14
From Them to Us
Working with Multiple Constituents in Dialogic OD
It is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis.
—Henry Miller (1944)
Twenty-five years ago I had just started an assignment as manager of training and development in a large, successful telecommunications company that was experiencing new global competition. While working there, I discovered that my clients and I could take advantage of the potentially disruptive circumstances by working at their manufacturing sites with work teams and their clients, rather than bringing people in from disparate locations for classroom training at the head office. We concluded based on anecdotal evidence that this way of working provided a far better return on investment than traditional training programs that had little to do with day-to-day work. I experimented with bringing together customers and staff from other departments using dialogic processes based loosely on social constructivism (Searle, 1970) and David Bohm’s Dialogue method (Bohm, Factor, and Garrett, 1991). I found cross-departmental collaboration improved productivity, ignited a passion for exploring, and challenged underlying mental models about how work gets done and how organizations work. The training and development department that employed me did not know how to bill for such work. The director only knew how to earn the department’s place in the organization by filling classrooms.
Soon after, I discovered the work of Marvin Weisbord and his Future Search approach (Weisbord, 1987). I met others who introduced me to Open Space (Owen, 2008), Appreciative Inquiry (Cooperrider and Whitney, 2005), further developments in Dialogue (Issacs, 1999), World Café (Brown and Issacs, 2005), and Real-Time Strategic Change (R. Jacobs, 1994). I used principles drawn from each of these approaches in my work. Colleagues called what I was doing organization development, yet that label did not seem to fit for me. I experienced organizations not as objects to be fixed the way a plumber fixes burst pipes. Rather, I experienced organizations as verbs, active communities of people who were working together to achieve results but were hampered by an assortment of barriers that made collaborating across departments very challenging.
I am telling this story as if I had some clear notion of what I was doing while I was doing it. This could not be further from the truth. I found myself in conditions of increasing complexity, characterized by ambiguity, loss of control, and a desire for connectivity. As Jane Jacobs (1961) wrote in her landmark urban planning book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the most vibrant cities are not those that follow orderly plans. They are more a result of patterns arising out of a multiplicity of simple interactions leading to effects that those involved do not see until much later. I learned and invented by going where the patterns emerged. Jacobs’s ideas encouraged me to continue to experiment with ways to create conditions that could invite the kind of vibrant, emergent spaces she wrote about.
When I began to teach organization development, I needed to find language to describe the perspective I brought to my work and why I thought my students needed theories and practices that expanded beyond and complemented the action research methods of traditional OD. I spent hours with my business partner, Ingrid Richter, articulating a theory of change that combined our experiences in whole-system change, leadership development, action learning (Marquardt, 2004), and hosting communities of practice (Wenger, 1999), as well as our understanding of self-adaptive systems and resilience (Westley, Zimmerman, and Patton, 2009).
In this chapter I will share that theory of change in some detail. It can be boiled down to something quite simple: sustainable, transformative change is more likely to take place when a cross-section of constituents is engaged in learning, working, and meaning making together. I have found this to be true whether consulting with a senior leadership team or with an enterprise that extends beyond any one geographic boundary. The advantage of engaging multiple constituents is the possibility of generating productive working relationships, disturbing certainties (whether of identities or understanding), opening new avenues for innovation, and establishing greater resilience in the face of rapid and disruptive changes. I will begin by looking at why we might engage multiple constituents in working together to create change and identify when doing so is appropriate. I will look at the kinds of issues Dialogic OD practitioners need to think about and deal with in hosting multi-group events and discuss conditions for success that arise when one invites people from different sectors or silos to work together to create a new future.
What Can Multiconstituent Convenings Achieve?
Multiconstituent convening brings together diverse constituents who (1) hold a range of perspectives on a topic or issue, (2) belong to a community or network engaged in some way with the same issue, yet (3) see themselves as belonging to different groups. People participating can come from different departments or locations of the same organization, as well as from different organizations. They might also include people who touch the initiating organization in some way—for example, suppliers, customers, service providers. No one is asked to represent a particular perspective. I insist that participants bring their own experience and wisdom and not speak as a representative of a particular perspective. For example, a participant from the transit workers’ union is not asked to represent the union’s perspective; rather he or she is invited to offer his or her own experience and perspective as a transit worker. I do this as a means for the whole group to establish a shared identity as a community that extends beyond traditional identities of organization, functional roles within an organization, cultural and racial likeness, and power relations or levels within a system. This may be a temporary community that exists for one meeting, or one that continues on for years to develop a practice or establish and sustain a social innovation.
Recently I worked with a client that had formed itself as a loosely connected enterprise that shared a desire to rehabilitate land contaminated by over one hundred years of mining activity. The enterprise had a name, two guiding visionaries, but no formal legal status or paid employees. Those involved came from several indigenous groups, a mining company, and two universities. I was asked to facilitate a meeting of nine individuals, a cross-section of the organizations and communities that had been involved in the initiative, to help them develop a shared vision and plan for turning that vision into a legal entity. Participants taped photos to the walls of the contaminated sites, the ceremonial lodge where the aboriginal elders met to provide direction, and maps of active and inactive mines. The initial meeting activities were intended to establish a sense of wholeness, which I had been told had been lacking. We began with a two-hour check-in, with each individual invited to talk about what mattered to them about this enterprise. This dialogic process helped to establish a sense of relatedness that participants said had not previously existed. In the next activity, adapted from a monitoring and evaluation process called Outcome Mapping (Earl, Garden, and Smutylo, 2001), participants were asked to write the outcomes they wanted to achieve on three separate flipcharts: one flipchart for the minimum that had to be achieved, one flipchart for what they would like to achieve, and the final flipchart for what they would love to achieve. This led to a dialogue about what the items on the lists meant. Through this process, in about two hours, the participants covered the history of the initiative and of mining in the areas, the values that guided their work, their own personal connections, and what they wanted to achieve. In this way, they established a community with a shared identity, or new core narrative, perhaps not one firmly established, yet one that enabled productive conversations about topics that had previously proven challenging. I made no attempt to resolve previous disputes between people, or to explicitly build trust. The dialogues themselves established the space where people could say what they needed to say and hold differences without a need to resolve them.
As this example illustrates, organizations are interconnected into multiple systems that are constantly in motion and changing. This means that patterns of behavior emerge, last for some time, dissipate, or integrate a totally unthought-of change. A single group or department trying to solve a complex problem will only see part of the problem. In such circumstances, bringing together a group of people from different areas of an organization or organizations to make sense of their experience enables leaders to take advantage of this interconnectedness.
Addressing Adaptive Challenges
Multiconstituent dialogues are used to address adaptive challenges (Heifetz, 1998), complex issues for which no known solutions exist. They are fundamentally a means for cross-organization communication, learning, and relationship building while making progress on addressing previously intractable issues. Typically the issues addressed are ones that are hard to fully understand from firsthand experience and are unfolding in unfamiliar and even unpredictable ways.
Multiconstituent convenings are a space for collective sense making and idea generation, from which generative images and new possibilities concerning an adaptive challenge can emerge.
A child welfare agency convened a cross-section of its staff and administration, along with those who receive its services, to think through how best to help families with a history of domestic abuse stay together. Many interventions had been tried, few resulted in improvements; many further isolated the children from their family. For the first time, this initiative established a collection of workers, administrators, and those affected as a collective body to talk about their experiences and what might help. After a slow start, likely caused by lack of trust, new insights began to emerge. Children in care were invited to talk about their experiences. The emergence of a new core narrative of what child welfare could be began to emerge. Workers who felt threatened that they would lose their jobs began to see how the range of services they provided could evolve. These ideas continue to emerge and be tested through experience and dialogue within the agency. Periodic meetings of the constituents continue to shape services and policies to support children and families staying together, safely.
Leveraging Diverse Perspectives and Knowledge
Multiple-constituent convenings enable an organization to leverage the many different realities constituents bring into a room. The Diagnostic Mindset operates as if there is one reality and the better we get at measuring it, the better we will be able to calibrate our activities to achieve desired results. Yet with the high degree of technological connectivity, complexity, and ambiguity in which many of the most intractable problems in organizations are embedded, a complementary mindset is needed, one that regards current reality as evolving and multifaceted rather than as a single bolt of cloth. This is the Dialogic Mindset.
For example, for agricultural scientists there may be many straightforward aspects to research required for food production. However, with immigration, shifting food preferences, new global competition from global food production, and climate change, it became much more challenging for one research organization to decide where to invest limited dollars in agriculture-related research. In the past, this organization would bring together its best scientists and senior leaders to make decisions on the allocation of research dollars. A change in government priorities shifted funding away from what might be termed pure research to application-based research. This resulted in dissatisfaction among scientists and frustration among producers and growers. The research organization decided to bring together a cross-section of scientists from its regional centers, as well as user groups and producer associations, rather than limit problem solving and decision making to a small, central group. What emerged from this disruption was the creation of regional clusters across the country composed of the organization’s researchers, along with farmers, university researchers, and association representatives in the region. The clusters took on ownership for how to spend government research dollars they were given; these decisions would be based on local circumstances and emerging opportunities. While this initiative has not eliminated all dissatisfaction and frustration, it has built a set of new, productive working relationships resulting in greater support for decisions on how research money is spent.
Moving beyond Trade-Offs and Narrow Decision Making
In addition to multigroup dialogues being convened for the purpose of solving adaptive challenges, they are also convened to build productive working relationships, create shared meaning, and shape a richer understanding of the complexity of the issue being addressed. They do so while making space for improvisational flexibility toward both what will change and how to change. The dilemmas and tensions that people address in dialogue are not traded off, one against the other. The foundation for productive working relationships is built on giving people enough time together to have face-to-face conversations about issues that matter to them, while not reducing complex and paradoxical issues to simple either/or decisions. Multiparty dialogues are where both/and solutions can be found.
For example, in healthcare, hospitals are challenged to achieve their healing mission while running their facilities in ways that manage costs and improves the quality of care. Bringing a group of multiple stakeholders together—physicians, nurses, administrators, allied health professionals, insurers, government officials, and patients and their families, as well as community members—gives the entire system a way to see itself, to make meaning of the dilemmas they all face, to develop productive working relationships, and to generate insights that no one party could achieve alone. One healthcare system I worked with convened a number of multigroup dialogues as a key component of its implementation of lean thinking (Wolmark and Jones, 2003). The client wanted the implementation of lean processes to be experienced as a holistic solution to improving healthcare services while becoming more cost efficient. She knew about a number of healthcare institutions where lean thinking was seen as a cost-cutting activity, strictly limited to resolving technical processes related to patient flow and workflow. The work of these multigroup dialogues was to develop a learning partnership that created commitment to a common agenda—improving quality of care and reducing costs instead of overfocusing efforts on cutting expenses. The multigroup dialogues increased clarity about the variety of needs and constraints that existed, and enabled participants to find both/and solutions that would not serve one constituency at the expense of the other.
These dialogues also increased the extent and density of existing connections, enabling new networks that supported a faster response when issues arose, and as described in Chapter 6 on emergence, made it more likely that the larger system could reorganize in a more adaptive manner under near-chaotic circumstances.
For over forty years, Barry Johnson has written and spoken about the existence of polarities, or interdependent pairs (e.g., stability and change) that need one another in order to achieve a greater purpose (Johnson, 1992). These pairs are always present, like gravity, and the energy they produce is indestructible. The significance of Johnson’s insights is that the interdependent pairs are often treated separately as if they are problems to solve (e.g., decentralization is treated as the solution to the problem of too much centralization), leading to greater organization dysfunction. Instead, Johnson suggests that both poles of the decentralization-centralization dilemma generate positive results that must be leveraged in order to produce sustainable change and greater innovation.
I often see mixed groups get in knots over what they see as irreconcilable differences that actually turn out to be an overfocus on one side of a polarity. It is quite typical for one group to believe that by eliminating one pole of a dilemma (e.g., by eliminating hierarchy and, instead, distributing authority) the problem they have come together to address will be solved.
An education-focused organization was growing rapidly and its board and senior leadership groups sought to establish a structure and defined processes to handle the growth (centralization). This was undertaken with little consideration for the flexibility and self-direction local partners needed to adapt to different demographic circumstances (decentralization). The senior leadership team and fund-raising group came together with the program leaders to address what appeared to all to be growing and irreconcilable differences. Neither side could see the other’s point of view (they literally sat at tables on different sides of the room) until I took their words and drew them on a map with two poles: one pole focused on the desire to keep the original program and its quality (quality/centralization), the other on the desire to respond to local needs based on the specific circumstances where the program was being delivered (quality/decentralization). In other words, the key question was: How can the organization stay true to the practices and values of the original community-based program developed in a large urban setting—helping youth in a low-income community stay in school and graduate to post-secondary education—and expand into geographic locations that have very different demographics and needs? Seeing that the two points of view could be generative (and in fact needed one another to produce greater effectiveness) opened up a new core narrative that could enable the organization to stay true to its initiating values and practice while leaving room to adapt the program to the diverse circumstances in which it is being introduced. Not enough time has elapsed since we carried out this work to determine if this new narrative has led to innovation and generative images that could produce even more innovation.
Key Questions to Consider for Multiconstituent Convenings
Multigroup convenings place significant demands on individuals and organizations in terms of time, energy, and finances. Thus it is important to make knowledgeable decisions about when and if it is the right time to bring multiple groups together. While there are likely as many ways to think about the necessary conditions for effective multiconstituent dialogues as there are people who host them, here are four sets of questions I consider when convening multigroup dialogues. You can think of these as risk signals you and the sponsor or sponsors will have to address before you launch a multiparty Dialogic OD process.
1. Choosing to Convene
In your initial conversations with the client there are a number of questions to consider but these three are key:
1. Is the issue complex, in that no rigid recipe or blueprints will be helpful?
2. Do those with responsibility for the organization have the focus, will, and capability to engage with more than one group and to see the results through, beyond implementation, including dealing with divergent goals?
3. Will engaging with more than one group provide the organization with greater leverage for learning and success? Do learning and relationship building form key outcomes for the dialogue?
If the answer to all of the above questions is yes, then you have a solid foundation for convening a multiconstituent dialogue. However, the situations that Dialogic OD practitioners and organizations find themselves facing when considering multigroup convenings are entangled in a multitude of considerations that challenge both sponsor and Dialogic OD practitioner in their reflections on these questions. Each of these questions is meant to initiate dialogue leading to clarity about why convening a multigroup meeting would be a good option. It would be highly unusual for a sponsor and Dialogic OD practitioner not to feel some degree of uncertainty, even as they decide that conditions are right to convene a multiparty dialogue.
While these questions are asked in a closed-ended fashion, they are meant as starting points for contracting conversations the Dialogic OD practitioner should initiate with the potential sponsor and partners (see Chapters 8 and 10). The questions are illuminating for all parties in that they help individuals from different groups come to know one another beyond the stereotypes and past negative experiences they might have had. They offer the prospect of shifting mental models and opening possibilities of acting differently on previously closely held ideas.
To illustrate the above, here is an example of a dialogic process in which the sponsor decided to proceed knowing there were uncertainties, especially with respect to two individuals who would be in attendance and who had a history of open hostility toward one another.
A South African organization’s mission was to engage high-school-aged youth in entrepreneurial skill building. The organization relied on establishing a network of partners to carry out its programming. Two of the partners were particularly at odds with one another, an Afrikaner man and a Zulu woman. It is not hard to imagine the biases each may have built up toward the other based on years of apartheid and the denial of rights to women. The design team and sponsor decided it was worth the risk of the possible intolerance, sensing that the process to be used would enable more civil and productive conversations. The design team decided to use the Future Search methodology (Weisbord and Janoff, 2000) to explore the past and build relationships based on values, shared history, and owning up to serious missteps. Only after doing this would the groups explore shared aspirations and actions to realize their dreams. Over the course of three days and multiple conversations, these two individuals came to know and appreciate one another in a way that I could never have imagined based on what I had been told of their historical dealings with one another. This validated the design team’s sense that given the right structure for dialogue, there would be greater opportunities for learning and success in different parties working together for the betterment of South Africa, despite the country’s history. At the end of the Future Search, the two declared their desire to work together for the economic development of their community, which they succeeded in doing in ways that changed community life for the better.
2. Clarity of Purpose for Convening a Multigroup Dialogue
Bringing multiple groups together in a dialogue goes beyond consultation. Such convenings ask those attending to take ownership for the issues being discussed. In addition, multigroup dialogue is undertaken out of recognition that the initiating party affirms that it needs a fuller and richer view of the whole system. Bringing multiple groups together in dialogue without a clear purpose is like putting all the ingredients for a cake together without understanding how they contribute to the whole.
For example, a client once asked me to facilitate a dialogue among key staff from the organization’s international offices. The meeting dates were already scheduled, and attendees already committed. Despite my efforts to help the client clarify the purpose for the two-day meeting, it began without a clear purpose, and the sponsor steadfastly held to the notion that a clear purpose was not required. While those attending managed to participate fully and produced some useful insights, many participants complained during the meeting (as well as to me privately) that due to the lack of a clear purpose for the meeting, they were leaving thinking that the time spent achieved much less than they could have achieved.
When the purpose for convening is not clear, or is at the stage of “this is a good idea to try,” focus on developing a framing question that articulates the reason to bring multiple groups together by asking these questions:
Does the question invite as many constituents as possible to see themselves in the issue?
Does the question call for contributions from different perspectives?
Does the question focus the issue or challenge into a learning and innovation agenda?
Examples of good framing questions are
How can we adapt our organization and ourselves as leaders to successfully support at-risk young people to complete high school?
How can we ensure that staff and our partners are prepared to respond effectively and in collaboration to a major public health crisis?
When the client either refuses to clarify the purpose for bringing together different groups or remains unclear about the purpose, delay the initiative, if possible, until a larger design team consisting of a greater diversity of perspective can contribute to a dialogue on purpose.
3. Readiness for New Action and Progress on the Issue
The will to act and make progress on an issue can be seen in the preparedness to provide sufficient funding and time to see the dialogue through past a single meeting and in the willingness to put an idea in motion with a tenacity to overcome the inevitable setbacks. In other words, there needs to be, as John Kotter (2008) has written, an urgent patience. Examples of key questions for readiness are
Is there a critical mass of groups who want to take action on the issue?
Is the sponsor ready to reach out to other groups to engage them on the issue?
When the challenge appears to lack a critical mass of groups willing to take action, map the system of constituents and identify where there are actors who are ready to take action and begin working with the sponsoring group to take small actions (minimal investment of time and resources) that are likely to result in success. For the client and Dialogic OD practitioner this is a way to demonstrate the viability of taking new action and to build credibility.
Where you are uncertain of a client’s readiness to act, hold one-on-one meetings with different stakeholders to determine interests, and find ways to connect them with groups that have similar interests and that may be ready to take new action. If a multiple-group meeting remains a good idea that only the sponsor supports, it is likely not the right time to pursue it.
4. Forming a Design Team
As described in Chapter 10 (as well as above), many Dialogic OD processes require the formation of a steering committee or design team. This is always necessary when undertaking multiparty dialogue. Think of the team as a holographic cross-section of the system that the initiating organization desires to change. The design team will highlight and engage with the struggles that the multiple parties to be included in the subsequent dialogues will also experience. The design team must include people who understand the issues and perspectives of the different groups—individuals who might be termed resisters to change, as well as proponents and innovators. When the sponsor’s choice for a design team member is unable to make the commitment to the work, there can be a temptation to ask that individual to assign someone else from their group to take that place. While this may turn out well, in my experience it is best to review the organization’s ecosystem (see below) to determine who should be included on the design team.
To make the decision about who to include, it can be helpful to make a simple drawing of the organization and larger ecosystem in which it exists. For example, a healthcare system could be sketched as a circle within which are the diversity of professionals and technicians who work at its hospitals: doctors and nurses, administrators and managers, and support services such as finance and information technology and maintenance, to name a few. Depending on what the client wants to achieve with the dialogue, this grouping of diverse perspectives might be all that is required.
Some clients with whom I have worked have chosen to go beyond the organization’s staff and leadership to include the board of directors, customers, suppliers, community members, even competitors as design-team members. Each of these can be sketched as circles outside the organization with the exception of the board of directors, which might be placed within the organization’s core. Design team members are asked to bring their perspectives and experience into the conversations, but not to represent their part of the system. For example, when working with hospitals that have a number of unionized staff and professionals, it is important that the union members invited understand that they are not attending as representatives who must check with their union on every decision. They are asked to offer their insights and knowledge from their work and their union experience, and to make decisions with the others in the room. Key questions in forming a design team are:
To what extent does the organization need to build better working relationships with “external” constituents?
In what ways can this individual influence others in his or her constituent group to participate in future dialogues?
How will these different perspectives add richness, reciprocity, and reach to the initiating group?
There are no straightforward responses to these questions. Rather, each question is a basis for dialogue with the client. You may begin with a design team composed of a small internal group. As a Dialogic OD practitioner, your role is to help the initial group by drawing out their ecosystem, in graphic form, and asking questions similar to those above. It is typical for the sponsor to find he or she needs to engage other perspectives on the design team in order to gain a fuller picture of the ecosystem.
When design teams first form, initial interactions between members will be shaped by the perceptions and biases people have about the groups those members come from. In other words, interactions within the team can be usefully viewed as a microcosm of the multigroup dynamics within the system as a whole. One of the earliest and most essential changes that must occur in multiparty interventions, particularly where there is a high degree of fragmentation and conflict within the ecosystem, is to create a space where design team members have opportunities to grow past their biased perceptions, see each other as individuals, and then come to see themselves as a team. This starts with each person speaking about their personal investment in the issue. There is some evidence that building a collective sense of “we” in a microcosm like a design team can have positive effects on multigroup relations in the system as a whole (Bushe and Shani, 1990; Gillette and McCollom, 1990).
Bringing Multiple Groups Together
When bringing multiple groups together, it is typical that no common authority exists to which each group reports or to which all groups are accountable. The sponsor of multigroup convenings must understand that he or she cannot compel anyone to take action or enforce commitments to take action made during the dialogue by individuals from a group outside of his or her direct line of authority. As detailed in Chapter 15 on amplifying change, the sponsor has to ensure that following a multigroup dialogue there will be multiple means by which groups can communicate with one another. This can be achieved by offering space for groups to meet, providing seed funding to test initial ideas, committing to holding follow-up dialogues in the future so that all those involved stay connected with what has transpired since the initial dialogue or dialogues, and staying in close contact with each group to understand their successes and struggles so that all groups know about the progress and setbacks. It is unfortunately common in multiple-group convenings for individuals who attended dialogues not to know what has been accomplished or where initiatives have derailed. Lack of this knowledge and learning reduces change potential.
In addition, for the Dialogic OD practitioner there are several key tasks. One is to ensure that there is a clear purpose for bringing together multiple groups. Part of creating a clear purpose is helping the sponsor to craft a clear framing question. As stated above, a framing question gives focus to the inquiry. When multiple groups are brought together, it is particularly important that the framing question is specific enough to be relevant to the initiating organization and its purposes yet broad enough for individuals from other groups to see themselves and their interests being served by the dialogue. For example, in a multigroup dialogue for a newly amalgamated school board, the planning group shifted its initial focus from the future of the new school board to the future of public education in the region. The latter question was broad enough that individuals on the design team (and attending the three-day dialogic meeting) coming from the business community, for example, were willing to participate, since school success is related to the success of their companies.
For the Dialogic OD practitioner and the sponsor there is a need to create a space that makes it possible for people to come together across differences and work as partners. This is what I call bridging leadership (Pierce, 2002). Bridging leadership aspires to create and sustain effective working relationships among constituents whose joint contribution is needed to make progress on a given challenge. By spanning different perspectives and ideas, a deeper listening can begin to develop, a listening that enables the groups to co-evolve shared understanding about and solutions to the most complex issues.
There are no easy formulas for bridging divides and enabling collaboration across differences. Chapter 13 on hosting containers offers considerable wisdom on the conditions and facilitation processes needed. Some strategies that have proven effective are described briefly below.1
1. At the start of a dialogue, enable people to differentiate themselves by inviting everyone to speak. As described in Chapter 6 on complexity and emergence, differentiation is as important as unification in dialogic change processes. In large multigroup meetings, differentiation normalizes differences, making them neither bad nor good, but treating the differentiations as data.
2. Differentiation can be brought about in as simple a way as doing a go-around, asking everyone in the room to offer their perspective. In large meetings, or meetings with more than twelve people, it is often best to divide people into smaller groups (seven or so people) ensuring that each group has a mix of perspectives. Then have each group report out what ideas and differences surfaced. Sometimes I ask people to bring in an object or symbol that represents for them what the issue is about. When the meeting begins, I ask each person to introduce himself or herself using the object or symbol, explaining what it means to him or her and how it connects to the issue to be discussed. As described in Chapter 13, these can be placed somewhere in the room to represent the spirit animating the dialogue.
3. Multigroup convenings are always in danger of fragmenting. To help reduce this potential, whenever anyone offers an opinion or idea that then becomes the dominant idea, ask if anyone sees it differently. Leave space for all to offer their voices without a need to resolve the differences or justify perspectives.
4. Differences do not need to be resolved. They can remain as data that become part of the learning ecosystem. Instead of focusing on resolving differences, ask groups to identify where they see congruence and correspondence between or within ideas without a need for agreement or consensus.
5. Polarization, or opposing factions, can happen at any time. To work with polarization, do not let those with opposing views have an argument among themselves. First, interrupt that kind of ping-pong argumentation. Next, give those who identify with the different views an opportunity to dialogue among themselves. For example, when meeting with an organization in Israel composed of Israelis and Palestinians, when an argument broke out between the two sides about who was at fault for religiously motivated violence, I stopped the argument and asked the Palestinians and Israelis to each form a separate subgroup. I invited one of the subgroups into the middle of the room to talk about how they saw the issue. The other group sat in a circle on the outside and listened. When the first group had their say, the other group entered the middle of the circle and discussed the issue from their perspective. What each group discovered was that there were quite a few differences even in groups identified as having similarities. They also discovered that even between groups that apparently differ there are similarities. This enabled both groups to see there were points of convergence where they could co-create a new core narrative and make advances on the issue.
6. To catalyze creativity and new ideas, ask individuals to meet in small groups to talk about an issue. Then have people from different groups pair up and talk about what they learned. You can also do the reporting out in a plenary session. Either way, the forming of small groups creates the possibility for everyone to participate because most people feel safer about speaking their truths in small groups than in the whole group.
7. When you cannot think of what to do next, or when the group itself seems stuck, ask the group what to do. Without exception, there will be more than a few ideas that surface offering positive ways to move ahead. Write the ideas that seem to generate most excitement on a flip-chart, then use something like dot voting to determine which approach to use. Dot voting can be done with markers or sticky dots and involves asking people to identify one to three top choices. When all have voted, have everyone look at the results and talk about what they see. For those ideas with the most dots, ask if they represent the best ideas, if there is something missing, and what larger patterns are present in the voting.
8. If people attending the meeting see no possibility of making progress on the issue, offer to end the meeting. For example, I was working with a client on an illness-related issue that involved healthcare providers, insurance companies, injured workers, ergonomists, researchers, employers, and unions. Thirty minutes after we began what was to be a three-day meeting, a highly respected physician stood up and declared that the meeting should not be taking place without a common definition of the illness. It was true that there was no common definition, and many past attempts to come to an agreed-on definition had failed. I turned to the speaker and acknowledged her remarks. I then turned to the group of 125 individuals and asked them what they wanted to do. I asked if they wanted to continue despite the lack of a common definition—understanding that a small group could form to dialogue about a definition at some point during the three days—or if they felt the lack of a common definition was a deal breaker and that therefore the meeting should be stopped. I told them that the decision was in their hands and we would proceed in whatever direction they wished to go. A brief dialogue ensued in which I asked to hear from people with different perspectives. At the end of this brief dialogue, someone in the room proposed that the meeting continue. Someone in the room called for a vote (not a strategy I would use, but I respected the group for what it was trying to do). Over 80 percent of the people in the room decided to continue the meeting. And so they did.
9. When meeting with multiple constituents, there is a tendency for groups sharing the same perspective to pair up or position themselves as opposite to others. Likewise, when in the midst of a challenging topic, there is a tendency for people to take sides, and join each other, at least psychologically, as a subgroup. There can also be individuals whose perspectives are so seemingly different from others in the room that they are left on their own. The objective is to draw out what is shared and what is different in order to get a fuller picture, and to use that fuller picture to develop innovative approaches.
10. Roger Martin (2009) speaks about this dynamic as holding two apparently conflicting ideas in creative tension. Thus, when a group gives voice to two apparently conflicting ideas, ask, “If these two ideas were to be put together as necessary to achieve a greater purpose, what ideas might we come up with?” For example, if the conflict is about information security and information sharing, the transformative question could be, “How can you both be information-secure and create an environment where information is freely shared?” This is similar to Barry Johnson’s idea of Polarity Thinking, referred to above, and can form the basis for a new core narrative.
11. There are times when one person appears to offer a point of view that is unique, or one that causes people in the room to roll their eyes. It is important that no one feel excluded and therefore vulnerable to being scapegoated should anything go wrong. Ask if anyone else in the room shares ideas similar to what was just presented. If no one does, then it is up to you as host to find what aspect in the individual’s perspective you can share, and make that observation to the group.
Questions That Guide the Design of Multigroup Convenings
In Chapter 12 on framing inquiry, Nancy Southern offers a model of five different questions, depending on the nature of the convening. The different questions actually form a rough process design I use for many of the multi-group convenings I host.
1. Begin with Southern’s “affirmative inquiry” into the issue to draw out the strengths as perceived from the different perspectives specific to the focus issue. This inquiry might be quite short, such as sharing with one other person the best experience in interacting with a specific organization, or with the issue under exploration. Sometimes the sharing happens in small groups, followed by individuals in the room offering highlights about what they heard or pairing with someone from another group to share what stood out. The results of this initial inquiry usually surface again during those aspects of the dialogue that are future focused. The kind of energy that surfaces from such an inquiry builds positive and strengths-based energy, and helps establish a foundation for trust.
2. A multigroup convening then often moves to an exploration of the present, particularly the larger context, the nature of the issues, and what opportunities might exist within the nature of the issue that could form the foundation for renewal. This part of the dialogue looks at the assumptions underlying the issue, the beliefs about what is possible, and each group’s responsibility for the current state of affairs. This is similar to what Southern refers to as “critical inquiry,” which is used to surface the nature of current tensions, the assumptions and beliefs that underlie them, and what groups might need to shift in order to create productive working relationships. This inquiry reveals what groups hold in common and where their differences appear to lie. No attempt should be made to resolve these differences, inasmuch as this conversation usually happens early on in the dialogue and there is not yet enough information, understanding, or trust to productively explore what the differences are really about. This inquiry establishes what I call a ground truth.
I typically ask participants to start this work in small groups that mix people with different perspectives. This is typically followed by a plenary meeting or paired sharing and dialogue to make meaning of what was heard. Sometimes this kind of inquiry will eliminate the issue as a serious challenge; other times it creates a space for shared meaning making, which is the precursor to positively addressing the challenge. This inquiry tends to deepen a sense of individuals being in the same boat, even if they have entered it from different directions.
For example, a three-day dialogue with a city planning department and its constituents brought together staff, administration, and citizens, as well as those who serve the city, such as the legal and education system. This loosely coupled constituency found a sense of shared identity as they talked about the challenges and successes they have experienced, as well as what they were learning that would make the city feel healthier and safer. The mixed groupings helped to build a sense of wholeness in a system that was initially experienced as quite fragmented and polarized, and ultimately led to a generative picture of the future.
I have found it best after such an inquiry to form individuals into small groups composed of people who share the same perspective (e.g., front line employees, headquarters staff, sales associates). The focus is on owning up to how that group has contributed to the problem. For the host, this requires a keen awareness of the language people are using. Statements that appear to blame other groups are opportunities for the OD practitioner to ask the speaker to reframe the statement into something about their own contribution to the situation. This may require multiple attempts by the speaker or help from someone in their group in order to get to the point of ownership. It is important to note that a multigroup dialogue might end at this point, having built greater shared understanding with no need to solve a problem or generate a sense of advancement on an issue.
3. At this point, groups are usually ready to move into what Southern calls “generative” and “strategic” inquiry. Generative inquiry first, in order to cocreate possible desired futures. This is often best done in small groups that mix perspectives, with each group then presenting back to the whole. The next step often includes an inquiry to surface the most compelling ideas, and an identification of people willing to take responsibility for ensuring the ideas are given more attention outside of the event. Because there is typically no common accountability structure, the success of this step often depends on the trust built during prior conversations, as well as on how clear it is to all participants and the management structure from which they come that this dialogue is intended to produce collective impact. This means that ownership for the end results and actions can be held anywhere in the ecosystem. For example, in a dialogue in a family and child services agency, responsibility for supporting children in care while they attend university (not a mandated service of child welfare agencies in Ontario) was cochaired by an individual external to the agency.
4. Strategic inquiry is about next steps and planning for the future. This is often a step that is accomplished using self-selected meetings, meaning that individuals self-select into groupings based on their interest and energy to see a particular action manifested.
Conclusion
When a sponsor chooses to engage, not merely consult, multiple groups to create a new strategic plan, make progress on a complex issue, or enhance collective performance, the organization is moving in a direction that suggests ongoing learning and constituent engagement. This brings with it an expectation that something will be different. Leaders cannot just invite multiple groups into dialogue once and then go back to command and control and ignore a new way of operating. Turning away from this multiparty engagement after a multiconstituent dialogue can result in cynicism and loss of support within the organization. The decision to engage multiple groups in a dialogic process is not one to be taken lightly. Do not do it simply because you want the experience, or because you as practitioner and the sponsor believe this will be the silver bullet to solve persistent organization problems. The benefits—from obtaining a fuller picture of the ecosystem, creating a generative image that can enable the development of one or more innovations, and transforming the organization into an enterprise capable of doing what it could not do before—are worth the risks, provided the careful preparations outlined in this book are attended to.
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