Are you ready to end #fakemeetings with a simple 4-point checklist?
An Excerpt from “Think Alone, Think Together: Banish Groupthink and Facilitate Creative Conversations”
The fourth meeting malady: #fake meetings
In this series of videos and articles, I’m working through some essential ideas on how you, as a facilitator and leader, need to think through the challenge of bringing people together. When the stakes are high, when the salaries in the room stack up, it’s worth making sure that the time a group spends in a room is spent well. I think groupthink is a crime and that helping people really *think together* is a rare and special opportunity. If you’re a facilitator, it’s your job to make sure no one’s time is wasted…and what’s more, people get to extraordinary results! No pressure, right? Read the other essays in this series here.
Last week’s episode was about setting the stage, why we need to change how we work together: The stakes are high and the system is broken. When your team is solving the wrong problems or can’t align and launch, that’s a real challenge. But it’s worse than that!
Last week’s response was awesome, on twitter and LinkedIn. The tweets above pointed to a more insidious issue that plagues many company cultures: Fake meetings. The key to fixing this starts at home, asking ourselves a few simple questions.
1. Am I willing to invite people into my challenge?
Does this meeting have a real purpose? Can I explain the goals, not just of the project, but of this particular session?
People get fired up about design thinking and innovation and people want to feel like they’re making progress, doing the right thing….so why *not* invite people into a 2-day workshop to generate ideas about an initiative? That’s the easy part. Once you’ve invited people into your challenge, the real work starts. You are now responsible to *do* something with their input, or explain why you didn’t!
2. What will happen after this gathering? Where on the spectrum am I willing to live?
Collaboration, thinking together, isn’t an on/off switch, however. The IAP2 spectrum is a handy reflective tool for anyone planning a gathering. IAP2 stands for “International Association for Public Participation”
One side of the spectrum ins’t “good” and the other “bad”…if you are only consulting people, consult with them and tell them so! In the tweets above, was the school administration afraid to bring people into the process? If so, why? Why pretend to involve, when you’re only informing?
When you’re trying to design a creative session, ask “Am I willing to tell people where on the IAP2 spectrum I’m working?”
Design Thinking can be a powerful narrative tool: You can tell people where you are in your creative process and explain your choices, choices that you feel are well-founded and even fixed. Are you asking people to “rubber stamp” those choices? Or give real feedback that you intend to use (or explain why you didn’t use it)? Or find ways to make your choices acceptable without changing them substantively?
The medium article linked above from Steph Roy McCallum turned me on to the roots of the IAP2 spectrum, and also shows the real risk of fake collaboration. Sherry Arnstein put together a typology of citizen participation visualized as a ladder with 8 rungs, sketched below.
If you’ve watched recent town halls where members of congress got chewed out by little children making powerful statements, you might have felt better…but did anything change? Once in power, are elected officials actually responsible to the citizenry? Mostly, people in power choose to defend and protect their power. And opening yourself up to deeper collaboration looks a lot like giving away power.
3. How much power am I strong enough to give away?
My firm belief is that most problems are too complex to solve alone.
If your work somehow consists of simple, cool (ie, non-volatile) challenges, sure, do what you like! But if you work in a complex world, if you work with multiple stakeholders, if you live in the modern world, you’re going to have to get other people on board to create durable change. And if you want to create durable change, you have to get people really bought in on that change. Not just through leadership and storytelling, but through deep ownership and participation. In order for that to happen, you have to give power away! Are you strong enough to do it?
4. Am I willing to change my mind?
If you haven’t read Liminal Thinking by Dave Gray it’s worth a look...in it are a wealth of tools to use to unlock your own potential for change, which can help you change…yourself. You can’t really force change on others!
In the final analysis, you can’t facilitate a creative conversation if you’re determined to keep all of your theories, opinions and beliefs intact at the end of things. That’s the final check on the list. If you are ready to invite people to a challenge, you might want to consider what you plan to do with their time and inputs. Consider how much power you are ready to give away and be ready to change your mind.
Now, we should be ready for a creative conversation! If you want to listen to week three, sign up below. Check out week one and the rest of the planned content here
