Experiences
with Dynamic Facilitation
Matthias
zur Bonsen, the
founder of the All-One-Spirit consulting practice, has been
instrumental in bringing trainings in a number of
large-group and dialogic methodologies to Germany,
including Future Search, Open Space, and Genuine Contact.
Since 2005, Matthias has been bringing Jim Rough to Germany
to teach Dynamic Facilitation. Matthias himself has also
begun teaching DF now. Below is a translation of what some
of the graduates of the seminar are saying. The original
webpage in German is at
http://www.all-in-one-spirit.de/sem/stimmenzudf.htm.
Dr.
Jörg
Neumann As part
of a professional project, I had to lead a "difficult"
project meeting. It was about optimizing a process and
corresponding allocation of responsibilities with regard to
an issue that had long been fraught with conflict. Right at
the start of the meeting, I had the idea that Dynamic
Facilitation could help here. Following the procedure we
had learned, I improvised, hung flip charts with the four
thematic categories, and initiated a conversation. At first
it was hard to persuade the participants to let themselves
be drawn out (so that everyone could be “purged”) and to
direct their comments to me, but eventually it became
accepted practice. By the end of the meeting there was a
really good solution proposal, supported by all
participants, which had not been anticipated before. It was
a great success, although I just improvised the DF method
and thus did not really use it in its cleanest form. But
the essential elements were probably present.
Caterine
Schwierz The task
was demanding: a working group had been in a process for a
year or more, with many facilitated meetings, and had not
arrived at the desired result. As had been the case all
along, it seemed that the goals of the individual group
members were completely different and that mutual trust was
lacking. The group pulled the emergency brake and sought a
new approach. Then I came in to the game with Dynamic
Facilitation. Within three working meetings, this allowed
us to build trust, create a common goal, and adopt action
items. Today the group is working to accomplish objectives
with motivation and enjoyment. This experience showed me
how, with the help of Dynamic Facilitation, it is possible
to slice through a big Gordian knot with little effort.
Silvia
Gysel
The
15-member team of an NPO in eastern Switzerland needs to
give their comittment to the dissolution of three field
offices and work out the possibilities for implementation.
"Dynamic Facilitation" is the solution. The effect was
brilliant. Acceptance and comittment grow, the team comes
together emotionally, and in a short time a solution is
born for implementating the restructuring project.
Simone
Bögeholz, Phoenix Contact
In the
meantime, I have finally had the opportunity to facilitate
using Dynamic Facilitation. It was a great experience! With
the help of the method, the group was able to take a big
step forward with regard to a very complex and at times
obscure topic. The process is ongoing, and with every
meeting, Dynamic Facilitation brings us greater clarity. I
want to thank you again for this method and for the
successful momentum in your seminar.
Ruediger
Lekschas, Hamburger Sparkasse
We tried
out Dynamic Facilitation with an "entangled situation" and
achieved a great result. We had a real breakthrough! It was
good that my colleague and I had attended the seminar.
Alex
Rall, PricewaterhouseCoopers Dynamic
Facilitation has really brought me further. This is due in
part to the mediated structure of DF, especially how it
changes the role of moderator into becoming a human
'talking stick'. The moderator stands close to each person,
gives each one his or her full attention, listening,
writing and asking until the participant is 'empty' - you
could also say 'receptive to new ideas'. I have often seen
how in the course of the process, the faces of the
participants visibly relax, and a certain calm quiet
arises, characterized by appreciation and a creative
atmosphere. This is what I've experienced in all types of
settings: team development, conflict resolution, strategy
development, but also in highly technically oriented
settings. Since then, I try as often as possible to make
myself into a 'living Talking Stick' whenever I facilitate,
as I learned to do in Dynamic Facilitation.
Karin
ReuterThank
you for teaching Dynamic Facilitation in Germany last year.
It was a great seminar and I have enjoyed every minute of
it. I remember how you said "Imagine me being in tears
watching you performing great in Dynamic Facilitation!".
And so this past October and November, you must have been
in tears… I was stunned about the success of my second
Dynamic Facilitation experience. Maybe you want to hear the
story:
A manufacturing company of approximately 300 employees
hired my partner Astrid and me for consulting a sales
department in regard to business processes. In our
interviews we heard from all 12 employees the same opinion:
"There is a conflict in our group that has been ongoing for
almost 4 years. It is not possible to solve it." I took a
chance for my second DF and invited the group to an
"experiment". I said I would like to get some ideas from
them about how this conflict might be treated. Also, I said
I am convinced there is a chance to get back to a good
working climate as they had years ago. Then I explained the
four categories and asked "What would you like to talk
about?". One usually rather quiet guy finally started with
the superb question "How can we stop that Kindergarten
thing?" From then on, it was a great pleasure for me to
help the group develop their solution. It took only a
little more than an hour for them to get to the conclusion
this conflict can be solved by themselves! After that
experience I was almost high because I never expected the
energy of the group to generate change so fast. After 3
sessions altogether - and some difficulties inbetween - the
employees in this group now are cooperative and enjoy
working together again. Their feedback as well as the
feedback of the management was very good. Best of all, this
company is now a reference for us.
Six
months later: I did an
evaluation 6 months later with the whole group, their boss,
the staff manager and the head of the staff association.
The staff manager asked, "Could this consulting work be
recommended to other departments?" The answer was a
reaffirming "yes". The staff associate offered some
personal feedback afterwards: "I was not expecting to find
this department now working so well together, after all
those years when I was constantly having to address
problems from them."
Herbert Urmann: I was
one of those for whom, by a “fortunate coincidence”, the
connection to Dynamic Facilitation had clicked, and
therefore I received the gift of being able to use this
modality in a very difficult situation with very strong
emotional conflicts – to a resounding success: as a result,
the group has been able to enter into a productive team
development process that everybody wants to continue. This
is much more than I (and the participants) had expected.
For me it was a great experience.
Isabella Klien: "It was
great, that just prior to the seminar, I had my first
experience of DF: I coached two people who had a conflict.
The exciting thing was that we went through the all of the
phases, just as they are described in the manual. Actually,
after an hour we were almost ready to be done, but shortly
before that, the "real concern" emerged. It was actually
the big breakthrough to a new creative phase, and we then
continued on, for another hour. The result was an
unexpectedly good solution for both parties."
Jürg
Wenger: During
a well-structured Start-workshop on personality training,
suddenly a new topic came up, a topic that clearly needed
and called for clarification and for a practical way
forward: "If we now change as a result of this personality
training, but then go back to the "old organization", a
great deal, if not almost everything that we have done
here, will be dissipated. We need to identify what it is,
in the larger organization from which we have come and to
which we will return, needs to be urgently and practically
changed and improved." I decide
to tackle the topic with a Dynamic Facilitation session,
preparing flip charts and bulletin boards while giving the
participants a short break. Then it begins. While our work
increases the energy in the room even further, the
commitment of the staff to the foundation of their business
is really strong. After two hours, we have identified
issues that, in our opinion, constitute some of the major
challenges facing this company. This is confirmed the next
day in a meeting with the CEO, who has been on board for
six months. But let’s tell the story in order.
After
this Dynamic Facilitation session, we go to dinner. The
waitresses and waiters are hardly able to take our food and
beverage orders, as we are still so engrossed in intense
conversation. In a very short time we have grown together
into a close-knit team, and the participants comment on
this with some astonishment and joy. All of the
participants decide to hold a short additional after-dinner
work-session.
The next
day we visit the CEO. Before any of this took place, I had
heard that he had a very skeptical perspective with regard
to our training. When we give him an overview of our
results so far, he is thrilled. He lets go of his prepared
presentation, and focuses instead on our issues, and the
possibilities and consequences of them being succesfully
addressed within the company. He is thrilled, that this
group of "ordinary" people has identified the same
fundamental business issues, that he had identified during
his first six months in the company. Even
though he usually comes across to employees and colleagues
as a hardliner, he really gets the commitment of these
participants and their common focus on real outcomes. He
asks us to go into even greater detail on the issues.
Today, two months after the workshop, half of the issues
that were brought up have already been implemented
throughout the entire company, while the other ones are in
line for being addressed next. This
initiative has created waves in the company - many people
are having to change or else lose their position. Not
everyone feels the same way about this. The
participants still speak about this special
experience: •"I've
never before experienced a facilitator, being willing to
engage so dynamically, with the issues that hold us back
..."•"We
were so excited and focused. It was really noticeable, how
you took us so seriously, how you wanted to know exactly,
what exactly we wanted to say and to
express."•"In a
short time, we achieved a comprehensive common result. At
the same time, we developed a sense of what each other is
concerned about, how each one thinks and acts, and whom we
can best use for which task ..."
Myriam Mathys
Because
the situation was so complicated, right from the customer’s
first call the thought came to me, that the best approach
would probably be to work with Dynamic Facilitation. And
the experiences that I created with this method were really
positive - and so I very much wanted to share them with
you. The
situation involved bringing together two parts of a print
shop (key account management and production) with the aim
of generating improved cooperation between the two areas.
The situation was difficult in that employees were already
blaming one another, behaviors had started to sink deep
below the belt, and this had apparently caused a lot of
injuries particularly at the Production Planning interface
between the two departments ("If they were gone, the
problem would be solved! "). It was clearly a situation in
which nobody really believed that there could be a solution
and the emotional climate had shrunk to zero.
The
workshop began with a welcome and an introduction round,
that already showed how many participants wanted more
harmony at work. And then I shifted the circle into a
semicircle. Everything worked according to plan. As I
suspected, the Dynamic Facilitation process took, not just
two or three hours, but the whole day. More exactly, from
10:45 a.m. to 1 p.m., and then after lunch from 2 p.m. to 6
p.m. I documented the process on a total of 25 flip chart
sheets. It took
two full hours until the "purge" was done - the “emptying”.
(That was my perception, and it was confirmed on the second
day in the morning round, by two participants: "After two
hours, it suddenly became exciting ..."). And then I had to
allow for a lunch break. Afterward I stepped in, and read
aloud again all of challenges / questions that had already
emerged - and, indeed, as I got toward the last third of
the statements, one of the participants came up with a new
solution and the conversation resumed, on the journey we
had been on before lunch. Eventually,
we arrived at problems that occur at the upper management
level (conflicts between two managers of the company), and
of course there were no really clear solutions for that.
After this point the conversation faltered somewhat,
probably because of this, and so I shifted my role for a
moment ("I am not speaking now in my role as facilitator,
but because of what I've seen in many companies: Yes, you
are right; that what takes place "up above" in upper
management, transfers "downwards", and the pressure that
comes from above, has an impact on the working atmosphere
below. But we here in this room, cannot change that. What
you can change, is how you want to work together with each
other in this environment, under these conditions - or in
spite of these conditions.”) Then I paused and went on with
the reading of the previous solutions again. And then the
conversation went more smoothly, and the challenges and
solutions that came up were now increasingly focused on
personal behavior. The
breakthrough did not come with a single realization, but
with a series of solutions that had the tone "one could
also simply do this and that ...". It was the discovery,
arrived at with great surprise by one side (key account
management, which urgently wanted and need more
information), and also by the other side (production, which
had always been annoyed by the "unnecessary questions these
idiots ask"), that this information could be readily
available to everyone (for example, in a database for which
one only needed to provide new access rights.) This left
both sides wondering, why the first group had not known
this before…
In this
phase, I myself was not so clear what had actually brought
about the breakthrough, but I perceived clearly that the
mood had improved. People also mentioned that up until now,
they had not been able to really enter into this kind of
conversation. But the breakthrough was not the end of the
conversation. They continued to bring up and name further
challenges. So it went on and on. It was as if a sluice had
opened, so that now, at last, even this or that difficult
issue could be addressed. The
second day began with a morning meeting, which lasted about
50 minutes and was attended by the two Executive Committee
members, who had not been present on the first day. And
then something remarkable occurred: In response to the
statement by one of the bosses, "but these documents are
completely available and known to all," came a friendly but
firm denial from the group that this was not exactly the
case; and this came from one of his employees, whom no one
would have ever expected to speak up (as another
participant said to me afterward). A department head who
works for another manager, named the behavior of top
managers as one of the reasons why production processes
often become confused, and asked the two executives to
ensure that this will change. And someone even said to one
of the upper managers: "The statement you gave, in response
to what we worked on yesterday, seemed to me to have too
many “buts” in it”! - It was apparently the first time that
anyone had dared to say such things openly. And I thought,
Wow, what kind of empowerment has taken place here!
**
Translated from the German by Rosa Zubizarreta (with
extensive help from Google!)
