We often experience that people in an event – sponsors, organisers, participants – express their expectation that the outcome of the event is innovative, yet they are not really open to be innovative in terms of how the event itself is designed, structured and facilitated. That’s a bit of a startling and daunting situation:how can you expect outcomes to be innovative if you stifle innovation along the way to that goal? How (and why) can you expect things to be different and change if you yourself are not willing to be innovative in the ways to get to innovation?

The leas, innovation demands inevitably in terms of a meeting format is, that the meeting itself embodies innovative ways of thinking, engaging and working. Based loosely on Einstein’s quote “Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them”, one could say that it is not possible to produce innovative ideas and solutions by using conventional forms of workshops.

One needs to consider how innovation takes place. First it must be distinct of “incremental improvement”. Experts – due to the characteristics of their knowledge and expertise (which relies on past experience that they analysed and researched extensively) – are often among the most conservative people and as such seldom the source of innovation; what is often largely underestimated is the fact that any expert – like everybody else – has a particular and as such very limited perspective on complex issues, ie. only perceives a limited segment of reality (ie. the “expert’s view”). What is needed is to bring together an abundant group of different people with different perspectives that collide and – in this space of confrontation of thinking – cross-pollinate.
On the ambiguous role of experts with view to innovation, you may want to watch this video of Dave Snowden: http://youtu.be/B2AijRoXnvE

Furthermore, what is needed is the creation of a significant level of discomfort and confusion (in some form) as the basis of innovation (the “room of confusion” in the terminology of Claes Janssen, or a “shallow dive into chaos” as Dave Snowden calls it). It is indispensable to leave the ground of certainty, people must be shaken up! This causes the pressure to abandon fix positions, to shift perspective and look at things in different ways. In fact Snowden says it takes three elements – starvation, pressure and a shift of perspective – as necessary (yet not sufficient) preconditions for innovation: http://youtu.be/IlmesbbPqtU

Lastly, fragmentation of issues into “topics” is often detrimental to the discovery of new, improved solutions, because they lead always to a loss of the big picture, of the understanding how different elements and aspects of a situation or system interdepend and interact. An issue must be dealt with in its entirety and interconnectedness. The Sufi proverb goes: “You think that because you understand one, you understand two, because one and one makes two. But you must also understand and”. This is often grossly violated in many events (by “cutting the issue up” into different themes, topics and sub-issues, that are dealt with in individual sub-sessions or parts of the workshop).

So if we want to have any chance to be innovative in our events, it may ask from us to be really innovative in the way we design those very events in the first place…

Interestingly one of them send me notes from a preparatory discussion around an event we were about to prepare – and in there I found the following:

“Mr. XYZ brought up the need to ask and address the question of what are organizations, countries and other players in the response going to do differently that will get us out of the reality of today.  He noted that around the world there are the “right” programmes and technology but it is still not working.  Following that, the [group] should ask if the current response and targets are realistic, considering the [...] donor situation.  Finally he noted that many of the problems aren’t technical but rather based on a lack of an enabling environment and a need to find the social and cultural solutions.  Beyond the consultation, are we getting commitments? Who is taking the responsibility to get more money in country budgets? How do we move from analysis to doing something about the current levels?

Mr. UVW acknowledged that there is no shortage of actions verbs being used to describe the next steps but it remains unclear what it all really means.”

(Emphasis and removal of names by myself)

These gentlement were expressing and sharpening the issue we hear so often… So what do we then do? Well, we have to acknowledge the complex nature of those circumstances, issues and the systems they are part of – and then deal with them accordingly.

Things to Promote

• Expound complexity: the complexity of an issue/situation must be consciously addressed and worked through. This can only be done by engaging different part of a complex system into a dialogue and avoid “monopolisation” of “right « wrong” or “best « bad (practice)” by a few (experts). An open conversation must aim at creating an understanding for the bigger picture for everybody involved in a peer-to-peer process, not by a few experts sharing the “right” perspective with everybody else.
• Leverage diversity: as a consequence from the previous point, homogeneity in background, experience, thinking and opinions levels the appreciation and assessment of an issue/situation. It is important that different people bring this diversity into the room/conversation and allow a real-time interaction. Stimulating pro-actively dissent, disturbance and deviation is essential to realistic and meaningful engagement with complex issues/situations. This diversity must be actively promoted, managed and leveraged.
• Promote shared understanding, sense-making and emergence of common grounds: in complex situations, sense-making is a critical task. While the facts often may be on the table, they are often not enough; the crucial task is to make sense of them, to come to a shared overviews and interpretation, to identify and recognise patterns (often more than stringent, mechanical cause-effect relationships, which in the face of complexity often fail to persist). By engaging in a process of mutual learning and sharing among peers (who each contribute a particular “world view” and as such are “experts” in their own rights), common grounds are identified. Common grounds are those stepping-stones, which everybody authentically can adhere to without compromising. These common grounds are the basis of further understanding and hence engagement and commitment.
• Foster learning and growth: getting to terms with complexity always entails an initial intensive phase of learning and growth (in terms of ideas, perspective, understanding). During this phase, it is of paramount importance that everybody suspends their judgement and fully engages in a process of disconfirming previous knowledge, learning about new (often surprising) ideas and facts. Jumping to conclusion or seeking to confirm pre-existing knowledge and assumptions are detrimental to a genuine and adequate understanding of a complex issues and circumstances. A properly designed event/ workshop will take people through an initial phase that is exclusively dedicated to learning, where all decisions are suspended towards a later stage of the event.
• Iterative working approach: complex issues and systems cannot be understood in a straightforward, clear-cut manner. Inherently – and in distinction to “technical/mechanical” issues – they need an iterative (step-wise) approach, encircling and narrowing down the issues and possible responses. To avoid the ascendancy and supremacy of authorities and their preferred ideas/views, it is important to provide structures that withdraw the possibility of a few selected individuals to dominate and determine a situation. Working constantly and consistently in parallel, yet shifting sub-groups provides the golden opportunity.
• Follow an inherent flow of process: it is critical to design a process that on the one hand provides containers for the topics (content) to be dealt with extensively, and on the other hand leads the group of participants towards an objective and the production of results. This inner architecture of an event must caters for the defined outcomes and incorporate the flow towards that point. It is critical to move away from a “line-up” of individual thematic sessions; this produces often fragmentation in thinking, leaves things erratic rather than interlinking different aspects and it leads often to disorientation, the individual being lost in the succession of events, mental leaping and eventually lack of coherence of workshop outputs. A coherent architecture can guide participants through a full-fledged thought and learning process and eventually converges towards shared outputs and results.

Things to avoid

• Fragmentation of events, topic hopping, disruption of flow: “topic-based agendas” (listing individual sessions dedicated to individual topics or issues) should be avoided → cf. above
• Cognitive overflow (avalanches of information, overstretching of attention span): the workshop format of presentations is by design only suitable for simple messages. The human cognition is not capable to absorb larger amounts of information in this format. On top of this, the human attention span is limited to roughly 20-30 minutes – anything delivered beyond gets lost in the black hole of human exhaustion. Presentations are uniquely suited to bring across 2-3 key messages or ideas, which are very simple in nature, yet critically important and must be highly sticky. Yet, it takes a top presenter (professional in the art of presenting) to deliver such a presentation. The usual pitfalls (ie. projecting “speaker’s notes” by PowerPoint instead of visual supports and symbols → split of attention between media) can be very damaging – and many presentations fail to fulfil their purpose. Therefore they are a very risky format that requires a lot of care and knowledge to handle.
• Frontal formats: format like presentations, plenary Q&A’s and panels suggest – through the physical arrangement – a sense of “we” and “they”; they suggest and install hierarchy and superiority that are not conducive to the understanding of complex situations and issues. What’s more, they are detrimental to ownership, engagement, and commitment. What is needed instead is an atmosphere and a set-up of “us”, of co-thinking and co-creating.
• Sustaining authority & hierarchy: the dominant (and loud) voices – of authorities of some kind – often tend to level and paralyse the creative thought processes (based on diversity), that are indispensable to come to terms with complex issues and situations. For instance are classical plenary sessions (and classical Q&A’s) prone to be dominated by a few authoritarian individuals and tend to suppress dissent and deviant minority views. They often create an ambiance of aggression and controversy. For these reasons they can be “toxic” to gaining profound understanding, creative thinking and innovation, and therefore results.
• Jumping to conclusions: we always have the habit and inclination to prematurely rush to judgement, conclusion, decision; this stands in the way of thoroughly explore and understand alternative perspectives and ideas, which consistently leads to mediocre results that are more reiterating old ideas in new words.
• Hamper emergence, cross-fertilisation, innovation: many workshop formats don’t have the openness and freedom to allow for novelty to take place and emerge. They stifle innovation by not providing (enough) open spaces for the unplanned and unforeseeable to take place – and therefore prevent innovation by design.

Roles & Responsibilities of the Facilitator – and the Participants

In events and workshops of the nature described above, it is highly critical to clearly distinguish and separate the different roles in the event. Contrary to more conventional modes of facilitation, the facilitator is only responsible for the structure and process of the event, ie. she/he guides participants towards the sequence and flow of modules towards the defined goal. She/he ensures that the “containers” remain intact and integral, opens and closes them properly and ensures that rules are observed. That way she/he ensures that the results are achieved.

Participants as far as they are concerned take care of content and outcome: they contribute their expertise, reflections, ideas, suggestions, knowledge, they observe the content level, unearth insights and patterns and take charge of moulding outcomes.

The facilitator must strictly abstain from summarising, paraphrasing, assessing and the like (which is quite common in conventional forms of facilitation), as this constitutes an inside-out interference on the content level. Since the facilitator is mostly perceived as an (informal) authority, this will inevitably bias and distort the content level to the disadvantage of an optimal outcome, will hamper or even stifle the emergence of higher levels of understanding and insight; lastly there is a high risk that at least a few participants will perceive this kind of intervention as manipulative towards a predetermined (and superimposed) outcome. In this light it becomes understandable why in fact the less the facilitator knows about the theme of the event, the more can he fully focus on the actual social process – which is her/his defined role and responsibility – and the less is she/he tempted to interfere on the content level. Likewise the documentation raw material is largely produced by participants themselves and must be an output of the processes, which in its turn must be consolidated into an actual report by a (small group of) content matter specialists and managers.

Following the above it also becomes clear that the most important task of the facilitator is actually not the delivery (→ facilitation) of the event itself, but the design of the architecture, flow, structure, process and methods used during the event before it actually starts. Once it begins, facilitation is largely delivering and executing what has been designed – and the success of the event is largely determined by the preparatory work.

We then try to demonstrate (and convince people) that there is another way of designing these events. What we keep hearing is that (and I quote from an e-mail of a senior manager of a large organisation) “more substance should be reflected in the programme, instead of the process”. What we see is this constant misconception that it is either content or process, that process stands against content, that the two are a zero-sum. This is fundamentally untrue:  process is the underlying structure that creates the container for content and leads to results (or not – if badly chosen).

The relevant comparison is rather the following one:

When we come to process and the format of the event, we find ourselves with the choice between two paradigms:

So we could rather say that we have to choose between content and results – and the process is the underlying means to determine which alley we go down…

Read it on the SDC Blog, it’s worth it!

Already 11 years ago, Meg Wheatley wrote a very similar article on the obsession of measurement, and it’s more topical than ever:
http://www.margaretwheatley.com/articles/whymeasure.html

There is a second article of her speaking to the same issue, a nice illustration from the educational system in the US:
http://www.margaretwheatley.com/articles/largescalechange.html

The podcast has been posted on the Learning&Training blog of the ITC-ILO.

We can look at a “conference” as a large group event and largely shape and organise it according to the principles, design patterns and with methods we use in our work elsewhere. However, we must be aware of some particularities of conferences and cater for those. Roughly we can separate them into three areas: a) the purpose and goal of the event, b) the nature of participants and subsequently c) the event structure and organisation.

Purposes and Goals of Conferences

In contrast to other events, the goal often lacks in terms of clarity and stridency. Goals are often formulated like sharing knowledge; allowing exchange; comparing ideas, notes and experiences; getting updated; having dialogues; etc. For other workshops, that usually wouldn’t do it – all these goals would rather be means to achieve a higher purpose like transforming an issue, deciding and committing on a particular change or so. What many conferences lack (in distinction to a strategic event or so) is the unifying goals, the direct collaboration of participants in their daily work routine (eg. they mostly are not members of one and the same institution, they don’t need to achieve concrete outputs jointly), conferences hardly ever have any particular decisions to take (let alone the power to take binding decisions) and there are very little obligations that bind participants to each other (often more on a moral level if any at all). People want something from each other, not with each other (ie. they want ideas, information, but there is no need nor expectation to achieve something jointly beyond the duration of the conference).

In many events and for many methods, we can define some basic conditions for success. They constitute somehow a magnetic core, a centre of gravitation and cohesion, the engine of the event. These conditions could be summarised as I) a burning issue at stake, II) authority to prepare or take decisions, III) some sort of conflict or tension (even if its just latent) at the centre, and IV) ideally a decision time of yesterday, ie. a sense of urgency. None of those is given in many conferences as we know them, which poses questions and challenges in terms of cohesion and commitment.

Last but not least we made the important observation that there mostly are parallel definitions and expectations of purpose: sponsors and organisers of conferences may have their very own agenda, ie. they want to elaborate a declaration, they want to promote an issue or product, or they may look for answers to certain questions they are carrying. However, in many instances the majority of participants may have an entirely different motivation or agenda to take part. These may be to network, make and cultivate old and new contacts; to promote their own ideas, viewpoints or issues; to use the event as a platform to promote and sell their own services and products; to do fundraising or gain new mandates or contracts; to find a new job; or many more. Obviously these purposes can clash and a conference needs to cater in some way or another for several of those or it risks to produce frustration, dissatisfaction and disruption.

The Nature of Conference Participants

Conference participants are a quite a special kind of species – often quite dissimilar to participants in other workshops, trainings and large-group events. Many participants however can and do play different roles, but already the term „conference“ can trigger a particular role and thus a corresponding set of attitudes and behaviours, which the same persons would not hold and show in different situations.

There is also a large group of „conference tourists and habitués“, who attend countless conferences every year. They show a pronouncedly “veteran” behaviour. For instance they will only participate on a very selective basis, show up at around 11:00 in the morning (no matter what time the event actually starts), grab a programme and then select just a few sessions where they expect to hear something of particular interest or meet specific people they are after. In a conference, there are often several side events and parallel workshops (of a formal or informal nature, they can be planned and announced or spontaneous/ad-hoc, they can be declared and open or confidential and closed) and people will not really bother to follow the main stream of events and sessions – the latter often more being the “hub” and providing the occasion and legitimisation to attend in the first place.

First of all this leads to conferences being quite unforeseeable in terms of participants: how many persons will attend when, who will be in which room or session when and for how long? Questions of a more oracular nature. And even if a session starts with a particular number and group of persons, it will say little about who will be there in the end. All of this demands for much increased flexibility in terms of organisation, facilitation and proceedings.

Secondly this high fluctuation and unpredictability in terms of attendance poses a problem if the conference – in the style of classical large-group/ whole-system events – is carefully designed and choreographed, where the succession of sessions follows an inherent logic, where one module builds on top of the previous ones. In these events, it is crucial that the overwhelming majority of participants jointly go through a learning and transformation process to gain shared understandings, build common grounds and jointly co-create visions and action items.

Lastly, we must be aware, that (in sharp contrast to many workshops) participants mostly travel and attend at their own expenses. Therefore they expect to be offered some sort of show and excitement. They will only accept instructions on an entirely voluntary basis and there is no authority to issue directives. And last but not least the credo of whole-system events to bring the whole system into one room (ie. to make sure that all perspectives on an issue are represented in the sessions) is very questionable and fragile, because important parts of a system, crucial “view-holders” may be unable or unwilling to raise the funds to participate in the conference – after all there may be nobody who has the power to dictate people to attend.

Event Structure and Organisation

In our events we apply the pattern of “Divergence → Emergence → Convergence” as the fundamental structure of sessions. Participants undergo a phase where they learn from different sources, open up their minds to new ideas and become very broad; on this basis they co-create a shared vision of what to achieve, something new and innovative; lastly – when considering action to follow up (concrete steps and measures, a plan, …) they narrow down again in an excluding move towards agreeing on one “plan” or “set of measures” or “guideline” or whatever the intention and hence the outcome of the workshop should be.

Conference however can be considered as a “once-in-a-lifetime” gathering. Even if it is repeated or people know each other from before, the event as such very much stands as a once-off event. People gather from very different backgrounds and converge in their discussions towards a common understanding of the issues at stake. At this stage they have the unique opportunity to elaborate jointly something new, eg. a set of recommendations, a new idea, a guide or so (emergence). Lastly they take this “novelty” and reflect about how to carry that back home into their own, particular context and what to do with it – eventually everyone on his how – very much a divergent movement. In this sense a conference can be looked at as an inversion of the same pattern to “Convergence → Emergence → Divergence”.

A conference often cannot achieve more than recommendations, because this is the highest degree of obligation that is attainable. Unlike an intra-institutional workshop a conference does mostly not allow for joint action planning because participants do not have a shared institutional framework but they all work for/ act in individual organisations.

Given the “voluntary” character of attending a conference, participants want to have a certain degree of personal choice. The conference is more a kind of container or even “biotope” for various different modules, which cater for different styles of engaging and learning. This however requires new, more sophisticated guidance systems to allow participants at any given time to orient themselves and find their individual way to whatever attracts their interest.

In fact I have been following Sugata Mitra already about 8 years ago (at my time at Helvetas), when he did his experiments called “The hole in the wall” – and was already highly fascinated then. “Imagine if you could take this further…” I thought – and Mitra of course did! I’m really excited to see what a long way he has come!

More information on “It’s Nice That“.

I realised that although I had a sense that there is something like a red thread that runs through our facilitation and change work, I constantly tried to avoid spelling it out in explicit and clear manner. What ensued was a debate, whether it was an “approach” in the first place – or rather a method, a style, a worldview, a set of principles? But since our handbook is in the making, I no longer had a choice. Or rather a good invitation to get to terms with it. I gave it a try. Read on here:

The Approach of IngeniousPeoplesKnowledge

My initial answer to the question of how transformative momentum is sustained was the following: momentum cannot be sustained through internal or even less external interventions, but rather sustains itself if the platforms for collective conversations are present and accessible to all within the organisation at all times, i.e. if the organizational culture is one of learning in which knowledge sharing and change management strategies become second nature and all members/employees learn and practice this way of thinking and engaging with each other. So training in such methodologies could be a very useful way of making an organisation ‘fit’ for ongoing transformation in a complex and rapidly changing world.

I attended a Peter Block Community Building event last week that has inspired me greatly and also raised a new question: What if the transformation of large numbers of individuals within a system (i.e. its members being trained in various knowledge sharing and change management methodologies) does not lead to an organisational culture that is conducive to ongoing transformation? How and when does momentum last?

And I might just have found an answer to these questions in the form of further questions.  How do you create a sense of community amongst a group of people? How do you connect them to a common task/bigger purpose? Because only when people feel that they belong to a community will they also care about this community that they belong to and that belongs to them (Peter Block). So people care about what they create (Margaret Wheatley), but they carry on caring about what they create because they belong to a community that at the same time belongs to them (and that they carry on creating). So when and how do such transforming communities emerge…?

Catherine Widrig Jenkins