The facilitation hamburger

Geoff Roberts change, flexibility, focus

A recent article I was reading referred to the ‘additional roles of a facilitator’ – definitely Advanced Level stuff, so here we go with the O-Level version.

I like to think of working in a team as a bit like a hamburger, there are three aspects of teamwork that need attention:

  1. The Task – the ‘what’ of the work. What is the deliverable/outcome? The hard end-point of the work.
  2. The Process – the ‘how’. How are you going to get the job done?
  3. The People – the ‘who’. Who needs to be involved? How do I keep them involved?

The task leader – the person who is responsible for delivery of the task – needs to keep as much of their attention as possible on getting the job done, so having to devise and keep track of the Process and the People issues is a distraction from ‘doing the job’. Nonetheless they are both essential and this is where the role of Facilitator comes in.

A good facilitator can help the Task leader by working with them to devise a suitable process and then keep the team on track; they can help by watching the people and helping everyone to contribute. The facilitator can concentrate exclusively on these ‘non-task’ aspects of team performance and help deliver outstanding performance. Now one interesting ‘side-effect’ of this division of labour is that the facilitator does not need to know anything about the content of the task, indeed there is a risk that a facilitator who does havecontent knowledge can get sucked into the task and neglect thier primary duties on the Process and People aspects of performance.

So next time you have a challenging task that needs a process to be invented and a new team – that’s the ideal situation to employ a process facilitator, they will add huge value and you will soon learn just how effective facilitation can add to your team performance.

One day at a time

Geoff Roberts change, choice, flexibility, focus

One day at a timeDo some of your goals sometimes seem a bit too challenging, a bit  too long-term or a bit too much to take on? Do you find it hard to make and maintain the committment necessary?

Well, I came a cross a suggestion that I found helpful – take it one day at a time. Now just a minute, isn’t that what is always advised? well, what I heard was a slightly different take.

The suggestion was to commit to your goal, or more accurately the action needed to achieve it, one day at a time. When you wake up, promise to yourself that you will eat only healthy food, run for 30 minutes, contact one new potential customer, whatever…today. If you miss it, you miss it, get on with life and re-make that commitment again tomorrow when maybe you will be more successful.Yoou will probably hit your action more often than not, each step still moving you forward, but without the weight of months or years of effort in your head weighing you down.

I find it easier to do something one day at a time than ‘for ever’. Maybe you will too.

Communicate, communicate, communicate

Geoff Roberts change, flexibility

Communication is critical in change

So you have your burning platform, your guiding coalition and your vision – what next? Well the vision won’t achieve anything sat on the managing directors computer, it needs to be communicated to everyone involved in the change and that will be the topic of tomorrow’s blog. I have often been asked “What is the most valuable piece of advice you could give to a change leader?” My response is constant – “Communicate, communicate, communicate and when you have finished communicating. communicate some more.” People often report that the worst part of change is not knowing, that once the way forward is clear they can start making their personal decisions about their own way forward. Any change leader or manager who does not have a communications stream in their programme should be sacked immediately, sat in an office by themselves for a month without any communication and left to ponder what life is like when nobody tells you what is going on.

People will want to know why the change is happening, what is going to be different afterwards, how the change is going to happen, when things will happen, who is in charge and how it will affect them personally. At some level, the question that every individual will be asking themselves is W. I. I. F. M? “What is in it for me?”

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell offers some useful insights into effective communications during change. You already have your advocates, the members of the guiding coalition, and they must be the initial message bearers. They probably need a communications professional to help craft clear, consistent and accurate messages that can be passed on initially by themselves and subsequently by others in the organisation. I was working on the job only a couple of years ago when talking to 3 equally senior members of the management team I got three quite different messages about what was going to happen in one particular part of the business. This cannot be allowed to happen – it leaves employees and other stakeholders confused, it leads to significant mistrust and will inevitably leads to hours and hours of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.

Plan and rehearse your communications especially if you are going to hold any form of launch event. I did this with the board of the company I was working with who wanted to announce a significant piece of organisational strategy and change. With probably spent three or four days in total crafting the messages, wondering what the listeners responses might be to the messages we were sending, re-crafting them rehearsing them and then letting every single employee know within a 24-hour window. Yes, I’ll say that again, every single employee heard  from their own director and within no more than 24 hours of other employees what was going to happen in the future.

Be prepared for questions, and misunderstanding – remember that you have probably taken weeks to get where you are and you cannot expect your audience to catch you up with a half-hour PowerPoint, followed by 10 rushed minutes of questions and answers. Your preparation will have left you with a set of questions and answers that you can hand out or put on your company website and there will be more emerge as individuals and groups start to understand the possible implications for them. If you don’t know the answer to any of the questions say so-the worst thing you can possibly do is to make answer up only to be proven wrong sumps later stage. This totally destroys trust. You will get a lot more respect for saying “I don’t know but I will find out and get back to you within 48 hours” than you will for waffling or making up stuff on the hoof. Of course once you promised to get back within 48 hours, or whatever, you must do so or fall even deeper into the pit of mistrust.

So your communications efforts have started, there is a long way to go, they must be kept open throughout the process. Even when there is nothing to say. I will say that again “Even when there is nothing to say, you need to say that there is nothing to say.” Too often I have seen a vacuum left when there really wasn’t much action being taken. There really wasn’t anything to tell everybody else but the trouble is that if you don’t say anything people make stuff up to fill the gaps and what they make up is not likely to be reality and will take you ages to disassemble and correct.

Communications is a critical part of any change efforts and needs to be handled as professionally as the engineers or IT specialists or chemists or whoever are handling the technical aspects of the change.

Rattlesnakes can cause stress

Geoff Roberts change, choice, flexibility, procrastination, stress

Richard Bach has been at it again, this time he has stimulated my thoughts around change. Ask anybody who deals with change on a professional basis and they will typically tell you that either it takes a very long time or it can happen instantly, the latter usually when there is some sort of crisis to be dealt with. This requires a response outside our normal repertoire.

Richard Bach, brilliant writer that he is, put it this way:

It doesn’t take time to change once you understand the problem” he said, his face lit with excitement.” Somebody hands you a rattlesnake, it doesn’t take long to drop it does it?

Sometimes I was unaware that rattlesnakes were even around, sometimes I knew about the rattlesnakes but ignored them, sometimes the rattlesnakes transformed into a poisonous spider, but every now and again one of those rattlesnakes ends up in my hand. This is a bit like how some people deal with stress.

We wake up in the morning and someone has left the bathroom lights on all night (it’s not worth the hassle of finding out who and reminding them to turn it off in future), we go downstairs and the first thing we notice is the waste bin overflowing (who is it that is so lazy that they cannot be bothered to empty it and so just it just piles up. It falls on the floor), only try to fill the kettle up but we can’t because the sink is full of dirty dishes, then we find our favourite cereal has been used up, then there’s no milk, and the kids are late which risks me being late for the appointment that I have to meet after I’d taken them to school, then there’s an accident on the way there and I am delayed yet again, then the client I’ve been speaking to 4 weeks decides he wants a fundamental change in the proposal we have been working on, then I get home and my printer has run out of ink again, then the telephone rings and rings and rings but I am trying to concentrate on something else, then… (add in your own stressors will).

Then my wife comes in and asks what’s the dinner tonight?-And she gets it all dumped on her. I’LL TELL YOU WHAT’S FOR DINNER TONIGHT. WHAT’S FOR DINNER TONIGHT IS WHAT YOU COOK WHEN YOU WANT TO COOK IT….

Poor woman, a simple enquiry yet the stacked up stresses of the day just collapsed on her very ordinary question. And I spend the next week apologising and making it up – somehow.

If only I had dealt with those little things as they were happening…

If only I had dealt with the rattlesnake before it ended up in my hand…

Life is for living

Geoff Roberts change, choice, flexibility, focus, opportunity, procrastination, selection, time management

Richard Bach - OneI have just been reading another wonderful little book by Richard Bach called “One”. I first came across Richard’s books when I was introduced to Jonathan Livingston Seagull over 30 years ago. JLS can take you half an hour to read or a lifetime; it can be a simple story about a Seagull are a complex parable about learning. For many years I never left the house without a seagull on a chain around my neck, until the day that I realised the seagull had flown away when the chain broke,  never to be seen by me again.

Anyway, back to this latest book “One”. He posits a situation and an exercise that I challenge you to take on yourself. Somehow or other  he meets himself in the future and that future self  knows, for certain, that he only has six months to live. Let me give you the exercise by quoting from the book:

“I think we ought to take this napkin here”, she reached into her purse, “and this pencil, and we ought to list what we want to do most and make this the best six months, the best time in our lives. What would we do if there were no doctors with their dos and don’ts? They can’t cure you, so who are they to tell others what to do with whatever time we have left? I think we ought to make this list and then go ahead and do what we want.”

I don’t know whether the subject of this piece was lucky or not that he knew for sure that he had another six months to live. I don’t know whether or not I will be alive when you read this entry-there is no reason why I shouldn’t be but who knows what happens on the roads or in that complex biochemistry that keeps is running every day?

So my challenge to you is to do the exercise, to figure out what it is that you want to do (not need to do – that’s usually someone else’s agenda), to make a list and to get out there and do it. Oh, there will be challenges, but isn’t a life full of those anyway? Yes, you might upset a few people but you are living your life and you probably only have one of them so you might as well get the most out of it.

And some people will tell you that it’s impossible, selfish, not affordable, etc  – those are their hangups. So let them deal with them rather than dump them on you. I urge you do this exercise , after all you might only have six months to live.

Change – management or what?

Geoff Roberts change, flexibility, focus, metaphor, opportunity, strategy

Chaneg ahead road sign

I was recently involved in a discussion about whether change can happen in organisations without the use of Change Management.

For me, the challenge of the phrase “Change Management” is an embedded belief that change CAN be managed. Yes, we may be able to manage the installation of some new piece of kit or software but when it comes to wetware that all changes because people are much less predictable (and more likely to bite back) than machinery.

To be sustainable, change needs to happen at the ‘right’ pace for the individuals (whoops, I nearly typed ‘people’) involved – push them too hard and you will end up going backwards to deal with resistance, move too slowly and you will lose followers’ enthusiasm. For this reason, any ‘change plan’ – and the existence of such a plan is implied by use of the term ‘management’ – is bound to fail.

I prefer to look at change as a strategic thrust – “This is probably where we need to get to, we will find out more along the way, do you want to go there, what can you do to help us get there?” Hold a Vision and then move as fast or slow as you can whilst keeping the people with you.

My metaphor is to light fires within the business. Some of the fires will catch, spread and maybe even attract others; some fires will die out and unless these are really critical areas (in which case keep stoking the fire in different ways until it catches) move on and find someone/somewhere more ‘productive.

One key piece of learning for me over the many years I have spent in change is to “do what you can, where you can, when you can”.

Finding that creative spark

Geoff Roberts choice, flexibility, focus, metaphor, opportunity

creative spark between fingersI spent yesterday morning with a group of colleagues who are members of a Net2 group. The me, this group acts partly as networking but more significantly as an informal personal development network where I can share my expertise, have it challenged and add to it on the basis of the work and presentations that we do in the sessions. After yesterday’s meeting I commented to several people how pleasant it had been to share some time with like-minded individuals who operated in similar spheres and had a degree of intellectual and practical capability that offered me a challenge.

I really enjoy these meetings and found myself reflecting on the paradoxical nature of my attendance. On the one hand I have no doubt whatsoever that there is value in this group of like-minded people. The other hand suggests the value of diversity and the importance of exposing myself to new ideas and new people. So perhaps you to need to pay attention to both aspects of your learning. Perhaps you need to be challenged and challenge yourself within your domain of expertise as well as stimulating your creativity by exposing yourself to ideas and experiences that do not seem to be immediately relevant.

For those of us that operating in an essentially data rational world, it is the second aspect that might be particularly challenging. How might spending an afternoon in an art gallery or reading about the history of the Roman Empire or simply going for a walk along a beach help me design a better road, build a better sewage works or facilitate a meeting more effectively? The whole point is that we do not know. It is a simple fact that I often find interesting ideas popping into my head whilst I am doing these off-topic activities and it is received wisdom in creativity circles that both incubation and diversity of experience are important in generating creative ideas.

I guess another paradoxical aspect of the whole experience was that it boosted both my ego and my humility by helping me realise that not only am I rather capable but I also still have quite a lot to learn.

So, my challenge to you is, and this is perhaps especially relevant if you are in one of those are driven jobs or lifestyles where everything is planned and there is no time for anything new. Find creative ways to meet your peers (professional associations, networking groups etc) and also make time to do something that is out of the ordinary. Do both of these knowing that in some way, perhaps not known beforehand, both of them will add value to your life and help you do a better job.

Do let me know what you do and how it goes.

Assumptions and not-seeing

Geoff Roberts choice, flexibility, focus, perception

assumptionsIt’s 9:15 in the morning and my gorgeous little granddaughter comes running through all ready for nursery. “Would you like me to take you?” I ask and hear from the kitchen (her father) “You can’t because we don’t have the child seat”. Well I knew we did and I knew that it was in the kitchen and I know that he had put her coat on it when she came in the previous evening; so we put it in the car and off we went.

And then I ended up wandering around the centre of Bradford (yes, it is quite a sad life!) reflecting on this. How come a perfectly functioning adult fails to see a substantial child seat even though he has several times been within inches of it? And I thought of the many times I too have lost something only to have a colleague find it in the same place that I have been unsuccessfully looking … and of course the times that I pointed out to someone else that what they are looking for is right under their nose. So this is a fairly common pattern it seems – we can fail to see something that is physically right under our noses. So what’s going on?

Well, there are lots of things that could be going on and the one that I want to talk about today is assumptions. Where is the child seat? The working assumption, which is is correct 99% of the time, is that it is in my wife’s car. She was away and so a reasonable assumption would be that the car seat was not with us. If I am subconsciously assuming that something is not present, it seems quite likely that my consciousness is not going to be looking for it and hence will not see it even when it is there. I assume that tickets that gig I wanted to go to have sold out, so I do not even enquire – only to find out after the event that the hall was half full; I assume that that beautiful young woman/man would not consider going out with me and so I do not even ask.

Assumptions get in our way and part of my daily challenge is to identify some of the assumptions that I am running at any particular moment. Remember, we all run a series of assumptions all the time. Assumptions, call them beliefs, influence our thoughts and actions in ways that are sometimes incomprehensible to both ourselves and others.

Even my four-year-old granddaughter is running them. She (implicitly) assumes that when she asks “Why?” there is an answer that can be given in terms and a timeframe that a four-year-old will understand. Maybe there is and maybe my assumption that that is not always true is wrong.

So the story has two thrown up two challenges. Firstly to notice more actively what is around you. To use your eyes and ears and smell etc actively rather than in the passive way that many of us operate most of the time. Secondly to stop occasionally and explore what assumptions you are holding about a situation. What do you believe to be true in this situation? What would have to be true for what is happening to make sense? When you surface these assumptions you will have a different perspective on what you are observing and hence more choices about how to live willfully and thoughtfully this world.

(Oh, by the way, one of my assumptions is that if you have read this far you must be interested in the topic. So how about taking a couple of minutes out to write your comments or share with me some assumption that you found to be less than helpful.)

Time to stop?

Geoff Roberts change, choice, flexibility, time management

stopAlison Smith runs a great coaching programme (so do we – but that would be blatant self-promotion!).

I was speaking with her a few months ago when she mentioned something that awakened in me this morning – the need to stop occasionally.

We lead such busy lives, filled with all sorts of activity, that sometimes and perhaps especially when faced with a personal/life challenge the most effective thing to do is get off the roundabout altogether.

As long as we stay on the roundabout our view of the world is constantly changing – OK we may come round to the same point again, but something ‘out there’ will have changed while we were having our ride. How important it might be to take real time out – STOP completely – to look at ourselves, our situation, our connections, our aims and goals, our personal vision?

…and I do not mean ‘stop doing this task and start doing another..”, I mean STOP. Take time out, away from where you normally do your work or live your life. Take time to reflect on what really matters to you, whether how you do your work and live your life is really serving your greater vision. Take time to decide what to drop, who to drop, what to change and what action you are going to take to improve your lot. Always remember:

life is not counted by the number of breaths you take
but by the moments your breath is taken away

Context and immediacy in learning

Geoff Roberts change, choice, flexibility

tree of lifeThese days I tend not to lose much sleep over some of the wackier government edicts that come our way. However, a recent one suggesting that reading tests for six-year-olds should include “non-words” set me thinking. Apparently the rationale is that including non-words allows testing of whether or not pupils can decode using the phonics system that is prevalent in our primary schools these days. The counter argument, to which I admit I subscribe, is that reading is about obtaining meaning not simply translating symbols on a page into vocal utterances.

So, why am I writing about this in a personal effectiveness blog? Well, it seems to me that the debate centres on the whole issue of the relevance of context in learning. It is widely accepted that if a learner understands how to apply a new piece of learning and, better still, has an opportunity to practice that learning within a very short timescale then the learning will be much more effective. How, I wonder, does your average six-year-old understand the concept of or use a non-word?

I think this question of context poses interesting challenges for us trainers and our trainees. As a facilitator of learning (I am really not very keen on the word’ trainer’) my challenge is to be constantly anchoring new material in the current reality of my learners. It is no good just talking about the concept of personal responsibility or networking, I must help my learner identify a specific situation in which they can try out/practice the ideas to which I am introducing them.

So what happens when we turn the tables and I think about this topic of context and immediacy as a learner? I remember, many many years ago, being sent on a short course to learn how to use spreadsheets. My boss at the time thought this was a good idea and in the long term it probably was, however what he had missed was that neither he nor I had any immediate application for this new knowledge that I was acquiring. I came back with all this wonderful stuff in my head and got on with my day job while what I had learned slowly decayed to the point at which when I finally did need to use a spreadsheet I had to start almost from scratch in my learning. From that point onwards, I only ever went on training courses when I either had or could create an immediate application for the new knowledge.

When I apply this thinking to my current field of helping others in their personal development, the challenge is all too apparent. I can sit down and draw pretty diagrams of elephants in circles of Completions Gestalts and lots of other theoretical models, but it is only when my client goes out and actually does something different every day or rewards themself for completing a task that they really understand the power of the ideas I would like to get across. To my coaching clients – please remember that your home play is extremely important! To anyone else reading this blog, just takes 30 seconds to think about the implications of what you have read for your own situation and how you are going to put into practice this context of context and immediacy in learning.

It is not the sound of words that is important, it is their meaning.