Above and Beyond KM

Gordon Vala-Webb is former National Director, Knowledge Management at PwC Mnagement Services LP Canada.

[These are my notes from the KMWorld 2012 Conference. Since I'm publishing them as soon as possible after the end of a session, they may contain the occasional typographical or grammatical error. Please excuse those. To the extent I've made any editorial comments, I've shown those in brackets.]

NOTES:

• The charges against the accused. (1) Attempting KM alchemy. (2) Subverting KM novices. (3) Attempting to kill the knowledge management profession.
• The theory of the DIKW Pyramid. The idea is that you start with an enormous amount of data which is then refined into information, and then refined again into knowledge.
• 1st Set of Issues. What data to collect? (Conceptual framework) How to express it> (Language) What else is going on? (Context)
• 2nd Set of Issues. What is Information? What is Knowledge? What is the difference? And, how do you accomplish the required KM Alchemy (i.e., turning the information “lead” into knowledge “gold”)?
• The Top 5 KM Problems Resulting from the DIKW Pyramid: (5) Collection of data in the hopes that this will lead to information and, ultimately, knowledge. (4) Just-in-case collection and organization of content. (3) Build it and they will come. (2) Ignoring the context (of people, of knowledge objects). (1) The pyramid does not help you link your KM work to any business results.
• A Path to An Alternative Model. What would we want in a new model? (1) Start from the desired business result. (2) Determine how you will link your KM strategy or intervention to that business result. (3) Focus your KM efforts and then measure your results (hopefully, your success). (4) Put people at the center as active doers. (5) Make sure it is context sensitive.

Thomas Hsu (Global KM) and Stephen Kaukonen (Senior Manager) are at Accenture.

[These are my notes from the KMWorld 2012 Conference. Since I'm publishing them as soon as possible after the end of a session, they may contain the occasional typographical or grammatical error. Please excuse those. To the extent I've made any editorial comments, I've shown those in brackets.]

NOTES:

• What’s Gamification?. Use of game elements and game design techniques in non-game contexts. (1) Game elements: the ability to earn points or badges for completing certain activities, a leader board showing the status of the players. (2) Game design techniques: this relates to the aesthetics of the game, the narrative, the journey, how the player progresses through the game. (3) Non-game contexts: applying gamification to solve business problems — even on an enterprise level.
• Why KM and Collaboration?. KM is a perfect candidate for gamification because while collaboration is good and rewarding in and of itself, many people find it hard to do. Gamification can help people over the hurdles to starting and keep them motivated along the journey.
• Some Examples of Gamification. (1) Fitocracy helps make you “super better” through exercise. (2) Nike Plus has built an enormous community of runners. (3)) Steptacular is an Accenture program.
• Core Concepts. (1) Start by understanding your audience. What works for one part of your organization may not work for other parts of your organization. Conduct a user study to determine which elements of gamification resonate with your audience. One game does not fit all. (2) Impact: showing status is cheap and easier. However, it may lack meaning since it does not really demonstrate impact. Look for ways to demonstrate the impact of accomplishment within the game. At Accenture, they provide a report via gamification called “My Collaboration Impact.” It tracks activities such as posting a blog that represented thought leadership that lead to a specific number of people either commenting or reporting a new behavior.(3) Visibility: you can use gamification to make visible good behaviors and provide feedback and positive reinforcement to ensure more of that behavior. (4) Mastery: becoming good at an activity is reward in and of itself. Therefore, break the game down into logical steps that help participants progress towards mastery. The job of the game designer is to be the sherpa to help them up the mountain to mastery. (5) Autonomy: allow the player some independence, let them make some meaningful choices. (6) Purpose: this is the social element. Have the game communicate that you are involved in something bigger than yourself, you are making a difference.
• Gamification Pitfalls. (1) Gamification won’t fix made KM. It’s like putting lipstick on a pig. Therefore, be sure that your KM approach and processes are good before adding gamification elements. (2) Making games is easy. It may be fun (at least serious fun), but it isn’t just a matter of slapping badges on something. (3) Focus on behaviors not activities. While activities are components of behaviors, they don’t by themselves bring about long-term change. (4) Da
• Focus on Behaviors not Activities. While activities are useful and necessary components of behavior, they don’t by themselves bring about long-term change. Therefore, focus on the long-term change you are trying to achieve and then construct the game to help the player to complete specific tasks that will help cultivate the desired behavior.
• Data is King. A well-designed game can help generate huge amount of useful data.
• Spread the Recognition. Find different ways of recognize accomplishment. Don’t limit yourself to badges. Realize that sometimes a note from a senior executive will be more meaningful.
• People Will Game the System. This is a fact of life. Therefore, set limits on the numbers of point you can receive for a specific activity. Equally, don’t communicate exactly how many points you can earn for particular activities because you don’t want people to focus solely on high-point activities or a large volume of low-point activities. Finally, remember that if you offer a prize like an iPad you will be inviting people to seriously subvert the game.
• Start small and then evolve.. Don’t worry about getting it right immediately out of the box. Plan to iterate.
• Gamification is Not a Silver Bullet.

Ian Coyne is Sector Knowledge Manager, Russell Reynolds Associates. Using the experience of KPMG as they tried to answer the “Brave Banana” problem, he shares insights and tips on how to use crowdsourcing to share knowledge.

[These are my notes from the KMWorld 2012 Conference. Since I'm publishing them as soon as possible after the end of a session, they may contain the occasional typographical or grammatical error. Please excuse those. To the extent I've made any editorial comments, I've shown those in brackets.]

NOTES:

• The Brave Banana Problem. “Late one night, a KPMG partner in the U.K. sent an email to 600 people asking for solutions to what he thought was an unsolvable problem: How could you peel a thousand bananas at the same time?” They reason he was asking was that a client was a maker of banana ice cream, but didn’t have a reliable and affordable means of getting peeled bananas to make that ice cream. Through this crowdsourcing effort they found at least one credible answer that was worth testing. (For those of you who are curious, the respondent had studied food sciences in university and proposed putting a banana in vacuum, which would cause the skin to split and eject the peeled banana. The idea didn’t ultimately work, but it definitely impressed the client.)
• Lessons Learned. (1) Learning from failure: asking people about general work topics didn’t work that well. Equally, asking them about purely personal topics in a vacuum didn’t work either. What did work was asking a question for the purpose of serving a client. Once the crowd understood the reason for the question they were willing to respond for the sake of the client.(2) People do something if they are asked by their friends and peers. They are less likely to act if requested by a remote senior leader. (3) Make it easy. Ask questions to which there is no wrong answer. All that is required is to have an opinion that you are willing to share. (4) Don’t offer financial rewards — it encourages the wrong kind of behavior. (5) Seek forgiveness not permission. This is particularly important if you’re attempting something new for your organization. (6) Be brave. Doing simple stuff is less likely to have a transformative effect on your organization.
• Methods for Tapping the Wisdom of Crowds. To begin with, don’t use corporate speak. Use every day language, not formal corporate messaging. In addition, don’t send an organization-wide request since that will feel a bit more like a corporate edict. Start by sending emails to a target group and see what kind of response you receive. Another method is to set up a simple discussion board (this can be done in SharePoint) and invite people by email to participate.
• Don’t Expect the Ultimate Answer. In the Brave Banana example, they were hoping for the ultimate answer, but found that a credible answer was sufficient to impress the client. For most crowdsourcing exercises, focus on gathering as many answers as possible. Even if one of the ideas isn’t the perfect answer, it may point the way to the right answer. Equally, don’t edit or cull the responses — you don’t always know what will resonate with the client. Therefore, give the client ever single answer received. To make a little order out of the chaos of seemingly random answers, try grouping all the responses and then present the major themes to the client (supported by copies of all the answers).
• Where do you draw the line between crowdsourcing and focus groups?. When you need responses from a specific demographic, it makes sense to organize a focus group. (You can do this by sending the email to a limited group of people.) However, if you want the widest range of responses, regardless of source, then make it wide open and try crowdsourcing.

Jeremy Bently is CEO and Founder of Smartlogic.

[These are my notes from the KMWorld 2012 Conference. Since I'm publishing them as soon as possible after the end of a session, they may contain the occasional typographical or grammatical error. Please excuse those. To the extent I've made any editorial comments, I've shown those in brackets.]

NOTES:

• Unstructured Content. Unstructured content is highly varied: it can range from a Twitter feed to a Word document or a scanned image. It can cover a range of subjects — as many subjects as arise in our lives.
• Information Management, circa 1950. In the 1950s, the focus was on manual tagging, content management, indexing, search and distribution. What is the same today? The scope of infomration and the process (e.g., tagging, indexing, search, etc.) The great crime is the continuing reliance on manual tagging. What is different? The techhnology and variety of information has changed. Further, we’ve moved from “information overload” to what it is currently called: “Big Data.” (Calling it Big Data suggests that we can cope with it, in a way that we couldn’t cope with Information Overload.) Other changes are the velocity of information and the complexity of requirements. The complexity relates to different audiences interested in different aspects of the information we have. It also relates to the different uses of that information.
• Flow. For the purposes of information management today, Flow = velocity X volume. (This is not entirely accurate according to fluid dynamics, but works for KM.) Being able to harness information in real time (in that flow), gives you a competive advantage and efficiencies. It is the relationships between data that present the opportunities.
• Content Intelligence Allows You to “Enrich” Your Content. This is now the Holy Grail for organizations. Knowledge our content helps us find opportunities, gives us competitive advantage and helps us stop it from leaking out of the organization. At the heart of content intelligence is labeling = metadata. Another key element of content intelligence is extracting the key information. We also need to classify the content so that we can provide indicators as to what it’s about. Given how much content there is and how many topics are covered by that content, it is impossible to manually tag it all effectively (especially since you don’t know who is looking for content and what they are looking for). Therefore, deriving metadata should occur at the point of use, not at the point of archiving. This is a huge reason why manually tagging can’t work. Content needs to be integrated with the existing collection. Finally, it needs to found so we need tools to help surface the content relevant to the person looking for it.
• Closing Questions. Can you afford the risks inherent in manual tagging? Can you afford to ignore customer feedback via huge unstructured data flows (e.g., via social media)? Do you have the means to track trends reliably?

David Weinberger is Senior Researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, author of Too Big to Know, and columnist at KMWorld.

[These are my notes from the KMWorld 2012 Conference. Since I'm publishing them as soon as possible after the end of a session, they may contain the occasional typographical or grammatical error. Please excuse those. To the extent I've made any editorial comments, I've shown those in brackets.]

NOTES:

• What Knowledge Has Been. From the beginning, knowledge has been about filtering signal from noise; it has been that which is settled (if people are still arguing about it, it’s not yet knowledge); it is settled (if we don’t know its place, it’s not knowledge); knowledge has been a system of stopping points (you stop your search for knowledge after you ask a certified “expert” who has mastered a “brain-sized chunk of the world” and asnwers your question). In addition, there have been several limitations imposed on knowledge by its physical medium: it must be permanent and preserved in permanent physical forms (e.g., books, newspapers); knowledge can be physically placed in only one place, therefore, it can’t be put in a different places at the same time; knowledge is in a final form (the author must convey the extent of her expertise on a specific topic within the covers of a single book — another stopping point).
• The New Knowledge. New media have unmoored knowledge and allowed it to expand beyond it old physical limitations. We’ve moved from knowledge contained in single physical objects to knowledge found in networks. For example, instead of placing scientific knowledge in a peer-reviewed journals, it can now be placed in a wide open network (arXiv.org) which can be linked into and out out of.
• Lessons from Science. (1)Peer review, for all of its goodness, does not scale. It has it place but is not robust enough to let science and knowledge get big enough fast enough. (2) Networks flood the ecosystem. (3) Knowledge contains differences. (4) At our best, we are learning how to deal with our differences.
• Lessons from Developers. When developers run into a problem they can’t solve, they post the question on a shared site like stack overflow where others can respond. Then the answer can be posted on another shared site like github. Lessons: (1) learning together requires humility and generosity. (2) One of the powers of iteration is that is scalable. (3) Public learning allows every interested person to learn together. In this way, every act of education leaves a track that everyone else can follow so they can become smarter too.
• Library of Congress Photo Collection. The Library of Congress posted collections of photos on Flickr.com so that the public could tag it with all relevant tags. The public jumped in enthusiastically and filled in the 75 available tags quickly. Some of these tags are factual (the date of the photo), aesthetic (“Red”) and on its face, wrong (e.g., tagging a photo of a woman at work as “Rosie the Riveter” even though it clearly is not a photo about Rosie). This range of tags creates messiness, which allows for a wider range of meaning and connection that was possible with the cleaner and disciplined approach provided by “experts.”
• The Echo Chamber Problem. When you give people lots of media choices, they tend to go towards choices that “”echo” their own views, thereby leading to confirmation bias. In addition, there is a concern that this tends to make us more extreme in our views…leading to “the death of democracy.” Weinberger mentions Reddit in which people can post and comment, all of which can be voted up or down by the readers. At its best, it leads to wonderful conversations that surface a variety of views and insights. (Weinberger points to the IAMA — “I am a…” conversation threads where there have been several open, respectful, occasionally humorous, often enlightening conversations.) Even though Reddit welcomes conversation among people with differences, the reality is that most people who participate share more than they disagree — at least with respect to how to interact with each other.
• How to Make Rooms/Networks Smarter. (1) Appreciate the power of difference. If we can maximize our networks for “fruitful disagreement,” we open the possibility of getting closer to “truth.” (2) Public learning allows more people to get smarter. (3) Embrace mess and inclusion — while we might like the clarity of cleanly organized systems, we miss a lot when we don’t permit messiness and inclusion. (4) Open a damn window! Rooms get stuffy unless you let new information/perspectives/air into the room.
• What are the characteristics of Networks and Knowledge?. Overwhelming, unsettled, unresolved, messy, deeply & loosely-connected, held together by our own interests. These are also the characteristics of a searcher of knowledge.
• What Do We Know?. What we have in common is not a single knowledge about which we agree, but a single world that we share and can disagree.

James Robertson is Managing Director of Step Two Designs and author of Award Winning Mobile Intranets. The purpose of the Intranet Innovation Awards is to share the best new ideas (so the rest of us can steal them!). The 2012 winners presenting in today’s session are Paige Rhodes, Quality Manager, Weston Solutions; Craig Stoll, IT Senior Project Manager, Weston Solutions; and Dan Lewis, Principal Consultant, Mobility, The Judge Group.

[These are my notes from the KMWorld 2012 Conference. Since I'm publishing them as soon as possible after the end of a session, they may contain the occasional typographical or grammatical error. Please excuse those. To the extent I've made any editorial comments, I've shown those in brackets.]

NOTES:

• The New South Wales Department of Education. The innovation in their portal is a beautifully designed “Essentials” bar that the user can personalize by adding other essentials that you like. Further a user can recommend a specific essential to other people in their network. When they do, that essential pops up on the essentials bar of the people in their network. While usually only 5-10% of users personalize their portals, in the NSW Department of Education portal, a huge number of users have personalized their essentials bar.
• Enter LLC. Enter LLC is a retail company in Russia. They are focused on growing rapidly by helping people have fun. They have done this through gamification. Users can earn points. There are many ways of winning points: you can earn a small number of points by taking action within their Jive environment (e.g., posting, commenting), by recommending somone else for doing something that merits points. You can earn a large number of points by taking action in the physical world, particularly if you do something in a retail store. You can also earn extra points if recognized by a senior manager. The top point earners win significant prizes (e.g., international holidays).
• Scott Corp. Scott Corp is an Australian company that moves really dangerous substances (e.g., explosives). They have huge reporting obligations to the government. In fact, they used to spend one full week each month gathering and auditing these paper reports. Their new process is that the truck driver completes the same paper report they have always filled out. However, next they photocopy their reports using a multifunction device and use soft buttons on the copier to indicate the severity level. That report is then automatically added to a database in SharePoint, which then triggers some automated work flow appropriate to the severity level. Now, the auditors have reduced the time spent from one week to zero.
• Judge Consulting Group’s mLink. Judge is a privately owned professional services firm specializing in technology services. Rather than using a traditional CRM, they use a candidate tracking tool (they call EDGE) to keep track of their staff. For each potential staff member, they keep contact details, as many as three resumes, and tools that allow Judge personnel to document interactions with potential hires. Participation is recognized by posting photos of the top users on a leader board. Another functionality they provide is real time information on staff time and attendance. You can also see paystubs. (Pay fluctuates since it is a commission-driven business.) They also included mobile calculators to help personnel determine margins. They deliver this and more functionality via the mobile web and through their own app store.
• Weston Solutions. Weston Solutions is an integrator providing services in environmental solutions, specialty construction and green development. It is an employee-owned organization with a staff of 1,800 in more than 60 offices worldwide. They have a diverse workforce and client base. They had a collaborative culture, but needed an intranet capable of supporting collaboration. Their intranet is currently ranked #1 in the Worldwide Intranet Challenge. This is an indication of user support of the intranet. LessonTrack is the functionality they are discussing today. It is designed to collect and share lessons learned. The landing page allows users to subscribe to a lessons relating to a specific area of interest. Each lesson has links to the author (included a link via Lync so you can contact them directly), and the ability to add comments to the lesson. The data entry form has only three mandatory fields: The title of the lesson, the lesson itself (three sentences will suffice), and some way to connect the lesson to a project number or opportunity number. The system can then connect that lesson to other metadata automatically. Other fields are key words and a list of contributors. They have built this in SharePoint. Using that common platform, they can tie a lesson to a specific project tracker (which tracks the operational status and financial health of a project). Employees are expected to enter their lessons learned immediately after they learn the lesson. The key to this is that the data entry form can be invoked no matter where you are. In each system there is a button that the user can click to generate a data entry form at the moment they realize they have a lesson to share. Finally, they gathered up all the existing lessons learned and pre-populated the LessonTracker so that users could get value from the minute the tool was launched.

James Robertson is the Managing Director of Step Two Designs, and author of Award Winning Mobile Intranets.

[These are my notes from the KMWorld 2012 Conference. Since I'm publishing them as soon as possible after the end of a session, they may contain the occasional typographical or grammatical error. Please excuse those. To the extent I've made any editorial comments, I've shown those in brackets.]

NOTES:

• How do you “bake” social into the work environment?. ((1) The answer, according to IDEO, is to put people at the center of everything NOT documents. (2) Another method is to switch from an Intranet 1.0 focused on publishing to an Intranet 2.0 focused on collaboration. To do this, you need to understand the purpose for the new approach. Then, deliver the new way of getting things done rather than a particular technology. (3) Deliver information at the point of need no where the user is. Therefore, you need to have flawless, seamless mobile access. (4) Even if you need to use multiple systems to get your work done, consider if all of them can be consolidated behind a single user interface.
• The Company Policy Problem. Usually organizational policies are distributed by email or are posted to the intranet. The problem is that most people ignore this and never read the policy. A small number may remember that a new policy was circulated and will go back to look for it when they need it. However, most simply don’t. The better approach is to track policy changes and then, when a person takes some action that relates to that policy, the system will alert that person that there has been a policy change that affects that person and the action that person is proposing to take.
• Start with the User Experience. Tony Byrne (from The Real Story Group) describes this as designing from the glass back. If you start with the experience you want to deliver, you can communicate that experience via story and pictures to everyone who needs to understand and support the project.
• Tell Your Own Stories. As you are designing, create stories that explain specifically how things will work when the new social system is in place. This is how you help others see the big picture, the grand vision.
• Simplify. Our job is to connect the dots and blur the lines.
• Four Critical Questions: (1) Can we make it simpler? (Can we remove something or skip somthing?) (2) Does it make smart use of technology? (3) Does it meet the needs of staff? (You can’t help people you haven’t met.) (4) Is it beautifully designed?

Gordon Vala-Webb is the former
National Director, Knowledge Management, PwC Management Services LP Canada. This talk is based on ideas from mechanical engineering professor Adrian Brejan’s book Design in Nature: How the Contructal Law Governs Evolution in Biology, Physics, Technology, and Social Organization. The presentation focuses on KM lessons from flow systems and how they design and redesign themselves.

[These are my notes from the KMWorld 2012 Conference. Since I'm publishing them as soon as possible after the end of a session, they may contain the occasional typographical or grammatical error. Please excuse those. To the extent I've made any editorial comments, I've shown those in brackets.]

NOTES:

• The Constructal Law. “All of nature is composed of flow systems that change and evolve their configuration over time so that they flow more easily to create greater access to the currents they move.” Look at a river delta moving to tributaries, to rivers, to streams, etc. In basketball, the ball is passed from one player to another until it “flows” to the person most capable of making the basket. Even if the initial design is flawed, it will adapt of time to make it work more effectively.

Dave Snowden, is the Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Cognitive Edge.

[These are my notes from the KMWorld 2012 Conference. Since I'm publishing them as soon as possible after the end of a session, they may contain the occasional typographical or grammatical error. Please excuse those. To the extent I've made any editorial comments, I've shown those in brackets.]

NOTES:

• Wicked Problems are Intractable Problems. Intractable problems are ones to which traditional solutions have been applied, but have not worked. These problems present a really strategic opportunity to Knowledge Management. If you can solve these problems, you will become vital to your organization. On the other hand, if you address only conventional problems, your knowledge management will never be anything but conventional — it will never be strategic.
• Complex Adaptive Situations. These situations are not causal, they are dispositional. In other words, there is no direct link between cause and effect. Therefore, there are no drivers that can be identified and applied. Further, traditional failsafe design does not work. So don’t waste time hiring consultants or doing copious amounts of research. Instead, run several rapid safe-to-fail experiments to “probe” what is going on by testing quickly any coherent theory that emerges and then move on depending on the results of your results. Your portfolio of theories of test must include some contradictory theories. Otherwise, you haven’t cast your net widely enough and have missed something. In addition, some of the portfolio must be oblique — something intended to solve another problem altogether. (See Obliquity by David Kay.) Some of the theories in your portfolio should be naive, which means that they should be formed from the perspective of one who is not an expert.
• Complicated Problems. These problems can be addressed by a traditional fail safe design. For these problems, there are leading theories or process that can be implemented.
• How to design a Safe-to-Fail Experiment that addresses an Intractable Problem. Begin by answering the following: (1) Name of experiment, (2) Rationale for experiment, (3) Indication of success, (4) Indications of failure, (5) Amplification strategy (after success), (6) Recovery strategy (after failure), (7) Actions (to follow success), (8) Responsibility for actions (after failure). After you have done your preliminary experiment design, conduct as many as five rounds of ritual dissent to tighten your design.
• Ritual Dissent. The benefit of ritual dissent is that it is an extraordinarily effective way of identifying weaknesses and potential problems with your experiment before you actually fund and carry out your experiment. Between each round of the ritual dissent, the planning group takes the criticism they received in the round just completed and use it to improve their experiment design. Dave Snowden recommends that you do as many as five rounds of ritual dissent to ensure that many people have had a chance to test your experimental design.

Dave Pollard is retired CKO at E&Y and Director, Group Pattern Language Project. For more information on the Group Pattern Language Project see www.groupworksdeck.org

[These are my notes from the KMWorld 2012 Conference. Since I'm publishing them as soon as possible after the end of a session, they may contain the occasional typographical or grammatical error. Please excuse those. To the extent I've made any editorial comments, I've shown those in brackets.]

NOTES:

• Intention. How you prepare for a meeting has an enormous impact on the results of the meeting. For example, engaging a facilitator beforehand can help surface conflicting agendas early. What matters with respect to intention? Set the focus for the meeting early and articulate that priority clearly and early.
• Context. To promote better conversation, place them in a pleasant discussion space. Even if you have participants of different rank, make sure you’ve created a welcoming and equal playing field so that everyone feels empowered to contribute regardless of rank. Be sure that you understand and give respect to group culture and the history/context of the discussion. Finally, make sure you’ve invited the right people to the meeting and that all of them are present and participating.
• Relationship. “Hosting” a meeting is a critical role. They set and maintain the tone of the meeting. You can help build relationship by breaking bread together, expressing appreciation for the members of the group and encouraging the good faith assumption (i,e., accept that we are all doing our best). Other critical factors are transparency, shared airtime and continuous attention to tending the relationships as they grow,
• Flow. Pay attention to the rhythm, energy, balance, and pacing from beginning to end. How you open a meeting sets the tone. Equally how you close the meeting can help with resolution — especially where there has been conflict or uncertainty in the meeting. Be aware that if you are exploring a new topic or looking for new ideas, you need to observe the divergence/convergence rhythm: diverge so that you can brainstorm and then converge to come to consensus.
• Creativity. Be careful that you don’t shut down creativity too early. Common ways of doing this are failing to encourage bold thinking, trying to force new ideas into an existing structure too quickly, using budgetary constraints to stop new ideas, being unwilling to be playful (using humor and fun). That said, be aware of the “power of constraints.” If you embrace limitations as challenges, that can help focus your efforts more productively. Just be aware of your intentions — don’t rush to a constraint if your goal is to shut down the current conversation.
• Perspective. When it looks like a meeting is running off the rails, it may be necessary to help everyone shift perspective. For example, help the group focus on common ground. While doing that, don’t ignore what’s going on — be sure to honor the contradiction and ambiguity that has emerged. Other ways of shifting perspective are (1) Fractal (notice patterns repeating at different levels); (2) Go meta (widen the lens, change the frame of analysis; (3) Change your focus by zooming in or zooming out (focus on forest or focus on trees); (4) Time shift (reflect on the past, envision the future); (5) Translation (reframe, articulate, bridge differences); (6) Value the margins (listen to voices from the edge);(7) Viewpoint shift (see with new eyes so you can think differently about the problem).
• Modelling. The facilitator needs to be very courageous throughout this process — don’t be defensive — just hold the participants to their commitment to achieve/perform together. In addition, the facilitator needs to “hold space” — this means maintaining the trust, focus and openness of the group. Sometimes the facilitator may need to say “I’m stuck here and need help moving us past this logjam.” Ideal participant behaviors include (1) listening carefully until you really understand what is being said (or not said); (2) mirroring — reflecting back what you’ve heard; (3) don’t things personally — it isn’t always about you; (4) be self-aware — understand your own values, biases, needs, biases, gifts. One key technique is to use the words “Yes, and” rather than beginning with the word “But.”
• Inquiry & Synthesis. At this stage, it’s important to take time to reflect. Then distill by summarizing/synthesizing what’s been said or decided. If necessary,consider going deeper (drilling down) until you really undersatnd what’s going on.
• Faith. While this may be a tough concept for a business audience, it is important that people trust that by doing the right things, the right result will emerge. Letting go and letting come can be very hard — especially for the faciitator.