on Systems Thinking

Think about the three best-facilitated sessions you have ever attended. I will bet the facilitator used some type of activity that you remember. The exercise was unexpected, exciting, and effective.

Now consider the worst facilitated session you attended. If there were any, the exercises were as boring and uninteresting as the rest of the facilitation effort. My bet is that standard PowerPoint presentations and a traditional sticky dot exercise were part of the worst sessions.

Engaging Exercises Defined

Engaging exercises are that draw favorable attention or interest. Some synonyms for engaging make the point better: alluring, appealing, captivating, charismatic, enchanting, entrancing, fascinating, glamorous, magnetic, and seductive. From experience, a facilitated session has a good chance to achieve its outcomes if its exercises rise to the level of ‘engaging.

I knew it was going to be a long week when my co-facilitator asked the group, “So, what happens when a submersible pump fails.” Their eyes spoke louder than the deafening silence. The skinny guy on the front row responded, “Don’t YOU know?” “You are an idiot!” exclaimed the old guy on the left side with a deep stare. The slightly heavy woman in the middle, who looked like everyone’s big sister, retorted, “why don’t you just tell us.” The fat guy in the back looked around, cut his eyes back at me, and said, “Where are the doughnuts?”

Yup, it was going to be a long week. Facilitating Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is never fun. Tag teaming the facilitation usually helps everyone stay fresh. But as Forrest Gump said about the box of chocolates, when you co-facilitate in a Fortune 500 company you never know what you are going to get.

Powerful questions are enablers of better facilitation. Using powerful questions takes awareness, discipline, practice, and self-appraisal. Facilitators need powerful questions to get better participant answers and create better results.

“I really liked the pre-workshop survey,” responded an executive team member. “It enabled us to have a fast start and it helped everyone get on the same page.”
No one wants to waste their time. As the leader of any workshop or series of meetings, it is crucial to understand what is effective and what is not. A well-executed pre-session exchange is one of the most frequently cited things that make a facilitated session more efficient, more effective, and more collaborative. [Read more…]

Things get a little dirty when humans get involved. In any system, human behavior and human understanding “gum up” the process. These are a few of the dirty secrets for effective communications.

Communication

Communication is the exchange of information from one person to another.

Communication requires a sender, a receiver, and a message. Technical professionals (sender) usually believe the decision maker (receiver) cannot understand the message because the decision maker is not as smart as they are. Most of the time, the lack of understanding comes from the noise generated by the sender. The burden of effective communication is on the send (technical professional), not the receiver (decision maker). [Read more…]

Effective communication is the one thing that makes your life better, more fulfilling, and more rewarding. That is equally true in personal relationships and in business.

Keep it simple. If you can convey the same information in fewer words, do it. If you can use fewer sentences, use fewer. If you can avoid tangents and parenthetical comments, avoid them. Only about 20 percent of what you normally communicate provides 80 percent of the influence on others.

The one thing is right under your nose. The one thing is the game changer for your career because it enables others to understand the complex and uncertain world where you work. The one thing requires understanding the outcomes you seek before optimizing the separate components.

System Defined

A system is a collection of interrelated or interacting parts, each of which can affect the behavior or outcomes of the whole. One defining property of a system is that it provides a function that none of the parts can accomplish by themselves. The corollary is that a system is not the sum of the parts but the product of their interactions.

Simple examples include the mechanical advantage gained from a system of pulleys or a gearbox. Sports teams or work units are examples of human systems. Systems are essential aspects of our everyday lives.