From our last Newsletter
Posted by Andrew 13 July 2010There are so many group facilitation techniques and methods around these days. Examples include focus groups, the six action shoes, Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space Technology, world cafe, future search, Story and narrative approaches just to name a few.
Whilst many of the facilitation techniques mentioned provide an entry point for helping to realise value, what is often missing is how to be provocative and really bring opportunities to life. In this newsletter I would like to share one (deceptively) simple principle that might help: Be prepared to be spontaneous.
The need for preparation
The first ironic and maybe even paradoxical element to being spontaneous, is the need to be prepared. For some reason there often is a strange belief that being spontaneous means that there is no foundation or preparation involved before-hand. And, worse, that being spontaneous is being wishy-washy. But, like the saying “the mind needs to be charged for genius, if it strikes, to ignite” – preparation helps to charge the mind for the opportunities that spontaneity brings.
Why is it so hard to be spontaneous?
Apart from the problems of letting go associated with planning and preparation, Jacob Moreno (founder of a science of spontaneity) has said:
“An individual may begin any specific activity with improvisation. But the more and more often improvisations around that complex are produced, the more the tendency develops in the individual to pick out from past efforts, the best actions, gestures, thoughts and phrases, in other words, to improvise less and less and to develop more and more safe and organized anchorage.”
Along with individual impedances to spontaneity, there are also group effects. Moreno has discussed how spontaneity is inversely proportional to group size. Improvising and being spontaneous alone or with a small group is a whole different story to that with a larger audience of 20 or more. What’s happened? Now there are cultural, societal and group norms that are at play. Moreno called this the Cultural conserve. Something sticky…
But we are destined to be spontaneous…
By now, you might be wondering how it is that we can be spontaneous at all, with both individual and group effects working against spontaneity. Ironically, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work has shown, it is the positive and constructive value of the states of anxiety and boredom that help us to reconnect with flow experiences and ultimately spontaneity.
So what does any of this have to do with being more provocative?
Maybe some of these questions might spark some opportunities for your own provocative facilitation. How well do you balance the need to prepare with the ability to adapt, change and improvise? Having developed a style of facilitation, what are your “safe anchorages”? What issues or opportunities lay in going against-the-grain of a group’s norms and culture? How might you leverage the states of anxiety or boredom to create movement and flow?
And after all this, it could be that Harrison Owen’s principle of “Doing one less thing” might be all you need to really be provocative…
Where would you start?