Bare knuckles, Bare Poles and polls: A Reflection on the recent British Elections

Bare knuckles, Bare Poles and polls:

A Reflection on the recent British Elections

It started as an unprecedented knock about by the leaders of the parties that was highly entertaining yet seemed to have little effect on the polls. It then culminated in an intriguing few days where the ship was drifting [running with bare poles - a metaphor from the age of sailing ships] while the party leaders made overtures to each other about coalition.

The recent British election has been fascinating to observe through the ‘lens’ of dialogue, looking at the interactions from before polling day and at the changes that took place beyond polling day to create a coalition government.

The crucial difference with this election has been the inclusion of the US style leadership debates – the 3 main characters being the serving Prime Minister – Gordon Brown and the then 2 opposition leaders David Cameron and Nick Clegg. The debates started quietly enough and gradually got a bit more knock about as the candidates settled into the unfamiliar process. There was no doubt that this was an entertaining spectacle, adversarial and bare knuckled with the potential for slip ups that could have dramatic consequences. Nick Clegg emerged much improved in the opinion polls by giving an audience – charming display, a good grasp of the issues and great skills in active listening [repeating the questioners name, making efforts to look directly at them and sticking to answering and repeating the question]. Gordon Brown, the elder statesman, despite being knowledgeable and politically astute faired poorly while David Cameron did much better appearing to acquire some of Nick Clegg’s charm along the way.

In the event no party gained an overall majority in the election leading to a wooing of the Liberal Democrats as potential partners by the 2 larger parties.

So we started with Debate, moved on to discussion and finally got round to dialogue. Looking at these terms that we tend to use interchangeably there is in fact quite a distinction between them. Here is a dialogue view of the election:

Debate: noun 1 a formal discussion in a public meeting or legislature, in which opposing arguments are presented. 2 an argument. verb 1 discuss or argue about. 2 consider; ponder.

Clearly argument is the central activity in debating. In mediation or negotiation we would identify the fact that each side adopts a position and defends it, trying to crush the others. There are winners and losers and the intention of all parties involved is I win and you lose. It is as much about inflicting damage on the other side as it is about forcing your point across. Much of British public life is like this, politics, courts etc. The adversarial nature of debate is rooted in the Latin origin it shares with battle and batter – battere meaning ‘to fight’.

Discussion: verb; 1. talk about so as to reach a decision. 2. talk or write about (a topic) in detail. ORIGIN Latin discutere ‘dash to pieces’.

Discussion sounds civilised enough but look at its Latin origin – dash to pieces! The original form of the word shared a root with percussion and concussion and meant literally to break apart. It has a strong analytical feel – pull something apart to keep what you want and discard what you don’t. Here we lose things, we pare down to a minimum, It is reductionist and selective. The Liberals and the Conservatives bargained back and forth losing elements of their own policy and adopting some of the others – negotiating and bargaining to stitch together a compromise from the pieces. It will take great skill and diplomacy on all sides to stop such an agreement breaking apart again. There will have been a mix here of shared interest and negotiating from a position. Both party leaders had to reach a compromise agreement that they could ‘sell’ to their parties i.e. persuade them that the advantages [governing] outweighed the disadvantages [losing some core policies that they had fought the election on]. The people who voted for the lost policies may understandably feel cheated.

Dialogue: conversation directed towards exploration of a subject or resolution of a problem.   • verb  - take part in dialogue. ORIGIN Greek dialogos, from dialegesthai ‘converse with’.

Interestingly we now switch from Latin to Greek. Here we start to explore a subject and try to resolve a problem. There is less emphasis on winning or selecting and a much greater feeling of inclusiveness and shared interest. Dialogue is where the truly imaginative solutions emerge. We are less focused on analysing and are more likely to express what we want not what we don’t want. In the politics this happens quietly and behind closed doors with the people who need to be included and will be happening now. Dialogue isn’t persuasion though it is reaching genuine agreement about something, a generative and healing process. It is quite possible that a completely new solution will emerge from dialogue not simply a choice of one of the available solutions. The ancient Mayans had an explanation for this

“we don’t bring our ideas together, we bring our purpose together and then we agree”

It is worth reflecting on the nature of conversations in your organisation.

Are they the superficially entertaining battles of will called debate, potentially destructive and divisive, leaving people feeling excluded and under valued?

Are they analytical and problem focused discussions that potentially “lose the baby with the bath water” by tending to dismiss ideas early and follow the well trodden path of least resistance?

Do you need to generate more open dialogue, releasing creative solutions and allowing voices to be heard.

Debate and discussion tend to be our cultural default settings. We need to appreciate the value of real dialogue and ensure that it takes place.

The Man Who Fell to Earth [after a training course!]

The Man Who Fell To Earth

A study published by Knowledgepool in 2010 shows that up to £9.5 billion of training spend in the UK has either a nil or a negative effect on performance. There are many possible reasons suggested for this including line manager support after the course and selecting the right course in the first place. Another possible reason is that individual training is a default response where in fact team coaching could have a better and wider outcome.

The concept of re-entry

Trainee leaves the group for training and then re-enters and finds themselves facing hostility, ignoring and ridicule

David Bowie’s enigmatic portrayal of the alien who fell to earth was a film rich in metaphor. What if the metaphor wasn’t an alien but a team member who has been away from the workplace on a training course and on re-entry finds themselves back in the team, feeling bewildered and treated with suspicion by his colleagues! They come back in to the group and workplace that they left temporarily, enthused with the new techniques that they have learned and determined to create changes. The group finds it hard to understand this and develops a natural allergic defence to their enthusiasm knowingly or otherwise. The group appears bemused at what the trainee is saying and may even be openly hostile. They will use phrases such as “oh we tried that before” and “well if you think that will work you just give it a go” and project little genuine enthusiasm. As a result nothing, or very little, changes. The trainee feels rejected and disillusioned and may easily slip into blame about the culture of the team and the organisation. The net result of the training is not even nil, it is negative.

The team is resistant to any change; its members ignore, ridicule or are openly hostile to the new ideas making it a ‘closed’ system. The diagram above shows the sequence of events and it doesn’t take long for anyone’s enthusiasm to fail.

False Idols

William Isaacs in his book Dialogue: the art of thinking together

says of concepts such as empowerment and learning, that the danger is that we make idols out of them, that we fall into a trap of seeing them as ‘things’ to achieve not paths to follow. The same is true of collaboration in this sense, collaboration is a practice, a path to follow we don’t achieve it and move on. Training is a familiar response but it may not help much with collaborative working. So the point is that the team [the collaborative group] as a whole needs to develop the capacity and the means of collaboration and crucially – the capacity to get back to collaborating when things go wrong.

Methods that address change in the sense of better, more collaborative working need to be collaborative in themselves and not simply pushing more knowledge into individuals who we then expect to implement them in hostile environments. If we don’t think about this then we run the danger of losing the most precious commodity – enthusiasm.

Team Coaching – a collaborative approach

Team coaching is a way of getting the whole team to focus on an area that could be improved, what is more – it can be highly effective in a much shorter space of time. Having a team really focus on process has huge benefits for its work in the future. It builds capacity and team performance is raised across the board. All members are involved and as a result are more motivated to change.

Solutions Focus is an approach that is perfect for this. The stages that a team might work through are:

Future Perfect – identifying the solution to the known issue such as time management or project planning. What could things be like if this problem was solved and/or the team worked well together?

Counters – where does it work well now, what are the notable exceptions and how can we build on these?

What are the next small steps we need to take – not a leap to complete resolution of the issue but the tangible changes we can make today or tomorrow.

A Solutions Focus facilitator works with the team to help them through this process. The team develops and owns the solution and as a result develops a joint commitment to do better. In addition the team can also learn the Solutions Focus method so that they can work on their collaborative working improvements themselves in the future.

Ideas such as Action Learning and Reflecting Teams help the team to develop capacity to self repair, a generative approach to change and very different to the situation that the man [or woman] who falls to Earth finds themselves in after their training course!

Summerhouses: dialogues at work can help you develop your team and your organisation’s generative capacity. Team coaching is a highly cost effective solution for collaborative working.

Call on 01617488845 or e mail me on philaspden@summer-houses.eu

How Does Your Organisation Think?

How to POP your meetings and develop a toolbox for real collaborative working.

In my work I often pose the question “How does your organisation think and I will get answers such as ‘creatively’ or ‘on its feet’. I ask it again and gently probe beyond those first answers as the question is more about the processes at work when an organisation, or indeed any group of people, thinks collectively.

The answer is so obvious that many people overlook it completely –  Dialogue. Organisational thinking is people talking and listening to each other. Some joint thinking will take place through e mails and reports, people reading and making responses for example but there will usually be a form of dialogue at some point in a face to face meeting or phone call.

So that is it, an act that is fundamental to our everyday lives both in and out of work.  We can take it for granted in the sense that it will happen but think of the performance and productivity gains of making it more effective and more efficient at the same time. Paying attention to our talking and listening and improving it even just a little bit has great benefit; makes a positive change to the ‘bottom line’ and yet costs very little.

Don’t let yourself be told any different, these processes are incredibly simple. When something is simple, people tend to create complexity around it. They elevate it into a science and create an elaborate jargon. That can create a mystique and confusion that makes us unwilling to even attempt the simple things that will make a big difference to how we think together.

Good dialogue needs good preparation, not necessarily laborious but again paying attention to some fundamental things. Getting people to the right place at the right time; preparing them and yourself to get the intended outcomes and considering some options for the process of the dialogue to achieve those outcomes. Next time you are about to ‘pop’ a meeting in the diary, consider the POP below:

Purpose: Do you always give this enough thought? I often hear the process of the meeting confused with the purpose. ‘This meeting is to explore the ideas for X’. tells me the process NOT the outcome we want to achieve. Lets say the stated outcome is to ‘decide the specific ideas for X that we will work on and agree next steps’. Now it is clear that you should walk out of the meeting with a shorter list of ideas and some agreements about how they will be taken forward. It engages me. I know I am attending a meeting to choose ideas and that there will be action to follow. Be EXPLICIT about Purpose.
Vital question: WHAT is this meeting intended to achieve?

Outcomes When you achieve your purpose, if it was correctly stated you will have outcomes.  Make sure you have a round up that includes agreement on next actions and sets deadlines for them – obvious? In a study at Microsoft 56% of actions were rarely or never recorded! Make the outcomes EXPLICIT.
Vital questions: WHAT were our outcomes? WHAT do we do next? WHO does it & by WHEN?

Process: You sit in a meeting, the chair, if there is one, introduces the meeting and waits for the first person to speak – familiar? There are so many exciting and engaging ways to improve conversation. Learn about some and start to use them regularly. Just sitting around a table does not create magic on its own. Any dialogue is richer for the participation of varied voices not just the usual ones. The process should be planned and having a toolbox of approaches that can be deployed when participation is low can be a real advantage. For instance, try using scales [on a scale of 1 – 10 where are we now?]; allow people a few minutes to think about an issue that arises and jot notes before offering these back to the group; map the conversation using flipcharts or sticky notes; stopping the meeting for a round of comments so far. All of these things help to break out of dull meeting syndrome and draw people fully into the conversation.
Vital question: HOW can we work best to achieve the outcome?

Having improved your meetings with POP, you can move on to stage 2 where considerable organisational savings of time and money can be made. This involves asking  “do we all need to meet together or would something else be better?” If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It could be time to develop a toolbox for collaboration that gives you greater variety than just the mass ‘get together’ meeting. Here are some ideas:

Put yourself at the centre: in effect you become a project or task hub, having individual meetings with people can be very effective and much more time efficient. Have short focused meetings when you need them. Use up the end of mornings or afternoons for these leaving time available for your own work. Meet together only when really necessary for your purpose.

Publish information: meetings to give out information are a waste of time for everyone. Get into the habit of creating newsletters by e mail that people can read when they have time and respond if they really need to. Encourage direct replies only and discourage the reply to all. The fact is a round of ‘activity review’ at the start of a meeting saps energy and gives most people information they don’t need, when it is written they can select.

Have clear criteria: have meetings only when decisions need to be made or joint problem solving is desirable. Data gathering and information giving are best done in other ways such as by e mail, telephone or 1:1.

Find other ways to network & exchange: chance discussions are the creative heart of any organisation. Connections made at random can be highly productive but meetings are not the best place for this. With the time saved you can allow work time networking that allows people to relax and talk about what matters to them. There are some great formats for this such as Open Space or World café – find out about them and timetable creative sessions.

I hope that you find this useful and are thinking that this could be relatively easy to put into practice. At Summerhouses: dialogues at work we advise organisations on how to make the best use of time through simple changes. If you think we could help you then give me, Phil Aspden a call on 01617488845 or e mail philaspden@summer-houses.eu. Because I do use the methods above – I will always have time to talk to you!