Souq session

Souq session Learning effects of Large Scale Intervention, 16 April 2008 Muscat, Oman

Participants

• Gerhard Fatzer, Director of Trias, Institute for Supervision and Organizational Development Switzerland
• Hubert Dolleschall, Director of ICG Consulting Group Gmbh, Austria
• Elisabeth Sköld, Senior consultant of ConsultUS, Sweden
• David Adams, Adams Associates, Scotland
• Ralf Lippold, Consultant, ralf_lippold@web.de
• Conception Yaniz, Professor at Deusto University, Spain
• Lady, the lady who was sitting closest to the door (Anyone know her name?)

Transcription

Tonnie: Welcome in this research session about the learning effects, the sustainable effects of Large Scale Interventions. To start with: What are your experiences with LSI?

Gerhard: And so basically you make Open Space.

David: I could say a lot more about that.

Gerhard: In my experience. I did make an event, I did not know about Open Space, but in the event one of the participants said: We had an Open Space event with 200 people. Just people come in. They learn and something comes out of it. Perhaps some common ideas. Or they split up. The next weekend, when I am home, we have an event with twice as much people.

David: You are clearly adventurous.

Gerhard: Still risk taking. We have actually a program in Boston. We invited different people in large scale events. The first one was with Dannemiller, a Real Time Strategic Change. Then we also invited one of the methods called Preferred Futuring, it is almost unknown. It is done by the son of Ron Lippit, Larry Lippit. It is an 8 step process you can apply with any size of group. I have a lot of experience swith those two types of methods. I know Open Space. I do that, but in terms of a structured way I use these two methods. I have the same experience that it used to be a fad. Three years ago everybody in Germany was doing these trainings. Now you do not hear anything about it any more. So I was asking myself is it already embedded in the companies, do they use it, or was it dismissed? So I think your research question is a very important one, because there is no research. Dannemiller was very persuasive about the method. But she has not done any research. It is just an assumption and experience that it works. What factors define if it works? It is a step in the good direction

Hubert: I use large group as one instrument in change processes, in almost every. For two reasons. One reason is to bring in information from the people and for analyses to give them information. Most are taking place in the first phase of the change process. To involve them, to give them information of what will happen and to take information from them, about what they are thinking. Later on to drive them, to move and motivate them to go in detail with them, when the structures are clear. When the decisions of the management are clear, to go deeper in detail with the people. In my opinion for other things Large Groups are not the right instrument.

Elisabeth.: I use World Café quite often in processes in the initial phase. But what I am doing right now. I have a target group of about 1500 leaders all over the Globe. We divided the group in groups of 25, having cafe sessions, posing exactly the same question to them. These are research and development engineers . Which means that going to a cafe for them is quite horrifying. What we have done, we are in the middle of it, and I call it a huge World Café. We take the information from each cloth. We have this website on the internet, we have these questions, we take the results of each group, pose it on the internet and then we sort of transform the individual learning from each session to the organizational learning. That is sort of a huge Cafe, which is my invention, but it is large scale.

David: How do they meet?

Elisabeth: Small meetings of ca. 25 people, they meet in the real world. We have meetings in Canada, Shanghai, in Vienna, in Stockholm all over the world. They have 4 questions. The cafes are done in exactly the same way. I have three teams that do this. The results are given back to the internet. A sloooow world cafe.

Gerhard: How do you process all this information?

Elisabeth: I have an internal from the company and a trainer from my company. The internal training has the assignment to plaster the whole thing. The effects are quite interesting.

David: Was this for one company? For a group of leaders in one company?

Elisabeth. Yes, the research and developments leaders and senior project managers in the research and development department.

Tonnie: What were their reactions, you said the sessions were quite terrifying for them?

Elisabeth: What it is, they have this leadership framework. Ok, we have the research and development department, how will they apply this leadership framework?. They came and we have a lot of information, this is a process, bla bla bla and then they came, I don’t know if anyone of you is a technical engineer, but they were sitting like ok. “Let’s get that stuff over with” We started describing the process, it takes almost a day and then we said: We don’t know, you know. Some times you know more, some times you know less, but as a whole we learn a lot and have a good network. It was so amazing to find: there are other people who I can learn from. The general impression is “someone gives me the information and I process this and I know the answer then. But the cafe way is different, much better.

Lady: I wander what I am doing here, because it is interesting that you just came and called me in, and I do do World Cafes, but I am in a number of organizations who had a lot of interventions, and I am not so convinced about the effects. Or perhaps what you said. Socially there are good effects, but they don’t change the system in my opinion. I have a real question about it

Tonnie: But it is called whole system change.

Lady: There is a process and then in three years time there is another one and in two years there is another one. The effects, I have a real question about it.

Gerhard: One thing that Kathleen Dannemiller said, and she is very structured about that. She said most of those interventions create euphoria in the system, they change energies. But then the question is what happens to this energy? Because normally, that is why I was interested, they press it in something like a sausage, you poop it. How do they process the information? What is the way they do it? That is the question. She said if it stops just at creating the energy, it does not change anything. If you have done that you create all this assumptions that you never get into this process again, it creates negative experiences. The question is what happens next with this energy.

Elisabeth: It creates a lot of frustration. What I said when we started is never ask a question that you will not process later on. The next step that is for someone to take hold of all the information that is created.

Hubert: Or to take them all together, collectively, to hold the information together. Not like getting one person holding it.

Elisabeth: What I mean is that hierarchally, that those who sort of started the process with this leadership framework say : this is the way the research and development department people wants to use our framework, ok, how can we support them. Because if it stops there will be more frustration.

Hubert: I would not make a LGI if the management would not commit that they have much to do afterwards. They have to be committed.

Ralf: Which is the minimum size of a Large Scale Intervention?

Tonnie: It is a matter of definition, what you choose.

Gerhard: Some of the creators were also interested in the history of large groups. Dannemiller said. We were just in the sixties. They had this challenge that we had to train not only 20 managers but 200. Nobody has ever done that before. What they did, this was interesting for us, and they used group dynamics principles, and they pumped them up into a bigger system and then she had to find the structures, how to make next steps. So this structure for the next steps is very important. She is very strict about that. There have to be very precise questions and interventions if you have 200 or 400 people. Otherwise you create a huge mess.

Tonnie The example that you give I would not call it a LSI, because you are not involving the whole system, whatever that may be. Your question what is the minimum or the maximum size depends on what the system is. One of the criteria is “is there enough diversity”. Are important, or most important, stakeholders, or yesterday I learned I have to say: solidarities, are they presented there? It is interesting that there are lot of definitions and ways to use LGI as an event. Can you tell more about what you do after a large group intervention session?

Hubert: The management team: we do it before. We plan the intervention with the large group into the whole process. It is one thing that motivates, that brings in more detail that starts improvement, or whatever. It has to be done in the hierarchy of the project, of most of the organization, to work on the results of this LGI. You have to have meetings in the week after, or two weeks after, or the days after, to inform how the improvement goes on. It has to be done in the project to work on the results of the LGI. How can we do it, have to reflect it Otherwise it has no benefit. That is important. If you make only information, an information event, then it is no LGI. You bring the people together, they have coffee.

Gerhard That is actually one of the abuses that you see now. I know in a lot of Swiss banks, they all went to the world economic forum and then Caroline Rukensmeier, she was also one of our trainers, and she does the city town hall meeting that is the newest one. The maximum was in Ground Zero with 4800 people. So that is really large group. What they do now, if they give out information from the CEO they call it city town hall. But it has nothing to do with what she has been doing. This also an example of not taking the basic principles seriously, not applying them. I think that is very important that they have to be very disciplined in the next steps.

Tonnie What do you see as basic principles? In my opinion, my definition, it is about a process and not only the Large group event that is a choice

David: It is a journey.

Hubert: Peoples behaviour is absolutely different in a large group and if they are alone. They fear to loose their faces, they give answers that are wished. I am not sure, they are under observation.

Ralf: It depends on the intention of people who come there. If your boss is there, you have to go? Doing it at the weekend, there was just an announcement like three month ago. If you are interested, if you want to share some ideas, than you come. If not, it is your own business. Different people are coming in.

Tonnie: So if you are free to come. What is the English word? Voluntary. Do they come voluntarily?

David: Then it is the question if you come voluntarily if you can call an event like that an Intervention with the whole system. You may not have necessarily the whole system present. It is a really interesting area.

I know there is a huge amount of Open Space work that goes on. I keep a connection with the OS list serve. Typically you get 10 to 15 messages a day. You get a sense of what is happening, I can’t follow all the details, it is just too much. Every time I bin 1000 emails, just to clear out my mailbox. I tend to read the messages from Harrison Owen. (T: me too, I select the messages of Harrison Owen, or it is simply too much). The point is, he has a wonderful preservative in condensing and pulling apart the issues that people present, and very very consistently he maintenance the ethos of Open Space that way. It is a brilliant peace of work. My colleagues they use Future Search, they use Open Space periodically. They put a big emphasis on design. Any event they hold has a very powerful build up of design team work, and that is integrated with the client management. Devoted on focussing on what is the purpose of this, what is the process of it, what is going to be the flow. Getting a real buy in and agreement on the basic design. They simply won’t operate unless they have got that. But even so, I think the follow-through, whether any benefit occurs, depends deeply on the commitment of the client, and especially on the commitment of senior figures. What they want. The corporate will is very very crucial factor. And very often there is this kind of corporate ambivalence. We want the result, but we do not want how it is presented. There is this kind of tension. What I observe from this is, it is very much the question of how important it is for the corporation to learn from it’s own Large Scale event. In times when it is very important, when there is some very big immediate strategic issue at stake, which occasionally there is, not often, then the willingness to learn can be high and therefore the change can happen. In the case of the UK Civil Service there was very powerful political pressure for change coming on. A series of events, some of which I took part in, which clearly were having an effect on people. But that was because a high political command. There had to be change. These guys had to find out how to do it and therefore getting all that collective work, people working together and coming up with solutions, was very productive.

Gerhard: I think that goes back to the question: How do you create change? Your example would illustrate that there is change if there is pressure. Is there also change if there is something else? How do you create change? From age on we have this distinction . In both ways it is anxiety. Survival anxiety, the other one is learning anxiety. It is a negative model

David:Are there cases of opportunity anxiety? I don’t know what happened in Sony with blue ray, or whatever it is, presumably they must have had some very intensive work there to get the position they have got.

Ralf: My example is to use authority.

Ralf: Toyota they started like 100 years ago with not building cars but with sewing, weaving things. And they have changed, but they do not change with a big bang. They changed like a 100 years. They built cars for about 70 years now. Now the last 10-15 years they just float. And everybody thinks there must have been a change, of course there was a change, but is was small change. People are always looking for the quick and big change. And step by step looks often if nothing happens. For the first one year it looks like nothing happens. But in the next 2 or 3 years things do change.

Tonnie: There are a lot of examples, cases, a lot of change processes going on, and I think that happens more and more, change is becoming more normal. What should we look for? When I say effects or success, when do you think it is successful or effective, how can you see that learning is taking place? Maybe it is not unique for LSI approaches, it is for any learning project in an organization or community. Especially what I am interesting in is the deeper learning effect, learning how to change. What do people do then, what do they do different? What don’t they do anymore?

David: What you said triggered me, it is all about expectation. Toyota incrementally changed, but overtaking GM is something quite big, in terms of scale there has to be large scale change. Whether there was large scale intervention in the process is what we are talking about. The impact of these different processes I am sure relates strongly to the expectations built up for them. Part of the problem is to, in terms of getting into an intensive design effort, is to also manage the expectations of what can float from that. Part of the value in these events is that actually people of different sites of the organization really get to talk, get to know each other. In a way the consequences of that are not particularly measurable in terms of research that happens in the flow of everyday organization. There is something about expectations and measurement that is important in this.

Hubert: I think you can not measure it direct. You only can see it in how the organization works. If people know their jobs, know what their part is, to satisfy the clients, the customers. You can not measure change.

Ralf: I have not seen any for ten years. HRM, and others, they don’t worry, it is only consultants at this point. Colleagues are not interested. Who is the person who is looking for this kind of things? You can not delegate the management.

Elisabeth: As a mediator, I can tell I don’t believe it is not measurable. I think It should be measurable. Because if you go to meetings it is the amount of things like how much can people actually speak in a meeting of what they really mean and how much not. That is a huge one for me. If this brings more of the stuff on the table than usually in a group, that is usually a good sign. And there must be a way to measure that. I can perceive the talk. You can’t measure it in numbers, but it is really important feedback for management. Because if that process closes people down, which it can.

Gerhard: I think it would be more not quantitative but qualitative aspects, like this would be a sign of improvement of communication, a better division among the parners . Normally if you start it is the boss who has the biggest part of the conversation. Is the behaviour changing? Or the quality of the decision making process. I mostly can see, all the way up. A good example is the Swiss Banks. The quality of the decision making process of CEOs is so bad because they are detached from all the information. Through all the layers you have defensive routines, each layer filters out the negative information. When the information arrives he thinks there is nothing to do about that. London is falling apart. The CEOs have to run after the events. That is how lies are created, because a lie is actually not an intention but it is lack of explanation of possibilities, because the CEO is not able to explain to the stock holders what is happening in his bank, because he doesn’t overlook it. He does not know what the guys out there in London with this hedge funds stuff, this mathematical constructions nobody understands. Sometimes it went right, but now it is going wrong, but it goes terribly wrong. The have a necessity to explain, and they can not explain.

David: Real risks were not understood, and were not in the system. There is a tool which helps with this measurement process. To start opinion survey. You can use Survey Monkey, you set up something people can deal with electronically. I have a client for whom we have done surveys for the last six years, with every two year intervals. You do clearly get a measure of change in staff perceptions. I am now trying to set up a metric, which is part of there corporate plan, were they would report changes, the progress of various measures within that. A normalized number of employees. We are working with them on that, wether how we can to get a sufficiently robust and meaningful statistic, which they can use. We do some grouping, if you want to oversee you have to aggregate answers, responses to get something that is reliable. If you use that with an intervention like this, maybe have an annual opinion survey, you can track changes in opinion. Diverse organizations that would keep databases, collective databases from different organizations. A measure against others of corporate performance. My own instinct for this is that you have to make combinations of that. If you are looking for organizational development through this kind of processes, then you have to able to track the value in some way, even if it is very global numbers, of global kind of thinking.

Tonnie: Do you have any examples of after a LSI process people start to ask different questions? Asking more strategic questions, or become more reflective, ore ask for other participative processes, or is that just a dream? What are your experiences?

David: I think that relates to our profession as consultants. Very often, almost always, one is isolated from the results. We go in, we do the work, and we do really get it prepared meticulously, go through it with the client, to get them to back off their control instincts, and all the rest of it. And then afterwards there is abide They are on to the next action.

Tonnie: Do we want to know?

David: Yes, we are on to the next action. That was last week we did that, now we are on to ....that is for certain. Perhaps unwillingness in organizations to reflect.

Ralf: Why should they reflect? If I am an engineer I turn it on and the machine starts. So if a consultant figures something out that could happen that would be nice but it does not happen in the next week, but in the next year or perhaps the next two years, then engineers or management in general they are not triggered like that, the need the numbers now. Please, please, please. Maybe they are not aware of needing this kind of reflection.

Tonnie: Is this true for business organizations or is it true also for non-profit or governmental organizations?

Ralf: Everywhere

Elisabeth: A reflection on that is that when I performed for example a World Cafe, I have some examples of people who really have set down and have been able to reflect. And having that experience with them when they go back, and they can sort of come back, and say this experience of exploring whatever challenge it was, gave me insight as a leader that this process is good. So they take the process as such further on and have finally found a way to explore challenges together in a more open way and a more reflective way than usually is done. when it is done, in the sort of normal way. I have seen quite a lot of goods of effect of the process as such talking about reflection, because it is a Cafe. An Open Space also is a reflective process. What becomes you can not tell in words. If you prepare the process well then it goes inside the people, and then they can take reflections further on in the organization.

Hubert: One intervention has only a small effect. The LSI only is one intervention, it does not give a very big effect afterwards.

Elisabeth It is part of a large process. But looking at the large scale event as such, giving in hand that there are a number of things has to be fit together in order to happen in the process, but looking at the process in the room, I have seen a number of times people really had been forced there, but really found out that reflection was good.

Hubert: It is possible to do it here in this company. Sometimes this effect is there, they are motivated.

Ralf: That reminds me of half an hour earlier, this morning in a session. They put down this question and think about it for half an hour. All of a sudden they were discussing problems that were so huge, through thinking and just waiting for half an hour, we were forced to do something, that something came op. Mostly people in organizations they are not forced to stay in the room they say I have some business I have to do, I have to leave, my business is somewhere else.

Elisabeth: But that depends on how you work as an employee, as a leader, what our expectations are of you, which could be: I expect you to be there and participate and contribute.

Tonnie: It is 4 o’clock. What I want to ask you, if you feel to, to write down what you want to give back to me, or what you want to know from this research, or maybe some insights you got from this conversations.

Ralf: Do you have a website were we can contribute?

Tonnie I have a website, not a wiki. www.largescaleinterventions.com

Ralf: Can we write as an outsider as well?

Tonnie No, only email. It is an html site.

Ralf: Make a wiki. ? Set up a wiki. www.pbwiki.com You can set up a wiki for free.

Tonnie: Thank you for attending, thank you very much.

Gerhard: A Wiki is a good idea, we do that in our group. Somebody has to set it up. What we could do, if you have all the different emails I can ask one of the guys in our group to set it up.

Tonnie: Another possibility is a web log.

Ralf: Yes that is another one, but a web log is not structured, a wiki you can structure more.

Tonnie: Ok, thank you

End: 41:06 min.