The Workshop Book

From Individual Creativity to Group Action

R. Brian Stanfield

• Publisher: New Society Publishers
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780865714700
• eBook ISBN: 9781550923728
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Decision Making
• Index: Business

Increasingly, people working in teams face complex issues that need resolving in an efficient, participatory manner that honors the group's diverse perspectives and individual creativity. The Workshop Book outlines the best practices of the workshop method, based on the Institute for Cultural Affair's Technology of Participation ^TM , and its use in consensus formation, planning, problem solving and research. It also discusses workshop preparation and design, leadership styles, dealing with difficult behaviors, and special applications such as its use in large groups and for planning purposes.

Part 1

The Basic Consensus Workshop Method

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Chapter 1. Why Use the Consensus Workshop Method?

Chapter 2. Some Background

Chapter 3. The Consensus Workshop as Life Method

Chapter 4. Two Approaches to the Consensus Workshop

This section begins with background information on ICA’s consensus workshop method, to be described in Chapters 1 and 2. If you want to know how you can use the workshop method, or where it came from, start with these two chapters.

If you are quite unfamiliar with the method, begin with Chapter 3.

If you want to begin using the method now, start with Chapter 4 and proceed to Part 2.

1

WHY USE THE CONSENSUS WORKSHOP METHOD?

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I believe that moving from an adversarial to a dialogue stance is the core requirement, if we are to move from co-stupidity to co-intelligence. Robert Theobald

THOSE AWFUL MEETINGS

Without some kind of orderly process, meetings can be quite chaotic. Once Gary, a colleague, was describing how difficult it was to have a good meeting at work:

I have a job and a boss. I go to meetings with him occasionally. One meeting in particular, every other Friday morning, has been going on now for what seems like eons. At the end of the meeting, the same ritual takes place. Not only my boss but everyone else goes out the door saying that everything they did at this meeting could have been done in the last five minutes. My boss goes into a little more detail than that because we have a long walk from the meeting place back to our office. So every other Friday we leave this place and go through this same ritual, in great detail, about how everything done there could have been done in the last five minutes.

I finally got tired of listening to it one day. I decided — I think it was just out of meanness really —to say, “Now suppose we take this conversation we’ve been having together over the last year a little bit further. What are the three things that a group of people needs in order to operate in their meetings differently from what they do now? What do they need to have?”

My boss is not a particularly bright man, but I was amazed. He said, “They do not know how to solve problems. They can’t think together.” (I thought, “That is not bad.”) “They can’t plan. It would be a miracle if they could simply talk one at a time. They would be far down the road towards operating as a team. They do not know how to work together as a team. Thirdly, even if they did know how, they do not want to, anyway.” I was amazed.

Gary went on to describe the accustomed flow of many meetings he had been in:

The meeting opens with an irrelevant comment. Then someone either asks a question or states the nature of the problem, and someone else makes a joke about the problem. Another participant argues that what has been stated is not the problem. This is followed by a debate on the nature of the problem. Finally, the meeting decides that the originally stated problem is indeed worth discussing. Two people offer different analyses of the problem. A comment is made that both analyses are biased. Someone says that the group needs a course on teamship. Someone tells a story about a course on teamship she went to. Someone questioned the validity of that course. One alert participant suggests that they had wandered far from the problem. Someone else makes another analysis of the problem. One participant comments on how easy it is to analyse problems and how difficult to solve them. Those with analyses in hand give a spirited defence of the power of analysis. The leader of the meeting throws his pen down and stalks out of the room in disgust.

Have you been to meetings like that? We all have. They’re terrible. Doyle and Straus in How To Make Meetings Work refer to this phenomenon as “the Multi-headed Animal Syndrome.”

Gary’s group is trying to do a highly complex thing — to be a team solving a problem — without any method or any respect for each other. They need a workshop method, or at least a focused conversation method (See R. Brian Stanfield: The Art of Focused Conversation: 100 Ways to Access Group Wisdom In The Workplace). Those who have used ICA methods, trademarked as ToP™ Technology of Participation, know that the situation just described desperately needs a workshop process that pulls out everyone’s ideas on the topic, understands what each person meant, looks for similarities in the ideas from which to develop themes, and pushes these ideas to come up with a well thought through answer to the problem. The process then organizes and names the ideas — in other words it needs a consensus workshop.

INNOCENT OF PROCESS

Most managers, most people for that matter, are quite innocent of process and the concept of steps in a process. Most people do not know how to take a huge topic and break it down to its components. They don’t know how to think through the parts of a process. They do not understand how to pull data from many sources into one picture. They walk into a room, and ask, “What is the winning strategy we need in this area?” and make bold to hope that the results will be worth something.

There are steps to take before asking that question. There are steps to take in asking the question, and steps to take after asking the question. Understanding the consensus workshop method is understanding process thinking.

Sam Kaner et al., in Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision Making, has this no-process story:

A software publishing company held monthly meetings that were chaired by the chief operating officer and attended by all department managers. The managers complained that the meetings were very frustrating. “Sometimes the boss cuts off discussion after five minutes,” they grumbled. “At other times he lets it run on and on. Sometimes it seems like he wants us to buy into a decision he’s already made; other times he couldn’t care less what we think; and then there are other times again when he wants us to figure out every little detail. It’s driving us crazy!”

There is no need for such meetings. There are learnable, teachable skills and processes for orchestrating a meeting that get everyone participating and sharing their wisdom. Enter the consensus workshop method.

COMMON USES OF “WORKSHOP”

The word “workshop” has several common meanings:

• a group discussion of an issue

• a brainstorming and organizing session in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part 1. The Consensus Workshop Method
• Part 2. The Finer Points of the Consensus Workshop
• Part 3. Workshop Leadership
• Part 4. Consensus Workshop Applications
• Appendix 1. Building Consensus
• Appendix 2. Examples of Focus Questions
• Appendix 3. ICA: Its Mission and Locations
• Bibliography
• Index