

Nay to Robert’s Rules of Order!

2010-04-07T16:06:00.000-07:00

For those of us trained in participatory meetings and consensus building, attending a meeting based on Robert’s Rules of Orders can come as a real shock. Here’s a case where the structure itself doesn’t maximize, and may not allow, inclusive conversation, and the decisions apparently arrived at may not be supported by everyone. It feels constraining to me to define people’s comments as proposals, when we might just be thinking out loud. Sometimes we need to hear ourselves think, or hear other’s thoughts, and see what the range of opinions could be, before we’re ready to think in terms of a “proposal”, yea or nay.
At a meeting I attended last week, soon after an idea was put forward, the moderator asked “Does anyone object?” Moving too quickly to objections doesn’t allow for divergent thinking – it prematurely calls for convergent thinking, when the full spectrum of ideas hasn’t been discussed. Some moderators may allow for longer divergence, but there’s something in the paired structure of proposal and objection that sets up the convergence. As well, anyone who does object to the idea is put on the spot, because their response is set up in advance as an opposing idea, instead of just voicing an opinion, or exploring options. People who have reservations may hesitate to express them at that point, especially if there’s a sense that they are going against the majority view.

I find the language of proposals distances us from the discussion – to me, it detracts from the immediacy of the discussion because we have to think in terms of proposals: is this a new proposal, is my comment a response to a previous proposal, has the previous proposal been decided on, if not, do I have to wait before expressing my thought? If the moderator asks these questions, then I get impatient with them for interrupting the discussion; if I have to ask myself these questions, it stifles the generativity of my thinking. If we don’t want to stifle people’s contributions, then we need to let conversation flow. Good facilitators sense when the options have been exhausted, and they can also check in with the group, i.e. “Have we explored all the options? Are you ready to make a decision?”

To me, a facilitator has done an excellent job when her role seems to be invisible, and when participants have the feeling that they arrived at their decisions by themselves. I have yet to see this kind of excellent facilitation when Robert’s Rules have been used. I’d love to hear if anyone has had a different experience.

The Art of Intervening

2010-04-06T16:35:00.000-07:00

We’ve all been there: someone’s dominating the discussion in a meeting, or the discussion is getting off-track. What to do? Does the facilitator stop the dominating voices, or refocus the group? If not, do you sit there and put up with it? Chances are you’ve experienced both scenarios. As a facilitator, I see it these as two of my primary tasks: to rein in the dominators, to make sure that everyone has a chance to speak, and to keep the meeting on track towards its desired outcome. But ask yourself – is it only up to the facilitator to intervene? What power, if any, do the participants have?

I’m in favor of shared leadership and shared facilitation; I think that anyone in the group can comment, and even recommend a shift, in process. Sometimes the best interventions come from participants. My students asked me recently for language that we can all use, as participants, to shift the conversation. Interventions are most likely to be effective when they exhibit the following characteristics:

They exhibit concern for the benefit of the whole group.
They don’t come across as scolding or blaming.
They come from a place of curiosity, and checking if others in the group share our perception of what’s happening.
They come across as suggestions rather than dictating answers.

Given those characteristics, here are some possible comments to help move the conversation forward:

I’m a little confused; I would find it helpful to know what the goal is for today.
I’d like some clarification - is there an agenda for us to follow?
I’m wondering if we could postpone some of these questions to the end? Or if they could be addressed offline?
I may not be speaking for the whole group, but here’s what I’m noticing… and I’m wondering if anyone else is feeling that way.

Participants don’t have to sit back and give in to their frustration. Let’s give people guidelines to help them help us and the group with the process.

Where Cultural Competence & Organizational Effectiveness Meet

2010-03-24T08:40:00.000-07:00

As an Organizational Development consultant, I get to think about how effective organizations are: their staff, their initiatives, their ability to deliver excellent service. As I’m also trained in cross-cultural communication, I sometimes look at organizational issues through that lens. When I’m lucky, these two fields coincide, as in my visit last year to the administrative offices of a health care organization, where I saw a patient brochure about “hand-washing for doctors”. You may know that this has been a focus in health care institutions, who are trying to reduce the spread of germs and infections. This brochure said “Have you asked your doctor if he washed his hands?”

Can you see anything wrong with this? There are power issues inherent in this question. For one thing, we tend to defer to doctors, or any authority figure, particularly when they’re wearing a white coat (or a uniform, or a stethoscope). Even I, as a white woman, feel a little intimated in front of doctors. Secondly, when you’re serving people from other countries and other cultures, who may not speak the language well, or who don’t feel fully acculturated, the authority gap is even wider. They could have saved themselves time and money if they had convened some focus groups on this question (or they could have asked people like me! :)

Facilitative Leadership

2010-03-22T08:49:00.000-07:00

Shortly after his administration began, Pres. Obama issued a document stating his commitment to open government and transparency. In May, the administration invited recommendations to their new website "Open Government Brainstorming". The organizations who have been involved in the planning of this include NCDD, National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation, America Speaks, International Association for Public Participation, and others. Anyone and everyone can post suggestions on this website. Here's my recommendation on "Training for Facilitative Leadership".

In order to create a program of dynamic public engagement, elected officials and government staff need training in the process and skills required to be successful – and this is a great opportunity to develop such trainings.

In order to support effective public engagement, leaders from federal, state and city government need to learn best practices for engaging the public, to understand:

* Facilitative leadership: they are the conveners of a process, whose purpose is to gather wisdom from many people. They need to identify and include the stakeholders who have a stake or interest, to help solve a problem that no one agency can solve by themselves. Government officials shouldn’t feel the need to have all the answers.
The need for ongoing support and guidance: it’s not enough to convene a meeting of several hundred people. Citizens bring their skills and energies, and a willingness to work with government. They need ongoing support and resources to carry out action plans – people to help them identify their purpose and goals, help with, or training, on effective facilitation of meetings, funding for materials or professional assistance.

* Bringing citizens together to help solve problems raises their expectations. If the conveners - state, federal or local government – cannot deliver the resources or can’t stay engaged in the implementation, then it’s better not to convene citizens in the first place.

Here are some issues to address in a training on “How to conduct public engagement:”

* Who’s involved in sponsoring the event? Who else needs to be involved? How do we get their buy-in?
* How do we get the right people in the room? Who are the “right” people? How do we get the non-mainstream people, or people who feel marginalized, to participate?
* How do we build bridges and trust before the event?
* What do we need to address so that people don’t shrug their shoulders and dismiss the event as “another misguided effort” by the politicians?
* What is our responsibility to participants? Are we raising expectations that we can’t fulfill?
* What resources do we need in order to support the outcomes that the participants generate? What organizations need to be included as sponsors in order to provide those resources?
* What kind of support and guidance should we commit to providing if we’re going to hold such a summit?
* What are the components of an engaging meeting or summit? How do we make it participatory? What kinds of activities should we steer away from?
* How do we get people to engage with one another? How do we build community in such an event?

What's our Impact??

2010-03-21T08:47:00.000-07:00

As group facilitators, we're trained to examine our impact on the group. Skilled facilitators have developed radar that clues them in to how the group is reacting, and they can fix their delivery mid-stream. We look for these clues in-the-moment, and also verbally check in with the group periodically. We also ask for feedback at the end of a meeting, realizing that that's the best way to improve our skills. This is also important to us in our role as change agents or consultants; working with colleagues provides us a wonderful opportunity to get feedback during a client engagement – it’s a way for us to correct course, and to improve our effectiveness.

What about getting feedback as participants, about our impact on the group? I’m thinking of workshops or professional development groups, particularly for facilitators and OD consultants. Can we include the opportunity to get feedback for participants in a group? I think this is more readily done in a multi-day workshop, or in an intact group. If we’re going to include this, we need to establish an atmosphere of trust and set the context for asking and giving feedback. We have to set parameters and have people contract with one another. One rule might be: ask for permission before you give feedback. Contracting questions include: Are you/ Am I, open to receiving feedback? From anyone? Or from a specified person or support group? Should we set aside a certain time for that? If we are careful about the contracting, I think this can be done successfully.

What do they hire us for?

2010-03-20T08:46:00.000-07:00

I often ponder the gift that I/ we as Organizational Development (OD) consultants bring to our clients and to groups. Some consultants come from "the expert" angle, where they think they have the answers. But I’m convinced that it’s the quality of questions that we ask – skilled OD practitioners bring a talent for drilling down, focusing and helping the client get clarity. So I was thrilled to come across this blog:

“This makes me think we look to experts more to frame conversation. Experts ask questions similar to those that are burning in our own heads, but the experts ask sharper questions; the answers we can take or leave, but the questions change us.”

One of the groups that I convene is called “OD and Social Change”, in which we OD consultants discuss a current case from an organization – we kick it around and ask lots of questions, so that we can offer some useful suggestions. The purpose of the group is mutual learning – for the client organization, and for us practitioners – we learn from the way that we each approach a problem, and from the questions that we ask. This week we conversed with a non-profit director about his program, and as I reflect on this quote, I realize that we were doing that “asking sharp questions” piece. What a gift to be able to ask good questions!

Music and Social Change!

2010-03-12T08:33:00.000-08:00

We need inspiring stories to stoke our hearts, and these two fit the bill! These two conductors are using music to promote peace and understanding. Luis Szaran is a Paraguayan musician who is changing the lives of poor children by teaching them to play music. Daniel Barenboim is the famous pianist and conductor, who created an orchestra of Arab and Israeli young musicians, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. Their concert in Ramallah in 2006 was an achievement that confounded logistics and expectations. Some of us were lucky enough to hear the Orchestra when it performed in Providence in 2007.
from Daily Good

In "Sounds of Hope," FRONTLINE/World reporter Monica Lam journeys to Paraguay to meet Luis Szaran, a famous musician and social entrepreneur who has dedicated himself to helping redeem the lives of poor and neglected children through music.
As the son of a Paraguayan farmer, and one of eight children, Szaran rose from humble beginnings to become the conductor of Paraguay's national symphony. With a lifelong passion for music and with a desire to give back, Szaran set up the Sonidos de la Tierra [Sounds of the Earth] music program five years ago to teach music to orphans, street kids and other underprivileged children.

This heartwarming story not only reveals how music has changed the lives of many of these children, but how Szaran has created what he calls "a network for social change" in his country, where communities are coming together and organizing through music.

"You need to understand that Sonidos is not only about good musicians, but also about good citizens," Szaran says. He has established music schools in more than a hundred communities across Paraguay and is now expanding into five other countries.

Dios te bendiga, Maestro!

The West-Eastern Divan is a youth orchestra based in Sevilla, Spain, consisting of musicians from countries in the Middle East, of Egyptian, Israeli, Jordanian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Syrian background. The Argentine-Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim and the late Palestinian-American academic Edward Said founded the orchestra in 1999, and named the ensemble after an anthology of poems by Goethe. The aim of the West-Eastern Divan is to promote understanding between Israelis and Palestinians and pave the way for a peaceful and fair solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Barenboim himself has spoken of the ensemble as follows:

"The Divan is not a love story, and it is not a peace story. It has very flatteringly been described as a project for peace. It isn't. It's not going to bring peace, whether you play well or not so well. The Divan was conceived as a project against ignorance. A project against the fact that it is absolutely essential for people to get to know the other, to understand what the other thinks and feels, without necessarily agreeing with it. I'm not trying to convert the Arab members of the Divan to the Israeli point of view, and [I'm] not trying to convince the Israelis to the Arab point of view. But I want to - and unfortunately I am alone in this now that Edward died a few years ago - ...create a platform where the two sides can disagree and not resort to knives."

One of the young musicians of the orchestra reinforced this point:
"Barenboim is always saying his project is not political. But one of the really great things is that this is a political statement by both sides. It is more important not for people like myself, but for people to see that it is possible to sit down with Arab people and play. The orchestra is a human laboratory that can express to the whole world how to cope with the other."

Although Barenboim claims that the purpose of the orchestra is not to achieve peace, it certainly goes a long way to promoting it, to bringing people together, and to challenging the status quo. Bravo maestro!

What if they held a Civic Summit and... People Came?

2010-03-10T08:45:00.000-08:00

Two years ago, the president of the City Council convened the Boston Civic Summit, with the builder of the Boston Convention Center, whose center has increased visitor traffic to Boston. It was an exciting event with 400 attendees, and could have been a kickoff for energetic action. It was wonderful to see people get excited, brainstorm and share their vision for the city – the kind of discussion that generates great energy that can be funneled into action teams. Unfortunately, there were several problems, with the design and with the follow-up, that could inform future efforts of civic engagement activities.

For example, the Summit wasn’t sponsored by the city, nor by the city council, nor by the mayor – so it didn’t really have legs: No money, no ongoing support, no connection to projects other organizations were already working on. While the event generated 4 action groups to work on 4 identified action items, those groups needed ongoing support and guidance, not to mention resources. They needed to identify their goals, prioritize them, figure out how they were going to work together, and so on. Without that support, 3 of the 4 groups did not continue to meet, and the fourth group lost participants as they continued to hold meetings.
Secondly, the vision that participants came up with needed to feed into city government. The city needed to hear their vision, and to check it with the vision that city officials had. There needed to be a way to keep ongoing communication between the participants and the city, so that they would feel heard, and that someone cared about their input. It’s a shame to generate excitement and to raise expectations and not follow through on them. That’s what makes people cynical about participating in these kind of events.

The beauty of civic engagement is that the government and the citizens work together to solve problems and to improve the quality of life in the city. Elected officials get to see that citizens care and are willing to volunteer their time to make things happen. Citizens get to feel heard, and can feel that their voice matters. It’s not that citizens expect government agencies to do everything for them – they’re willing to pitch in. We know that government by itself cannot solve the large issues that we face: homelessness, protecting and cleaning up the environmental, youth violence. Wouldn’t it be great if they convened multiple stakeholders to a city summit: citizens, business people, non-profits, educators, politicians, to think together and to generate plans for combined action?

My question is: “How can we get elected officials to understand the benefits of involving citizens in solving problems and improving the city?”

Making Peace with Your Enemy

2010-02-20T08:35:00.000-08:00

I have been busy organizing events for 2 peacemakers from Israel and Palestine, who are members of Combatants for Peace. These are Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters who have decided to lay down their arms and to pursue non-violent approaches to resolving the conflict. Two representatives have come to the U.S. to receive a Courage of Conscience award at the Peace Abbey in Sherborn, on March 13, 2009.

The Palestinian, Bassam Aramin, lost his daughter when she was shot by an Israeli soldier on her way home from school. He explains that taking a stance of revenge would be the easy thing to do; the harder avenue is to adhere to non-violence, and that's what he has chosen. Bassam had been in an Israeli prison from the age of 19 for 7 years; he recounts the dialogue that he had with his jailer, in which the jailer came to see Bassam as a freedom fighter, rather than a terrorist - and in which Bassam came to understand the fear of the jailer and of Israelis.

Yaniv Reshef, the Israeli, talks about his experiences serving in the army;   he and his unit, heavily armed from the war in Lebanon, were transferred to Gaza, a densely-populated civilian area where their equipment was inappropriate. They infiltrated houses in the middle of the night, and woke up families.   On one night, their unit of 6-8 soldiers gather up a family in one room, and as they're questioning the family, they hear scratching noises from a nearby cabinet. They point their M15's towards the cabinet, ready to shoot the terrorist who's hiding there - only to find themselves targeting a family of rabbits that the family raises for food.
As I listened to their testimony, and to questions from the audience, it struck me that there are 2 dimensions to their conversation: the personal and the political. That is, the combatants tell their personal stories and talk about their internal transformation – what happened in their lives that led them to lay down their arms. At the same time, they live within a political reality, where there are forces at work that are much bigger than them. I/we hope that fighters everywhere will lay down their arms, but that’s probably going to be a gradual process, and in the meantime, governments are setting policy, buying and using weapons. It seems to me that we need to acknowledge both dimensions, and work on both fronts to bring about peace. Peace is not going to come solely from personal transformation, at this point in history.

Thinking about the personal dimension brings to mind the work of Bob Kegan, Professor of adult development, and Herbert Kelman, Director of the Program on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution. Kegan explains his model of human development in his book, In Over Our Head. In the early stages, people blame others for their problems; they believe the source of the problem is outside of themselves. As they begin to look inside themselves, they discover that the problem is really their mental formulation of the problem and their attribution (or mis-attribution) of causality.

With a nod to Kelman’s work, Kegan explains the transformation in stages 4-5 (what he calls the “5th order of consciousness”, or the post-modern stage), which relates to the nature and resolution of conflict. In stage 4, two parties in conflict see each other as the source of the conflict, and each one believes that if the other party just went away the problem would be solved.   Inherent in that is that they don’t need each other as part of their lives. The transition to stage 5 requires that they realize that their lives are inextricably linked, and that they need one another – and most importantly, if one party goes away, the problem will not be resolved. We need to recognize our need for each other, because we make each other complete. This fifth stage suggests a “kind of conflict resolution in which the Palestinian discovers her own Israeli-ness, the rich man discovers his poverty, the woman discovers the man insider her.”

To me, the Combatants for Peace are working in stage 5 – they seem to need one another, in order to make sense of their experiences, in a way that they understand better than their audiences, better than those who haven't been fighters in that conflict.   They make jokes within the context of the Occupation, and of being in prison, that only they, or the parties in conflict, understand. On spending a lot of time with them, I get to see the intimacy between them, and see how they feed off one another.   They also seem to protect each other when responding to audience questions;   Yaniv is often protective of Bassam, exquisitely aware of the pain of the loss of his daughter, even if it’s not visible during these talks.   These speakers present a powerful example of recognizing the other after a personal crisis of conscience. They exemplify the interdependence that Kegan speaks about: the ability to put yourself in the other person's place, and to recognize your interdependence – preconditions to resolving conflict.

Obama: Accessing the Realm of Possibility

2010-01-20T08:44:00.000-08:00

Bill Moyers recently hosted a conversation on his PBS program with Parker Palmer, author of “The Courage to Teach”, and “A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life.” Palmer was describing how the Obama campaign engaged people, the electorate, in telling stories, and in thinking about the possibilities of his campaign. It was, Palmer said, the first campaign where he didn't feel that the candidate was being "sold" to him. “I was not asked, to buy a presidential candidate as a commodity in a consumer culture... It asked me to tell a story.”

I'm interested in the use of stories in organizations and communities to discuss values, visioning, and determining impact. For example, employees’ stories that can tell us about the values of the company, and how they fit with the individual; stories that reveal people’s hopes and aspirations; client stories about the impact that an organization’s services have had on them. Stories about hopes and dreams take us beyond the “actual”, they give us access to the right-brain and to our emotions, and they generate energy for future actions. So I was struck by the Telling of Stories, and the Questions about Possibility, that the Obama campaign asked people.
I've edited the questions slightly to serve a broader purpose:

* What are the hopes that bring you to this occasion, to the possibility that... this long-shot candidate might represent your interests and might actually get elected?
...that this new program or initiative will work?
... that we can work better together?

* What do you see going on in this moment that makes you think we have a chance to pursue some of the hopes that you've named in those earlier stories?
* Whose am I? (What group do I affiliate with?) What do you mean when you say "we"?
* How do you see your own story relating to the stories of other people you know, and to the larger American story that's going on right now?

To me, these questions connect people to an entity larger than themselves – a campaign, the larger American story, and the historic moment. They offer healing for the past, just by sharing people hurts and disappointments – I don’t think we’ve ever seen that before in political discourse. These are powerful questions, and they offer hope for the future. I'm keeping my eyes open for opportunities to invite people to tell their stories. What's yours??