January 2014 - The FoCuSeD™ Facilitator eNewsletter

Changing How Decisions are Made | Gary Rush Facilitation

I’ve been thinking about collaboration since it is rather core to what I do in Facilitation. “Collaboration” may be an overused buzzword, but I believe authentic collaboration (see my December 2013 FoCuSeD™ eNewsletter, "Achieving Authentic Collaboration") is required for us to make the “right” decisions and we need to change how those decisions are made.

It’s interesting how everyone seems to understand the need for “collaboration”, but whenever I come across someone in a leadership role, they push back that the final decision still belongs to the leader. Everyone gets that engaging others is important, but it seems more for advice and participation. First of all, understand that I fully believe that decisions made by consensus following a well-managed process leads to better outcomes, are time saving, effective, supported by all, and can be innovative. Decision methods that use default, delegation, recommendation, or voting (including dot-voting) are not collaborative – they are command and control – by one or by a majority.

How do we move from a command and control style of decision-making to a consensus-based collaborative decision-making style?

Let’s assume that you are in a leadership role. How do you get a group of people working with you or for you to make consensus-based decisions – authentic collaboration? I believe that the role of the leader is not to make the decision. It is to guide the group to make the “right” decision by ensuring that they have the needed information and then guiding (facilitating) them through a process (context) that ensures everyone has an equal opportunity to participate and be heard, that the dialog allows healthy conflict, and then moving the group to a consensus-based decision – one that is high quality and supported by all. So, how do you do that? This is fairly straightforward: identify and gather the needed information, elicit ideas (diverge), understand the ideas (struggle), and move to consensus (converge).

The Process – Identify and Gather Needed Information

Ask the group to identify what information is needed to effectively make a well-informed decision. The information needs to be complete, accurate, and from varied sources to bring differing perspectives. Avoid, “We already know what we need to know.” It is easy to miss critical information. Avoid, “We already know the answer.” Never assume. Avoid “We got it.” Challenge them.

Once the needed information is identified, ask the group to identify those who will gather the information and set a deadline. With the information gathered, ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity to review, absorb, and understand the information.

The Process – Elicit Ideas (Diverge)

Divergence is the first step to making well-informed decisions. Divergence gives groups differing perspectives and ideas. It is important that everyone has an equal opportunity to contribute. Everyone in the group must contribute to reach consensus. Note: If one or a few dominate others, ask everyone to contribute anonymously using Post-its or some other media. If the group is large, you can break it into smaller groups of 3 to 5 people each. It is often easier for someone to contribute in smaller groups. Set the example that all ideas are respected. Don’t allow judging statements – discussion of the ideas comes later.

The Process – Understand the Ideas (Struggle)

Because people think differently, they will struggle with the newfound information to understand each other’s perspective or point of view. Healthy conflict is essential. Note: Discuss ideas, not people. Many arguments come from lack of understanding someone else's perspective. Avoid groupthink by getting the group to fully discuss the ideas and does not just go with an easy fix. If no one questions information or ideas, no one is thinking.

The Process – Move to Consensus (Converge)

Through discussion of ideas, understanding is gained. Listen to the group and feedback what they are saying – they often don’t hear each other. Keep them away from getting stuck on only one “right” answer. Summarize what seems to be a trend, a movement, or a feeling that tends to converge on a decision. Note: It is important that the group understands that consensus means, “I can live with it and I can support it.” Make sure that if someone compromises, it is positive – “I can back off this far for the benefit of…” rather than – “I give up, I’ll go half way.” Compromising one’s position is sometimes needed to find a win-win solution – consensus – whereas compromising by giving up leads to poor decisions.

Conclusion

Making well-informed decisions in a consensus-based collaboratively style, requires you to enable and empower the group. You enable by providing a clear process – diverge, struggle, converge. You empower by enabling healthy conflict.

I have found that consensus-based collaborative decision-making leads to better outcomes that are supported by all people – win-win.

June 2008 - The FoCuSeD™ Facilitator eNewsletter

Collaborative Organization | Gary Rush Facilitation

Let’s look at the basis of “how to” create a Collaborative Organization. I understand that this is an ambitious concept. Is it doable? Absolutely. It takes commitment, time, and collaboration.

Defined

First, it is important to understand what a “Collaborative Organization” looks like. A Collaborative Organization is one that embraces collaboration – working together. It recognizes that working together is more successful than working as individuals. It values inclusion over exclusion. It recognizes that people’s differences make the organization more interesting and richer.

Characteristics are…

With a Collaborative Organization, we see the following positive behaviors:

• Plans, requirements, decisions, directions, etc. are developed through facilitated workshops.
• Because facilitation is key to collaboration, Facilitator skills are highly valued.
• Because members understand consensus and the decision-making process, they understand the need for divergent ideas, discussion of different perspectives, and convergence to a decision.
• Members are equal, but not equivalent. They contribute according to their individual strengths and abilities.
• Decisions are made considering input from stakeholders.
• Goals and targets are set based on collaboration and more easily met through collaborating.
• Members understand and support decisions because they are involved.
• Flexibility and agility exist because the organization doesn’t need to sell the members on directions – members are well informed and part of the solution.
• Members work with their vendors and customers in a manner that benefits all.
• Success is based on group performance.

Making it real

How do you make it happen? The first requirement is management commitment. Once management is committed to nurturing a Collaborative Organization and have publicly announced their commitment and support, then the following will make it happen:

• Lead – A Collaborative Organization is developed from the top down – collaborative leaders model the role.
• Communicate – The organization needs answers to:
  
  
  • What is a Collaborative Organization?
  • How does it work?
  • Why is it important?
  • What are the next steps?
• Train – The organization requires training. (Just as societies, who suddenly become “democratic” without experience in democracy, struggle so will people who are suddenly told that they are collaborative.) Three levels of training are required:
  
  
  • Facilitator training is required for a cadre of full-time Facilitators. A complete and comprehensive class is required so that these Facilitators are able to facilitate any type of situation. Facilitators should become IAF CPF’s to continue learning and stay abreast of new trends and methods.
  • Collaborative Leadership training is required for management in the organization. The training must teach active listening, how to build a collaborative team, processes for strategic thinking and decision-making, how to embrace diversity, how to engage members and create a participatory environment, and how to lead by example and collaboration rather than directing. This should be mandatory for future management.
  • Overview training is required for all members. Members need to understand what “collaboration” means; what “consensus” means; how decision-making is done, and how they are part of the solution.
• Collaborate – The training is put to use. The organization needs to begin collaborating and:
  
  
  • Review their policies to see how they need to change to support the new culture.
  • Reassess how they are structured – to see how well it works with the new culture.
  • Continuously redefine “collaboration” and their decision-making processes – i.e., collaboratively define and redefine their Collaborative Organization.

Benefits

Why become a Collaborative Organization? The benefits can be staggering:

• A larger pool of ideas exists because all members are involved. Brilliant ideas from all parts of the organization will surface and be considered.
• Decision-making is shared and more transparent.
• Risks and rewards are shared across the organization.
• When members collaborate, they overcome barriers previously thought overwhelming.
• Members have more of a stake in making the whole successful.
• Vendors, members, and customers become more loyal.
• Collaborative Organizations are more adaptable in a changing world.

And So…

There are small organizations that are collaborative and have been by design. Taking full advantage of the enormous human capital in an organization because of collaboration has phenomenal potential.

“Good leaders make people feel that they’re at the very heart of things, not at the periphery. Everyone feels that he or she makes a difference to the success of the organization. When that happens people feel centered and that gives their work meaning.” Warren Bennis (Professor at USC)

July 2012 - The FoCuSeD™ Facilitator eNewsletter

Facilitation and Self-Organizing Teams – Focused Teams | Gary Rush Facilitation

In my February 2012 The FoCuSeD™ Facilitator eNewsletter, I wrote about Facilitation Skills and Teams – Focused Teams and said that I’d explore this topic further. (Focused Teams are relatively new and a growing trend in many industries.) Here, I will explore how facilitation skills enable Focused Teams to work effectively.

Focused Teams

In my eNewsletter, I defined a Focused Team as: a group of people from multiple professions and/or disciplines, without an obvious “leader”, who form, temporarily, for a specific purpose. A Focused Team forms quickly and remains as a team for a short time. Because of this, facilitation skills are critical. This type of team forms in (amongst many others):

• Healthcare – doctors, nurses, technicians, etc., collaboratively treat patients.
• Product Design – multiple disciplines collaborate for ideation of new products.
• Consulting – short-term teams respond to client needs, requests for proposal, and client issues.
• Corporations – temporary teams deal with an incident, a problem, a crisis, etc.
• Emergencies – ad hoc emergency response teams handle the emergency.

Enabling Focused Teams to work effectively requires practices that are different from a standard workshop process – i.e., there is no time for preparation; there are no Facilitator notes (Annotated Agenda); there is no formal process to follow; and each team member documents results as needed.

Enabling Focused Teams to work effectively

Establishing, at the beginning of the Focused Team forming, how the team will work is essential to ensure that they are consistent in their work so that nothing is missed and effective decisions are made. Focused Teams require clear roles and responsibilities, a purpose for existing, agreed to guiding principles, defined process steps to enable them to work effectively, and an after action review for continuous improvement. This should take no more than a couple of minutes.

Assign Roles. Clarify roles and responsibilities so that everyone knows his or her role. Deciding who will facilitate is critical. The others automatically become Team Members. The Client is generally not involved other than receiving the benefit of the team’s actions. Roles and responsibilities are:

• Facilitator – this role facilitates the discussion, manages conflict, and facilitates differences that may arise between team members. In addition, this role ensures that each Team Member captures results, as needed.
• Team Member – this role participates in the discussion contributing his or her knowledge and ideas.
• Client – this role defines the reason for the existence of the team (the patient, product client, consulting client, etc.).

Define the Purpose. Agree on a simple statement (doesn’t have to be written down) that defines why the Focused Team formed. Example – “We will determine the next course of treatment for patient X”. This provides a common goal, which helps a team form.

Agree on Guiding Principles. These ensure that the Focused Team exhibits a collaborative set of behaviors. These define how they will conduct themselves while working together. Each Focused Team can set their own Guiding Principles, but since they often form quickly, here is a beginning set of Guiding Principles to keep in mind:

• All Team Members are equal – while in the Focused Team, each Team Member is equal in discussion and decision-making.
• Respect all ideas – all ideas are needed and even though not all are best for the situation, all ideas need to surface so that the Focused Team can find the one that works for them. Stifling ideas reduces the opportunity to find a creative solution or answer.
• Stay in Role – the roles need to be respected and no one Team Member should “pull rank” on another. It is a collaborative effort.

Define the Process Steps to follow. This is essential to ensure that the Focused Team knows how they will accomplish their task. The most efficient and effective way to define the process is to ask:

• What is the single question that we need to answer? Typically, we take the purpose of the Focused Team and rewrite it as a question. Example – “What is the next course of treatment for patient X”?
• What are the sub-questions? List out all of the questions that need answers to enable the Focused Team to answer the single question, above.
• What is the sequence? Sequence the sub-questions in the order they need to be answered (there may not always be a sequence).
• How might we group the sub-questions? Some sub-questions might be grouped together as one activity. Example – “What is the patient’s blood pressure”? and “What is the patient’s temperature”?, may all fall under, “What are the patient’s vitals”?

Following these steps will enable the Focused Team to accomplish their common goal without missing critical steps.

After Action Review

Capturing lessons learned to help improve performance is handled by a short review after the Focused Team has completed its task. Each Focused Team should take 5 minutes to quickly capture:

• What worked?
• What needs to improve?
• How do we incorporate the lessons learned next time?

By doing this, a Focused Team will continuously improve their performance with each instance they form. These lessons learned should also be shared with other Focused Teams within their organization.

Summary

The New Set of Skills and the Common Competencies defined in the February 2012 eNewsletter, along with the defined Roles and Responsibilities, Defined Purpose, Guiding Principles, Defined Process Steps, and After Action Review described here, will enable Focused Teams to be consistent in their work and to make effective decisions. Virtually everyone needs facilitation skills. Working collaboratively, following these guidelines, increases the effectiveness of the Focused Team, increases the quality of their work, and improves the relationships between the team members.

February 2012 - The FoCuSeD™ Facilitator eNewsletter

Facilitation Skills and Teams - Focused Teams | Gary Rush Facilitation

In January, I facilitated a group of healthcare professionals – doctors, nurses, pharmacists, dentists, EMTs, etc. The purpose of the workshop was to identify opportunities and strategies for supporting “inter-professional” teams – teams made up of multiple professions working together for the patient. The workshop went well, and got me thinking of all of the opportunities for multiple professions/disciplines working together as one team and the role that facilitation skills play in making the teams successful.

Some Background

The concept of multiple professions working together is not new. Companies, such as IDEO, have been successfully employing the concept for years. It’s spreading beyond the few to become embraced by numerous professions and industries. The concept is not the same as “Self-Directed Work Teams (SDWT)” because these inter-professional teams are convened for a specific purpose – a specific patient in the case of healthcare or a specific design in the case of IDEO. Self-directed work teams are established for a longer period and not limited to a single project. There are similarities because neither has a “leader” and both require a very different way of working than other types of teams. I’ll call these “Focused Teams” – defined as, a group of people from multiple professions and/or disciplines, without an obvious “leader”, who form, temporarily, for a specific purpose. These Focused Teams require a new set of skills that is seldom taught in the individual professions – facilitation skills.

Why is this growing?

The major impetus that I’ve seen is the phenomenal growth of information and knowledge required to do many jobs. Twenty years ago, one person could design, build, and deliver a video game. Today, it requires a team of people – musicians, artists, writers, programmers, etc., to make it happen. Fifty years ago, the country doctor carried everything needed to care for a patient in his or her doctor bag. Today, the doctor carries a computer and requires the knowledge of many other professions to care for a patient.

The same is true in many other professions and industries – no one person can be expert enough (an “expert” is defined as a has-been drop of water). This increase in required knowledge is due to the increased complexity of our world and requires multiple professions and disciplines to work together.

The Problem

The problem with this growing trend is that the various professions and disciplines are taught all of the technical skills needed to do the job; however, few if any are taught the required facilitation skills to work together. And, these professions learn in silos – seldom do they practice working in inter-professional or inter-disciplinary teams in schools – yet they have to work in inter-professional and inter-disciplinary teams when they leave school. Because they don’t learn about teams and working together in their education, they don’t know what the others' set of skills and perspectives are – and vice-versa. Traditional models don’t work because no one expertise is more important than another, so traditional leadership roles don’t exist. Because these “teams” only form for a short time, from a few minutes to a few months, with no one leader, traditional “group evolution” – forming, storming, norming, performing – happens differently.

How Does it Work?

Even though “group evolution” happens differently, the key characteristics that define a team still apply. For a group of people to be a team, they need trust, healthy conflict, commitment, accountability, and a common goal. The need for these characteristics doesn’t go away because the teams form for a short time, in fact, these characteristics are more important. The difficulty is to develop these characteristics when no leader is responsible to assess and develop the characteristics in the group of people. So how does it work? People need to be trained – both in individual and in inter-professional settings. People need facilitation skills and an understanding of Focused Team concepts.

• Different focus on Diversity – Understanding diversity is critical – especially understanding that diversity, in this instance, is referring to diverse skills, professions, and perspectives. This different focus is seldom discussed in diversity training but is critical to understand. Each profession brings a very different set of skills and perspectives that the others need, but don’t always realize. One example, I listened to a cardiac surgeon explain that once, when he was in the operating room, he realized that his focus was the mechanics of the heart – making it work correctly. The patient on the table was almost secondary. For the operating room nurse, the focus was on the patient overall. This different focus brought different perspectives and created communication problems until it was recognized and dealt with.
• Different way of working – These Focused Teams don’t form accidentally. Since they form on purpose, they need to follow simple project management concepts – plan for the work, execute the work, and then reflect on what happened. Planning for the work enables the team to function well because everyone can then know the purpose and objectives of the team, the roles, and processes they will follow. Executing the work requires facilitation skills. Reflecting on what happened is critical to capture what they learned – both about their work and about how they worked together as a team – so that they continually improve their way of working.
• New set of skills – Focused Teams need facilitation skills, such as:
  • Active Listening – This is critical to working together because communication is important in developing trust, healthy conflict, and commitment. It enables team members to understand each other and not make inaccurate assumptions.
  • Process thinking – Knowing how to structure a basic agenda is important. Effective action doesn’t happen when processes are haphazard or poorly defined. A clear process for how a team will work eliminates confusion and miscommunication and gives them a better chance at successfully achieving their goals.
  • Self-direction – This is much like self-directed work teams in that the individuals need to be self-motivated and self-directed since there is no “leader” to motivate and direct them. People need to be self-confident enough to be able to self motivate. Additionally, they need to be able to do this without the influence of the ego – they need to view each other as equally important – as equal contributors.
• Common Competencies – The following four competencies are taken from the Core Competencies for Inter-professional Collaborative Practice developed by the Inter-professional Education Collaborative (stakeholders from healthcare professions):
  • Values/Ethics – A set of core values that everyone in the team accepts and follows ensures that every member is on a common playing field. Mutual respect, trust, and honesty help a team develop trust and engage in healthy conflict.
  • Roles/Responsibilities – Knowing who does what helps avoid communication errors and helps avoid people stepping on the responsibility of someone else. Often, just defining roles and responsibilities is the easiest way to ensure success of an effort.
  • Communication – Active listening and understanding the perspective of another clears the way for accurate communication, which avoids errors and discord.
  • Teamwork – Working as a team and knowing how to work as a team – listening, understanding processes, knowing how to correct dysfunction – all help prevent discord in the team and helps them develop commitment, accountability and aim for a common goal.

This is the Future

Our world isn’t getting simpler so the need for Focused Teams will continue growing. These new types of teams need to be recognized and developed. I will explore this topic further in future newsletters as new ideas develop. Focused Teams require changing how we train people and require that we train people on facilitation skills as well as the technical skills of their job.