Thoughts on Heifetz, Kahane and Lewis

The opening session at the 2006 IAF Conference in Baltimore featured a panel discussion around the relationship between leadership and group facilitation. Strong cases were made for the possibilities that could lie in combinations of the two, and the demand for “facilitative leadership” was heard. Those chickens have all come home to roost as I have recently read two books and part of a third in sequence and over just a few days. What follows is much less a review of them than a suggestion to go and take a look.

I have always been circumspect if not cynical about the importance that so many organizations attach to leaders and leadership. Just a little reading about the likes of Horatio Nelson and Thomas Jefferson is convincing that even the “great ones” are at least as flawed as the rest of us, and we should be careful to use the broader society to assure that most of what emerges from leaders is good. The first book added some necessary layers to my simplistic view.

In Leadership Without Easy Answers, Ronald Heifetz describes leadership as “mobilizing people to tackle tough problems.” A distinction is made between “technical” and “adaptive” leadership, terms also used in the Baltimore discussion. Whereas technical leadership is a matter of knowing what to do and when to do it, adaptive leadership involves conflicts in values, or gaps between values and reality, neither of which lend themselves to easy answers. In adaptive work, change and transformation are the preferred outcomes, and these require work by the many rather than the few or the one.

Beginning with an assessment of “the gap,” a leader can take a path of shifting and/or sharing the work of major change to those being led, taking care to provide a productive environment and to match the rate of the presentation and discovery of issues to the capacity of the collective to deal with them. From a facilitator’s standpoint it makes for fascinating reading as it provides insights to a leader’s constraints and risks that actually come from both stakeholders and subordinates, as in the final analysis both are the sources of the leader’s authority.

Two of the case studies Heifetz uses are the Civil Rights movement and the Viet Nam War, issues – as well as leaders - seemingly far larger than most of us in this business will face. The relevance of the messages was improved, however, by the next book, Solving Tough Problems. Adam Kahane has not been involved in the Viet Nam War, but has instead dealt with national-scale issues in places like South Africa and Guatemala. His book describes his experiences in dealing as a facilitator with large-scale adaptive issues, involving groups both large and powerful.

Kahane describes his experiences and the lessons learned in how groups can come together to talk and listen meaningfully. The huge challenge and subsequent value of adaptive processes such as “generative dialogues” comes through in the quote from one participant: “We did not put our ideas together. We put our purposes together. And we agreed, and then we decided.” If there are doubts about the feasibilty of the approach described by Heifetz, Kahane begins to show what actually occurs among people that makes transformations possible. Of particular note were the ways he describes “listening,” such that I’m now trying to relate that to occasions when I was using graphic recording as a tool for tuning in my own attentiveness.

The third book in the trio, Excellence Without a Soul by Harry R. Lewis, sharpened the messages of the other two by way of contrasts. I may try again later, but so far there has been little appeal in what comes across – to me at least – as a hatchet job on Harvard. (Oddly enough, Ronald Heifetz works at Harvard.) In all fairness, this is a book about the issue of purpose in great universities and not about planning or leadership per se. The book has value, however, at least as a reminder of the inability of much of the world to appreciate facilitative leadership.

“They discovered that a great curriculum does not crystallize out of scribbling by bureaucrats or squabbling among professors if the leaders cannot breathe into it direction and purpose.” Should we not think of a leader as someone who can mobilize the discovery of direction and purpose? Compare the quote, and its implied dependency upon leadership for purpose, to the experience described above, where a group put its purposes together. The need is argued for a leader whom “others will follow, not unquestioningly, but with confidence and respect.” Faculty, students and staff are then compared to “volunteers” who need motivating accordingly. It recalls Kahane’s broadened description of apartheid systems as well as Heifetz’s explanations of how adaptive challenges can be mistakenly treated as technical issues.

The need for enlightened and enabled leadership proclaimed in Baltimore is ever-present. Some of the tools for creating it, however, are before us in two of these books.

Experiences with Different Visual Methods

My post of December 23 broached some of the questions I have about graphic facilitation and its use. At the same time that I’m in a hurry to see how really good I could become at it, I still seek an adequate understanding to make sure that groups really benefit from it. It would seem way too easy for it to become a slick trick that electrifies everyone on site but is immediately forgotten “back at the store.”

I’ve talked to a couple of faculty in our School of Art and Design. Gil Leebrick teaches photography and is also the gallery director, and after meeting Jennifer Landau I asked him if this stuff is real. His response: “What is the root word of imagination?”

Mike Dorsey, a painter and dean emeritus, was also encouraging, citing the emotional power of images. Mike suggested that the fact that the wall graphics are being produced live and with the risk of error adds a way of capturing attention. For this reason, he suggested caution in facilitating with digital tools: they lend the ability to fix an error, a group knows that and the effect is diminished. Hmmmm…..I’m not totally positive, but it does add to the worry I feel over just how few blank flat walls are available on a college campus.

I wonder too if a group shares the experience of the facilitator’s contact with the paper. In an earlier post I told of the experience of artist William T. Williams touching a canvas, and occasionally I experience something sensual when I really mash the wide side of a stick of cheap chalk across clean white paper. Can a group have that same kind of feeling, and obtain a sort of affirmation not only from seeing the record of their thoughts but also from a near-tactile experience of the recording?

In recent months I’ve had opportunities to graphically record and facilitate, and I have also used The Workshop Method on a Stickie Wall. I don’t understand the difference in the way groups respond to each method, and an experience in a session in Tempe is one example.

I co-facilitated the meeting with Phyllis Grummon for the Society of College and University Planning. After a lot of discussion she and I agreed to begin the session with the Stickie Wall and cards, and then move more loosely into an open-ended discussion. Thinking that we would do everything with cards, I was without my roll of paper and had to “collage” with easel sheets instead. A “final report” with a little PhotoShop work is shown here.

The card session was rather detail-oriented. We pulled a lot of information out of our participants, and then worked through a process of getting it organized into meaningful content. As usual I was amazed and impressed with how well it works. Following that portion, Phyllis led a very open conversation exploring a broader context, and I recorded what went on. At the end of the day, we had produced a distinct but unanticipated rationale around which we will undertake the task at hand. We were all pretty pleased.

Before letting everyone get away, I asked for reflections on the methods we had used and their effectiveness. I don’t believe anything was volunteered about the Stickie Wall and cards; I asked a question or two about them, received a short positive answer and then the conversation floated right back around to the graphic recording, which went on for a while. One comment that stands out in my mind was that no one had ever seen notes AND relationships among them coming together at the same time.

From a personal standpoint, that recording session let me go off into some other world. Phyllis managed the conversation, so all I had to do was act like a “flow-thru tea bag.” So, yes, it was good for me. I’ll keep trying make sure this kind of effort is as good if not even more beneficial for the groups contributing to it.

Graphic Facilitation as a Planning Tool

Some of us can’t take yes for an answer. We could teach Doubting Thomas a thing or two about circumspection. That said, is there a place for graphic facilitation in strategic planning?

In the year and a half that I’ve been working with groups using 4 feet wide rolls of paper, markers and chalk I have yet to leave a meeting without hearing positive comments about the graphics. I consider myself more of a draftsman than an artist, but I was lucky to have picked up markers from The Grove and some very ordinary chalk that give good results without a lot of fuss. But still I wonder: is it really meat or just sizzle?

The first architect I ever worked for could really draw. With a Scripto mechanical pencil containing a piece of 2B lead, he could create a perspective sketch that you could walk into, and do it as though he were tracing. He once said “People are fascinated by the ability to draw. Once you start drawing in a meeting, you can absolutely control the situation.” OK – is that good, or could it be not so good?

In the Spring of ’06 a couple of us worked with an academic department on their strategic plan, and we used wall graphics exclusively. Six months later I visited the Chair to inquire about what the lasting impact had been, and in the course of the conversation I queried him on the use of the graphics. His response was “It’s very powerful, but you’ll have to be judicious with it.”

That very evening, UNC-TV broadcast an interview with the artist Herb Jackson. (See this post also.) He talked about how we grow up with images in storybooks and such, and they are always shown to us as a “picture of” something. As we make our first drawings, we are always asked what they are pictures of. Jackson noted that music is an art form that is not hamstrung with that requirement, and that he spent much of his early life learning how to break from that constraint.

It would seem that as graphic facilitators we have to embrace that constraint, as our value is in representing what the group is feeling and saying in a way that makes it real through visibility. We carry images of our past, and we hold onto images of what we think the present is; both are constructed from things we have seen in the world. There is no “directly observable data” about our future. By providing the images, we can begin to make that third element of time competitive with those other two.

It would seem that relationships can be helped in the same way, whether they are among facts, ideas or people. A form of reality is created with which we can interact.

The following observation appeared in an AIA newsletter, attributed to Robert M. Beckley, FAIA, professor and Dean Emeritus at the University of Michigan: A designer’s communication skills – the ability to listen, speak, write and represent ideas – provide insights into how well he or she can function within a professional practice. The last, representing ideas, is what distinguishes architects from others. In the final analysis, architecture is our ability to turn ideas into representations. Whether the representation is in the form of a diagram, sketch, rendering, or physical or digital model, the architect’s ability to represent precedes the construction of reality.

Arguably, architects can be somewhat encumbered by the eventual need to produce construction. Graphic facilitators have both the privilege and the challenge of a much broader expanse of possibilities.

One Rationale for Working with Groups

In the last 20 months there has been a confluence of ideas and concepts from various sources that seem to contribute to common themes, although not with absolute clarity. In the last three weeks four of these seemed to come together in two realizations about living out a future.

1. Elaine Stover, a workshop presenter for the Institute for Cultural Affairs: Facilitation is about honoring, about profound respect……participation through honoring and trusting what the group is capable of, individually and collectively.
2. Studs Terkel, quoted as saying: Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor. In short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.
3. William T. Williams, a painter seen on a broadcast of UNC-TV’s North Carolina People, described an incident in which he had paint on his hands and accidentally touched a canvas. It brought back memories of contact with his grandmother and elderly women in the church when he was very small: What it reminded me of was the whole idea of the laying on of hands, that affirmation of me as human being………affirming life in the face of all the adversity in the world.
4. Tom Friedman, in The World Is Flat: ……be a good collaborator, leverager, adapter, explainer, synthesizer, model builder, localizer or personalizer……be able to learn how to learn, to bring passion and curiosity to your work, to play well with others and to nurture your right-brain skills…

The first realization to emerge is that as planners we can think in terms of helping an organization make sense of its outside world by working with the connections among the people that make up its inside world. This would be particularly true for a planning office in a university.The second recognizes that we all have these desires of being honored, treated with respect and attaining our affirmation; some of us are more conscious of our own thirsts for these than are others. Those of us who feel these needs the most are among those with an obligation to help the world by creating experiences wherein people can meet these basic human needs.

And this is all about.........

In the Spring of 2005, I was working with a group of med school department chairs on a really thorny issue: how to objectively allocate research space to investigators. In one of a long series of meetings that was progressing along the usual frustrating lines it suddenly occurred to me that they were fully justified in being hard to get along with - they had a stake in the outcome and I didn't. I later made a call to someone (who would subsequently become my mentor) and asked for advice on training in facilitation.

On her recommendation I went to the IAF Conference in Tampa, and the first workshop was on something called graphic facilitation, taught by Jennifer Landau. Life has not been the same since.

In the Fall of 2006, after more training experiences including one with the Grove, I began to try to make some kind of sense of what was going on. In assembling the graphic above and collecting all the names and phrases that I had run into, I began to see that I was moving back into creative opportunities that I had not seen since leaving the School of Design at NC State in 1976. I also saw what I was feeling: ideas, questions and challenges are spiraling out faster than they can be managed and sorted through.

We'll see if this blog helps.