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Constructivism in Facilitation

On December 22, 2009 By mark

Once a couple of years ago, I was in a car listening to my sister swear at the voice on her car’s GPS system and I once rented a car with the sometimes handy device. Until recently, that was the extent of my expertise with car directional GPS systems but in the last month a series in the Doonesbury comic strip and a quick Google search has expanded my expertise about car GPS systems. I now know that many GPS systems work by mixing and matching fewer than 60 snippets of words. Imagine that driving from cost to coast is dependent on two or three minutes worth of voice commands ordered and re-ordered in ways designed to keep you going in the right direction. Okay, this may sound like trivial pursuit but there is a point to this digression into minutia.

In my experience, many facilitators are as efficient and effective as GPS systems. When the goal is to lead a group from point A to point B good facilitators, adept at using a few skills well, can direct a group. When the meeting gets lost, a good facilitator reshuffles his/her directions in order to get the group back on the right road. Effective meeting management is an essential linear process facilitator skill but unfortunately, facilitation is increasingly less about getting from point A to point B in a linear fashion. Governance and networking thinking is collaborative and non-linear and, as a result, facilitation is fundamentally changing.

This month I have been following a theme in my posts about the shift in business practice away from hierarchy and towards governance and network thinking as they relate to the practice of facilitation. In my last post, I described the role of the theory of empowerment education as a primary influence for facilitators operating in a “governance” or “networked” environment. In this post I want to further expand on the concept of constructivism in facilitation.

First we need to define constructivism in a practical way. Constructivism is the principle that learning is fostered through putting together the pieces in order to create a whole rather than deconstructing the whole into the parts. By reflecting on experience, embracing ambiguity and paradox, and learning collectively groups find more meaningful knowledge. Constructivism is about an iterative process rather than linear thinking and as such, requires new ways of facilitating. In this context, the traditional GPS facilitation tools associated with hierarchical, government thinking are inadequate to address the self-direction that constructivism demands.

At the same time we need to recognize that a constructivist shift in facilitation is not an either/or proposition. Clear meeting facilitation skills are fundamental to any facilitation process. Constructivism simply expands the facilitator’s skills and demands that s/he approach groups with constructivist tasks such as: creating, deciding, predicting, designing and analyzing. For a facilitator such action verbs suggest more than running a good meeting. Facilitating in a constructivist environment suggests three overarching frames:

Facilitate in Ambiguity: Often, constructivist approaches require a facilitator to be comfortable with ambiguity. The mantra that “chaos is okay” runs counter to the command and control style of good meeting process. But for constructivism to work, it often takes a process of several iterative cycles from broad to narrow and from disorder to order. Hanging out in the space of ambiguity needs to be okay. Unfortunately, typical facilitation doesn’t make such space but rather moves rapidly from a brainstorm list to a priority list. In a typical process, speed and order are valued over process and synthesis but in a constructivist environment the opposite is true. In constructivism, efficiency takes a back row to process and understanding.

Facilitate for Construction: Often facilitators bring to a group process a tool bag full of deconstruction tools. How do we take this problem apart, break it into manageable tasks and fix it. Facilitating in a constructivist environment requires construction tools, as constructivism is a systems-thinking skill. The tools of construction require space where participants can learn and build. Scenario planning, storyboarding, open space technology, video narrative, and concept mapping, are examples of constructivist tools that might be used to facilitate a constructivist environment.

Facilitate from Authenticity: The third overarching frame for the facilitator in a constructivist environment is to be authentic. I have seen a facilitator manage a group claiming that the process would be a blank slate in which the participants could create, design and decide. However, as the process unfolded it was clear that the agenda was not a “tabula rasa” but was, in reality, largely predetermined. In the end, participants in the process felt that it was disingenuous and, “yet one more reason not to trust the hierarchy.” Constructivism decentralizes power and should only be used when equity and empowerment are the transparent goals.

Constructivism can be a powerful construct in facilitation, especially in the new reality of facilitating in the context of a network and where the process matters as much, if not more than the outcome. Old school facilitation where chart paper is inked up and participants are taken from start to finish as if on an amusement park ride are less and less relevant in today’s challenging economic times. The new breed of facilitation is thinking more deeply about theory and frameworks across several academic disciplines. In this context, constructivism and empowerment are emerging foundation stones of a new facilitation practice.

As always your comments are welcome.

Further Study:

I want to thank Bernie Dodge, faculty at SDSU’s EDTec program, whose generous knowledge sharing has over the years continues to influence my practice and thinking. http://www.slideshare.net/bdodge

Empowerment Education in Facilitation

On December 17, 2009 By mark

Raise you hand if in the last three months you have sat in a meeting that was dominated by process model of information presentation ==> discussion ==> and decision; followed by information presentation ==> discussion ==> and decision, in a pattern that was repeated until the end of the meeting? Unfortunately hierarchical meeting structures are still all too common in meetings today. You can put your hand down. In my last post I discussed the shift of group interaction away from hierarchical, government thinking towards governance as a dominant facilitation model. In this new facilitation environment the old framework where the facilitator imparts and the group members receive, memorize, and repeat is wholly inadequate in meeting the challenges of facilitating for governance. My contention is that governance thinking requires the re-discovery of community organizing tools and methodologies and constructivist learning theories. One place where the theories of community organizing and constructivism meet is in the framework of empowerment education.

The father of empowerment education is Paulo Freire and I encourage all facilitators to read deeply of his work. There are a three principles that I would like to briefly discuss as touchstones of Freire’s work. These three principles, in my view, are integral to informing the skill-set of any contemporary facilitator.

Conscientization: The first touchstone is that Freire’s believed that all learning is political. Conscientization, as he described the concept, was that education had the function of developing a critical awareness about the social, political, and economic contradictions and realities so that individuals would take action against the oppressive elements of reality. Transferring this concept to facilitation, it forces the facilitator to see that facilitation is not simply the process of information presentation ==> discussion ==> and decision. Facilitation becomes the process of making the connections between the internal context and external context to not only create change but also open the possibility for sea change. In another post I wrote extensively about facilitating for community engagement, which serves as the basic process for a conscientization approach to facilitation.

Constructivism: The second touchstone of Freire’s pedagogy is that learning is not a process of transmitting of information and imposing decision-making from the top-down. In the hierarchical model, the experts are on top and the majority of the group (below) are passive receptacles in the process. Constructivism purports that learning is an active process of construction on the part of all learners that involves making meaning out of a multiple perspectives and data. Constructivism requires a facilitator to move beyond simple brainstorming, sorting and prioritizing exercises and engages groups in such authentic tasks as creating, designing, analyzing and deciding (a topic for further exploration in a follow-up post).

Praxis: A third touchstone of Freire’s thinking is the concept of praxis. Freire believed that local transformation is the product of praxis at the collective level. Together, groups need to move from theory to practice. In application, praxis becomes an iterative process of theory, application, evaluation, reflection, and then back to theory. Learner driven experimentation is the basis for true system’s change and performance improvement and the facilitator’s role is to create the dynamics of iteration. One approach to engage learners in iterative learning is to use strategies of rapid cycle testing (such as the Plan, Do, Study, Act model). Additionally, the concept of praxis also implies learning over time and that creates for a facilitator the need to think in terms of the long view.

Empowerment education is a critical theory that serves well as one of the foundation stones of facilitation. A facilitator needs to understand the experiences and worldviews of the group in order to successfully foster change and further the learning process. Moreover, strong facilitation uses empowerment and critical reflection to not only solve the pressing and immediate need but also seeks to equip groups to applying such thinking to future problems.

As always your thoughts are welcome.

References

Freire, P. (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Freire, P. (1995) Pedagogy of Hope. Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Continuum.

Facilitating for Government & Governance

On December 14, 2009 By mark

.Over the course of my career I have studied with many talented facilitation mentors from both the organizational development world and the world of community organization. Studying and, more importantly, practicing in both worlds has helped me develop an understanding that there are two facilitation disciplines that require different sets of skills.

A traditional organizational development approach to facilitation takes the perspective of “government” thinking. Government thinking has been used to describe the hierarchical business approach with all that it implies. Government thinking is dominated concepts like hierarchy, centralized decision making, sole authority, dependent relationship, uniform policy, outputs and vertical relationships. Facilitation, in this context, employs a range of meeting process tools like brainstorming, decision-making, group dynamic, negotiation and mediation. Often parochial in nature, the primary objective of government thinking is to solicit advice, convince those that work “down-stream,” and ensure negotiated progress toward centralized plans.

At the other end of the spectrum is “governance” thinking that has historically been the domain of community collaboration and community organization. I started my professional career working in the community tasked with developing coalitions and partnerships. Over the years I have participated in the development of numerous working collaboratives. In governance thinking the characteristics are almost antithetical to government thinking. In governance there are multiple “authorities,” decentralized decision-making, negotiation and persuasion, participatory relationships, localized policies and community level outcomes. The goal of governance is collective and democratic action.

Many facilitators coming through the ranks of corporate human resource, training or organizational development departments who “cut their teeth” on traditional meeting facilitation, planning and/or in labor-management negotiations are likely well versed in government thinking and are masters at operating in this environment. However it is increasingly important for facilitators to possess the complimenting governance-oriented skills and experience. Indeed, the sea change that is occurring across all economic sectors (both public and private) is that governance thinking is now no longer the sole domain of community organizers. Government agencies and private sector organizations are embracing governance thinking. More and more companies are interested in the whole, are creating networks, and are operating in a triple bottom line environment –all earmarks of governance thinking. It is my belief that the correlation between the rapid proliferation of networking technologies and the acceleration in governance thinking is no accident. Technology tools have fundamentally redefined organizational hierarchy. This shift has also redefined facilitation skills required to be effective in this new systems-environment.

Given the shift to governance thinking, facilitators need to go back to the roots of community-based organizing and immerse themselves in systems-thinking, empowerment education, collaborative technology and adult leaning theory. In is only with a blended understanding drawing from the principles of governance that facilitators can make significant contributions to performance. Recently I came across a list of skills in an academic journal related to social work (1) that I adapted as a list of governance-related facilitation skills. In addition to meeting process skills, governance facilitation requires:

Activation/Enabling Skills: First and foremost strong facilitation understands how to convene (and hold together) stakeholders to address community issues. In public involvement this might include bringing together government, nonprofit, advocacy groups, faith-based communities, and unaffiliated citizens. In the private sector this might include bringing not only those up and down the supply chain but external influencers like regulators and consumers.

Framing Skills: A facilitator must be able to create a focusing frame and values around the issue(s) and facilitate agreements related to roles and responsibilities of players that, when coordinated, move the group towards values-based solutions. Core to the process of framing both focus and agreement is the ability to think and act from a systems perspective, fostering a whole that is more than the sum of the parts.

Orchestrating/Mobilizing Skills: This is the skill set that demonstrates the facilitator’s ability to manage the movement towards the milestones, objectives and outcomes. Facilitation as movement requires expertise in community engagement.

Social Networking Skills: I have written elsewhere of the facilitators need to be able to manage connections and relationships for the process of knowledge creation. This point is underscored in a governance model where the network is core to success. This truism is familiar to any facilitator who has come up through the community-side of facilitation. Making and supporting connections between people and managing the collective wisdom are often what makes the difference between success and failure.

Synthesizing & Editing skills: All facilitation requires the facilitator to have a deep toolbox of strategies that enables him/her to effectively synthesize, edit and transform the process as it unfolds. Such tools supporting this work include such things as mediation, interest-based problem solving, and possibly even strategies that create incentive for progress.

Some have suggested that the shift from government to governance is a revolution. Others, like me, believe that governance thinking is simply the process of re-imagining and re-discovering our roots in community organizing. Whether this shift is evolution, revolution or rediscovery matters less than how governance thinking impacts facilitation. Governance thinking is about creating networks of democratic action. It is about increasing leverage and effectiveness. Fundamentally governance is about thinking and working in new ways and is about re-imagining social impact whether it is in the public or private sector and fostering this impact is the heart and soul of facilitation.

References

(1) Frahm, K. A. & Martin, L. L. (2009). From Government to Governance: Implications for Social Work Administration.Administration in Social Work, 33(4), 407-422. doi:10.1080/03643100903173016

(2) Working Wikily

Scenario Planning as a Facilitation Tool

On December 4, 2009 By mark

According to a recent study, “Many funders expect that they will come out of the downturn being far more strategic than they were before the crisis.” How about your agency? Check out how Facilitation & Process, LLC can help. And remember there is a little help each day in the Resource of the Day posted on Twitter.

I have written previously a four part series on strategic planning. This week I have been putting together a workshop on the role of scenarios as a tool in strategic planning. The request comes out of my work with another consultant on a scenario planning exercise that we recently coordinated as part of a business planning process. The use of scenarios as a business planning tool can be traced back several decades and was popularized with couple of key articles by Pierre Wack that appeared in two Harvard Business Review articles back in the mid 80’s. There are well developed methodologies for the creation of scenarios, including Future Search and Scenario Thinking. In between these two methods are likely dozens of permutations of the scenario planning that practitioners have made up along the way. While I believe that facilitating a scenario planning exercise can easily be done after some modest self-study, for me, the power of scenarios came alive after going through a number of scenario exercises both as a participant as well as a facilitator. In this post I would like to describe several core principles of scenario planning that have come through my experiences using this planning methodology.

Scenario Planning is a Means and not an End: Scenarios, in essence, tell stories based on the near term certainties in the context of critical uncertainties. Stories, however, cannot be confused with strategy. I once was discussing with an executive director of an agency who called to inquire about strategic planning and suggested that she wanted to use scenario planning as the framework for the strategic plan. She said something like, “I think what this agency needs is not the traditional strategic plan but a pithy and vivid scenario that conveys who we are and where we are going.” While a strategic plan can be organized around a vivid scenario, scenarios alone cannot address the complexity of strategy. I am often reminded of the truism that “a good slogan can stop progress for fifty years” and the risk of creating vivid scenarios is that the story replaces the strategy. Strategy and not story is what matters.

The Future is likely more Complicated than a Single Scenario: One of the criticisms of scenario planning is that the technique of using a two-by-two matrix to create a scenario produces a truncated view of the plausible future. Except in rare instances an organizations future will be influenced by more than two certainties/uncertainties. Rather than a one dimensional matrix the future is likely resembles a Rubik’s cube. In creating scenarios, one needs to build time into the process to twist and turn scenarios until there is alignment across several dimensions.

Scenario Planning Contains a Germinal Seed of Change: Storytelling seems to be the latest consulting rage. While I remain skeptical of the power of story in creating an organizational sea change, I believe that one the roles of a good scenario is that it begins to influence the culture of an organization moving it towards change. New words, images, metaphors and stories that emerge from scenarios can be a powerful support in the development of a change strategy or strategic plan.

Scenarios Reflect Aspirations: The reality is that despite the apparent objectivity of a scenario planning exercise, scenarios tend to gravitate towards the group bias and the story typically reflects the aspirational direction of the collective organization. This is not a bad thing as long as the scenario is future-oriented, plausible and action-oriented. In fact, I would suggest that the power of scenarios is that they are constructivist by nature. A group working together to bring a scenario into existence begins the work of creation. Once created, the strategies and actions that support movement towards the realization of the scenario becomes a self-fulfilling direction. Again, as long as the scenario is based on informed decision-making and not simply a reflection of magical thinking, scenarios can contribute significantly to a strategic planning process by focusing the aspirations around a shared story about where the organization wants to be.

Scenario Planning is a Process and not an Event: A final principle is related to the concept of the “means and not the end” and underscores the point. Like other planning processes, there is a temptation to let the scenario planning event become the definitive moment in time. We need to guard against the thinking that “we did a scenario planning process last year.” The power of scenario planning is in the actions that follow the planning process. The stories and scenario only has power as it comes to life in action. Scenario planning is really the process of implementing change, achieving milestones and growth.

Considering these principles, a conclusion we can draw is that building scenarios is more art than science and while it engages the head, scenarios often more about passion, vision and heart. As a result, scenario planning is a useful tool that works best where there is leadership, openness to change, uncertainty future, and the time to process the uncertainty. Conversely, if the way forward is predetermined or an organization is in the midst of a crisis or otherwise does not have the capacity to absorb long-term change, scenario planning will be less helpful. Scenario planning is about moving confidently towards tomorrow and towards the aspiration of what an organization wants to become. In the hands of a skilled facilitator this process can be a meaningful way to engage stakeholders in a process of thoughtful change that strengthens the strategic intent of an organization. As we plan, manage and grow through these challenging times the tool of scenario planning can serve as a useful tool in the facilitation toolbox.

As always, your comments are welcome.

References:

Future Search

What If: The art of Scenario Thinking for Nonprofits

Using Taxonomies in Facilitation

On November 30, 2009 By mark

If you have been following this blog, you likely already know that my goal is to move beyond “Facilitation 101” and focus on the deeper context of facilitation, which I believe is the ability to connect people, technology, and process in ways that create performance improvement. It is my belief that the traditional view of facilitators “running good meetings” is wholly inadequate for today’s competitive and rapidly changing social-political and economic environment. One such “deeper” theme of this blog is the understanding of the facilitator’s role in managing knowledge creation. I have written before of the process of facilitating knowledge creation and managing the documentation of knowledge. In this post, I wanted to add another dimension of knowledge management by discussing the importance of using taxonomies as a strategic tool in facilitation. Knowledge taxonomies are based on the science of classifying words, ideas and concepts, according to natural relationships and should be part of the operating system of a facilitator. There are two ways of thinking about taxonomy development. One use is the use of a taxonomy in “organization of knowledge” and the second is the use of a taxonomy in “organization of people. Ideally a facilitator can use taxonomy in a blended approach taking the best of both orientations.

Taxonomy and Organizing Knowledge: One of the clearest benefits of creating a taxonomy is that it serves as an organizer. A few years ago I worked with a team managing three large resource libraries and had the privilege of being mentored by some truly amazing librarians who taught me a tremendous amount about managing knowledge through taxonomies. While there is a large science of taxonomies, the process of developing a taxonomy boils down to identifying the requirements, conducting a concept mapping exercise, building a draft taxonomy, getting a usability feedback, refining the taxonomy and applying/maintaining the system. The power of proactive knowledge taxonomy is that it gives order to process at the beginning and the dividends are accrued when content multiplies and expands. If a knowledge taxonomy is created up front, then as materials are created they can be labeled, organized and stored effectively. In the absence of a defined taxonomy, one can spend hours on a shared drive looking for a reference article, only to find it in the “download archive” folder named something like “3089.doc”

Taxonomy and Building Community: Almost polar opposite to creating a structured taxonomy is a community taxonomy that is iteratively and built from the bottom up by those contributing and using the knowledge. Sometimes called a folksonomy to contrast it from an informatics approach, a folksonomy is a democratized approach to building a defined taxonomy. It builds upon the social life of information and lends itself to community building. A common example of a folksonomy can be seen the use of keywords and tags associated with blogs. If you have ever seen a tag cloud, you begin to get the sense of how folksonomies are developed. Concepts attract concepts, patterns are recognized and a shared understanding grows out of the mutual use of terms. Another example of a folksonomy can be found in personal lists Twitter users create to sort content. Lists are developed, cross-posted, referenced and begin to “trend” as a shared concept. The power of such folksonomies is found when user tags are combined and refined based on the principle of self-organization.

If a facilitator understands the concept of taxonomies s/he can harness both the power of structure and community organization in creating framework for organization of knowledge. This brings us to the application of taxonomies in facilitation. How does understanding the use of taxonomies improve facilitation?

Managing Documents: The obvious, and previously stated, application is in the management of documents. For those facilitation assignments that require the creation and management of multiple documents, the use of a taxonomy is critical. Whether a top down informatics approach or a bottom up community approach, defining a taxonomy is essential to managing documents.

Making the Complex Simple: A second use of a taxonomy in facilitation is in taking a large and/or complex topics and breaking down so that it builds a common understanding of the group. The most common taxonomy exercise is creating a concept map. Concept mapping is a way off creating an inventory of ideas and vocabulary and creating relationships between the ideas and vocabulary. While some may argue that creating a concept map differs from creating a taxonomy, in my opinion, the two are at least close cousins.

Depoliticizing Words: A final application of taxonomy thinking in facilitation is as a tool to depoliticize language. For example, I have been in many discussions about affordable rental housing where group members used interchangeably words like: low-income housing, public housing, undercapitalized housing, substandard housing and predatory housing. Each of these terms can be loaded with a political agenda. A facilitator could easily remove the politics by starting with the higher order concept of housing and creating a taxonomy. In that process, the politics are uncoupled from the concepts and common ground is more likely to be created as a platform for productive rather than polarized discussions.

As I suggested earlier, facilitating the development of a knowledge taxonomy is likely the result of a blended structure that is in part designed but also allows for the iterative co-creation and improvement of how processes are organized. The point of this blog is not to teach informatics but is to describe the intentional clarity that a facilitator needs to bring to language, words and concepts. Facilitation has as a core foundation principle the ability to bring order to diversity. In the past, such facilitation might have been achieved by charisma, felt-tipped markers, and easel paper. However, the increasing complexity of process demands more than simple facilitation skills. Markers and easel paper are still required but the facilitator needs to understand how to think and design in terms of systems, organization and knowledge management. Such facilitation requires the theory and application of taxonomies as part of the facilitation toolbox. With taxonomy skills facilitation meets the need of times, when there is more at stake than running a good meeting.

References

(1) Taxonomy Development for Knowledge Management

(2) Taxonomy and Folksonomy Cookbook