First Time Facilitator podcast transcript with Bob Dick (Episode 17)
Leanne: Our guest today has the longest CV I've ever seen and that's because he has over 45 years experience in helping to make the world a better place. He is an independent scholar, an educator, facilitator coach and change consultant. He uses concepts and processes from action lining, narrative and facilitation to help people, including himself, teams, organizations and communities to improve their work, learning and life. Welcome to the show, Bob Dick.
Bob: Thanks
Leanne: It's great to meet you. I want to hear a bit about yourself and how you wound up 45 years ago entering the field of training and facilitation.
Bob: It was all an accident really, I applied for a position in the department of labor and they invited me instead of that position to apply for the position of industrial psychologist. I hadn't applied for it because I didn't think I was qualified. In three years, I was expected to know everything about industrial democracy and employee participation. I did research in that area, including local case studies of interesting practices. I was expected to spend a couple of days a week reading in that area to be up to date and then the university borrowed me for six months to plug a gap and then that extended and became 21 years. I wanted to take what I had learnt from those three years in the department of labor into the classroom thinking that all I had to do was to invite my classes to have their say in what they wanted to be the syllabus and the processes and that was so different to their expectations that it just made them anxious.
We finished coming up with a collaborative design but it was fairly pedestrian and so I set out to experiment with how to engage people so that they would want to take on more self-management and I didn't think that it was facilitation. It was just trying to be a better educator but really that was the foundation of most of what I now think of today as facilitation.
Leanne: When you approached that group, in the beginning, you said that it was a very different approach, is that because they were used to being in workshops where they were spoken to and it wasn't really participative? Is that what they thought was different about your style?
Bob: This was a fairly traditional psychology programme in one of the sandstone universities and people were used to sitting in lecture theatres in rows where somebody at the front would lecture them often reading out the lectures from a set of notes. What I learnt to do eventually was I'd get into the room early, I'd ask for a room where the furniture was moveable, I'd stark the tables at the back of the room, I'd arrange the chairs in a circle as a way of saying, people when they came into the room, this isn't going to be a lecture you don't know yet what it is but it won't be a lecture.
Leanne: That's really fascinating. Who did you take the lead from in terms of the furniture design and making it a more welcoming environment because back then doesn't sound like it was a very common thing? Is it just some ideas that you came up with one night to make the environment better for learning?
Bob: It didn't happen overnight, it happened over the first two or three or four years that I was at Queen's Uni. In fact, I deliberately stayed away from the literature in adult education and experiential learning at first because I thought that if I found my own way, it would be a better fit for my own style and then I could use the literature to further refine what I was doing.
Leanne: That's really good and that's why I like talking to facilitators from all different backgrounds and industries. Everyone's got something that they do that's a little bit different that works for them but you might be able to resonate with some of our facilitators that think that is a cue that I can pick up and already that furniture design and the environment of the room is important. That leads me on to the question around your website you had a statement, I believe that the term teaching is a misnomer. I assume the teachers don't teach, learners learn. Teachers so-called create an environment in which learning is enabled and encouraged and rewarded. So, how do teachers create this environment?
Bob: That was really what I was experimenting within the first three or four years and every year since then, I keep on fiddling with what I am doing [LAUGHING] and looking for ways of making it more effective, and when things don't work I then change things until they do. But the main thrust of it all the time was that- that saying about teachers don't teach, learners learn, that was my own experience as a learner and it was those educators who did most to engage my curiosities that I learnt the most from and so I wanted to offer the same opportunity to others.
Leanne: I find it fascinating that after 45 years you are still refining what you do. How do you keep learning on the job and what keeps you excited about being in this industry still?
Bob: I would do it for fun if I wasn't doing it for a living. It's a great buzz and if I keep looking for ways of improving that keeps me engaged and in the moment. I notice more of what's going on and so while I am facilitating, I'll work out what I want to say to take the next step. I'll watch the expressions on peoples faces and ask, does it look as if they are taking this in an understanding, if not I can think to myself, well, that wasn't the right way to say that, let me have another go and rephrase it in different words and see if that works better.
Leanne: Yes. It's really is about constantly refining what you doing and then just seeing what the reaction is in the room. Given all the changes with technology as well, have you tried to implement some of that in your teaching method?
Bob: I haven't. I've deliberately tried not to use any technology, I don't use powerpoint.
Leanne: That's great I like that. I like hearing that.
Bob: In the early days I used fancy stuff like those soft koosh balls and things like that and did a lot of play time of activities and then the thought occurred to me, people don't have gear like this is their normal work setting and I'll probably get better learning transfer if I stick with stuff that's pedestrian and day to day for them and rely on the ideas and their engagement to create the excitement. Now I'm not recommending that this is really the way to go, I'm saying that suits my style and what I'm trying to achieve.
Leanne: I have been talking to a facilitator yesterday and I was pitching these innovation problems to some graduates and the questions were very rush there wasn't a lot of information and he said that was deliberate because in the workforce you're not given much time to do anything and you can't sometimes clarify what the question is, what the problem is you're solving. You just need to run with it and solve it in the best way that you can, so I think keeping it really really is important.
Okay. I was looking at one of your facilitator guides, your A- guides which was fantastic, really great resource and you talk about two things that's content and process. Can you explain the difference between the two things? What is content and then what is the process and why is that important for us as facilitators to know?
Bob: Usually, when we are involved in meetings for decision making or problem-solving or we're doing planning or we are in any kind of task-oriented discussion, we pay attention to what goals we want to achieve and what information is relevant to achieving those goals. How we interact, we run on automatic, we don't pay conscious attention to it at all. So, what then calls out fast brain handles all the complexity of the process and our slow brain- our analytical brain, focuses only on the task and the information that's directly relevant to it. As a friend of mine David Natale says, if you're chewing gum, gum is the content, chewing is the process.
Leanne: Oh, I like that. So how then do you get out of that autopilot of focusing on the content and then how do you think, right we need to work on our process because we are not really getting so far? Who does that who should take that initiative to change that focus?
Bob: I would guess that some of the facilitators that you've talked to have talked about the importance of facilitators staying out of the content and merely being a process guide because that seems to be the generally accepted belief and so it's as if the facilitator is responsible for the process because the participants aren't paying attention to it and the participants are left free to pay attention to the content but it seems to me that it's really hard to choose the best process if I'm not also tuned in to what the content is and I'm asking are people exchanging the information that's relevant to the decisions they're trying to make for instance. If not, how can I modify the process so that the relevant information is more likely to be exchanged? Or things like, they're probably not ready yet to move into decision making but they’re starting to talk about that. How can I use a process that will slow them down so that I make sure that all the relevant information is exchanged and understood before we try to do something with it? I need to pay attention to process and content too.
Leanne: Yes.
Bob: I think that whatever the facilitation style that a person has, there's some requirement to do that.
Leanne: Yes.
Bob: It's not something we do naturally. We tend to focus on one or the other. It's almost as if we have to keep switching quickly between them and remain curious about both so that we stay tuned into both.
Leanne: That can be exhausting, can't it? Because not only are you having to pay attention to the content, you're actively thinking ahead. Thinking where is this going? What strategies will I use now to intervene? It's a really tricky and fine line that whole intervention piece. What kind of things do you use when people mention an example they've moved into decision-making mode really quickly? What steps would you take to reel them back to say, hey we haven't really explored a lot of the solutions or identified what the problem really means?
Bob: If I can address that before the problem happens and that's even better, one of the things I invite people to do early on is I make the point that our task is to reach these outcomes or to achieve this purpose or goal. To do that we have to make some decisions about who will carry this out, who will do what by when. To make good decisions, we have to recall the correct information and we have to share that so that we all understand it because that body of information constitutes the building blocks out of which we construct the decisions.
The decisions then lead us into helping to choose who are the right people to carry those forward into action. I let them know ahead of time that we'll be structuring this in a number of phases. That also makes it easier to intervene because I can then say to them I think there's still some information to be exchanged, can we postpone the decisions until we've checked them? Because I would prefer that they don't leave responsibility for the process entirely to me.
Leanne: Yes.
Bob: I prefer to share that responsibility with them. Some preparation as well as being willing to intervene when it happens is a bit of combination than either one on its own.
Leanne: Yes, absolutely. Setting those ground rules sounds like it's very important. Have you ever been in really high-pressure situations where you need to drive an outcome and there's been a bit of conflict in the room and over that time, where a really important decision needs to be made and needs to be the right decision, have you been in any environment where that's occurred?
Bob: I mentioned earlier before we started recording some of the work I did in the mining industry and some of the- and particularly the really bright miners tend to be quite willing to be competitive about things. They could often be a pretty lonely group to work with. I've also worked with research scientist in CSIRO from time to time. That was where I met David Natale that I mentioned earlier and research scientists weren't satisfied until they had demonstrated to me and themselves that they were brighter than I was. Sometimes I had to feign being dumber than I am to keep them on site.
Leanne: You’re sacrificing a bit of your ego to drive a result.
Bob: I was lucky to be born with a fairly manageable ego.
Leanne: [laughs] Okay. Really diverse audiences. It's interesting that you have to shift your mindset as well and the way you behave in that room just so you can enable them to all work really well collaboratively too.
Bob: Yes. One of the tasks I've set myself over the years is broadening my repertoire so that I can more easily work in a wider range of situations and with a wider range of people. My preferred style is relatively unstructured. I plan in detail but then I don’t expect to follow the plan. I want to be responsive to what’s happening in the moment in the room but if there's a lot to do and time is short and particularly if there are a lot of participants, then that doesn't work and so I have to move to the other end of the continuum and structure things tightly and push things along a bit rather than work at a more natural pace.
Leanne: Yes, absolutely. Do you ever -- Now that you've done this for 45 years, do you ever get nervous anymore or were you ever nervous when you first started going into these workshops where you may not know the industry or the content? This is quite new to you because we've got some little first-time facilitators here that are slowly building up that confidence develops to present and talk in front of people and shift conversations along. How did you deal with the notes if you had them and are there any situations now we you'd walk into a workshop and think, "I don't know how this is going to go, the brief is pretty interesting”?
Bob: I aim for a balance between nervousness and confidence. That the nervousness helps to lift my arousal level and helps me be more present and paying more attention. There's an enormous difference in how much information I can take in when my arousal is fairly high and I have that in the back of my mind that I have my safety net. And that is that if the process isn’t working, I will drop the content and engage with the participants about why the process isn't working and invite them to join me in figuring out what process will work better for all of us.
Leanne: That is such a cool little trick that you can rely on.
Bob: And keeping that in the back of my mind means that if I feel my arousal getting too high, I can say to myself, "don't worry if it does blow up in my face we'll deal with that when it happens."
Leanne: [laughs] Wow. You've got to be pretty vulnerable to have that approach as well. I think a lot of people will expect that if I'm at their facilitating workshop, I need to be professional, I need to do all these things. But what you're saying is you can actually let down your guard and let other people into the conversation and say, "why isn't this process working? Let’s addressed this if it's an elephant in the room." Does it really need strategy?
Bob: The assumption I work on and I don't always manage to achieve it- but the assumption that I work on is that the more real I can be, the easier it will be for the other people in the room to be real and authentic. That means that things that might otherwise be censored become surfaceable. That means that the information exchanged and understood is more complete. That means the decisions are better and the actions are likely to be better and there's likely to be more ownership of them.
Leanne: Yes, fantastic. I want to talk about the action because I also read about this in your facilitation guide especially in my early experience. Much of my facilitation was of meetings, decision-making and problem-solving. Did it work? Often, I couldn't tell. The meetings were to decide what to do. Then doing happened later and more often than not I wasn’t there later. How do you control then what happens after you leave that workshop to ensure that they are continuing with those outcomes?
Bob: I've learned over the years to give more and more attention to what happens before the decision-making starts and what happens at the end before we leave the room. Time for meeting anything I can do to create more of a sense of community in the room so that people can afford to be a bit more authentic with each other. The greater the extent to which I can negotiate expectations with the people I'm working with so that they and I are on the same page and the greater the extent to which they're willing to share with me the responsibility for making this a success the easier everything becomes during the middle.
Then at the end, trying to achieve a state where people will be committed to acting on the decisions that they've made is crucial. The literature is a bit demoralizing there if you look at the literature on learning transfer for instance. The amount of learning transferred from most workshops is distressingly small. I now regard that as an essential piece of any meeting. It's about having the actions specific enough that people know what actions they've agreed to and getting a commitment from somebody in the room that they will themselves take the actions or if they have to get somebody else to do it, that they will monitor how that proceeds. I try to build commitment to the final stage of the meeting because if the decisions don't lead to actions, why did we just wasted their time having a meeting?
Leanne: Absolutely and we often find that you do a lot of work on trying to find the solutions and then it's only the last five minutes when everyone's exhausted, they're ready to go out the door because you meant to finish at five o'clock or whatever it is and it's a really rushed process. I think building it into and that commitment all three workshops is a really great idea.
Bob: I try to design processes that take less time than the time I'm given, so that I have a quarter of an hour, half an hour, a bit more of flow time to deal with the unexpected that is going to chew up some minutes on its own because I agree with you, being rushed at the end helps to kill the learning transfer or the carrying forward of the decisions into action.
Leanne: It really does. I'd like to talk about the concept you raised which is action learning. Can you tell us- you've got an example that you wrote on your CV, I loved reading that by the way, when you advise the Electoral commission in a developing nation to improve their electoral system. Can you explain first of all, what is action learning and then how you used it in that context.
Bob: There are two very different varieties that just happened to have somewhat similar origins and the same name. The British style, which developed is that a group of people from different organizations come together regularly or semi-regularly. One of them offers a problem or issue that she or he faces and the others then ask curiosity motivated questions to deepen the problem owners understanding. Then the problem owner goes back to her or his own organization and uses this deep and understanding to do a better job, that's the British style.
It tends to be unfacilitated - I would provide some early facilitation but then he would assume these are all senior responsible managers, they're capable of managing their own process. I think it was brave of him to make that assumption with some groups of people. When the Americans took it over, the usual pattern there except in tertiary education, where it's used for educational purposes is that it's a shared project. It's within an organization and a diverse team usually from within the organization is set up to take that project on and they work collaboratively together to resolve it. There's usually a facilitator often called a coach or a set advisor who really makes sure that people do what they're supposed to do, that keeps them on the process.
Leanne: Yes, you need that accountability buddy, that's right.
Bob: The process that I use is a bit of both. I usually work with a single project and in-house teams because that's what I'm asked to do. It can be a bit different in the university classroom or in Ph.D. supervision where I also use it but often, the aim is to help people expand their leadership skills by increasing their ability to facilitate because increasingly, leaders are being asked to facilitate that collaborative problem solving rather than telling people what the answer is. A bit like the shift from presentation to facilitation in training.
Leanne: Two very different skill sets.
Bob: If we learn to ride a bicycle by riding a bicycle, I don't think anyone ever learned to ride a bicycle by studying a book, then surely we learn facilitative leadership by practicing facilitative leadership. To do that it acts against that if I'm present all the time and guiding them very rigorously through a very set process. Instead, I facilitate the first meeting relationship building and being clear about the project in outcome terms so that they know what achievement will look like and negotiating expectations and negotiating process guidelines and making sure that they understand who the other stakeholders are that they can engage them.
Helping them to understand what they want to get out of it for themselves as well as for the organization so that they're motivated to hang in there and fine-tune it until it works the way they want it to. At the second meeting, one of them facilitates and I'm there as a supportive coach. By the third meeting, I'm there but I hope not to have to intervene so that at the end of the third meeting I can say, "You've just demonstrated to me that you're entirely capable of managing your own process. I'd be delighted to be invited back at any time but from this point on it's your show".
Leanne: How do they feel when you say that to them must be pretty happy with that.
Bob: Because one of them has facilitated the second meeting and been supported in doing that and because I insist that there's a process review at the end of that meeting and because the process review is then facilitated by somebody else within the group, that person is then likely to volunteer to facilitate the third meeting and the reviewer of that can then volunteer to facilitate the fourth meeting. They're invited into it so that at any stage the step they're being asked to take they know is within their capacity.
Leanne: Yes. It's not a huge leap at all. Especially the whole co-facilitating model is actually really useful and that's how I started in facilitation was, it's always nice having someone that you can lean on. It's a bit more professional then you learn from them and then when you're on your own it's okay because it's not that set from sitting in a room to then leading but stepping in the room to co-facilitating to leading is much easier. It's a great idea. In your observation what are the good skills that a facilitator really needs? If you're to pick say your top two or three which I know is difficult, what do you think those skills are?
Bob: Some of them are conceptual. I'm reluctant to offer advice to other people because in terms of my own preferences and personality, I'm surprised that I finished up as a change agent and facilitator. I can say with some honesty that I'm one of the most introverted people that I know and I'm much more intellectual in my approach to facilitation than a lot of really good facilitators are. What works for me doesn't necessarily work for others. I can talk about what I found most useful for myself.
Leanne: I think that'd be great particularly as we do have quite a few introverts that listen in, again to get that confidence. We want to dismiss the myth that every facilitator needs to be this extrovert that's really confident. That's absolutely not true at all as we can see from your success. I'd love for you to share the skills that you brought to the role.
Bob: There is one conceptual skill which is probably common across all or almost all facilitation and that's to understand the distinction between process and content. For example, the usual ground rule about facilitators not intervening in the content is useful because when a facilitator does that, the danger is that the participants think that the facilitator has an agenda and that can contaminate the process.
Knowing where that boundary between process and content is, is a useful skill for anyone who does facilitation. Then there are times when you need to intervene in content and somehow rather that has to be done so it doesn't contaminate the process. For instance, if I'm holding a marker I would deliberately put it down and I would move to a different part of the room.
Leanne: You actually physically change where you are?
Bob: Move away from the whiteboard and/or the front of the room and say, "I'm now going to speak to you as Bob Dick citizen and it's entirely up to you whether you pay any attention or not to what I'm going to say". It seems to me that that decision that you were about to make has some dangers that I don't think you may realize and I would invite you to reconsider that. Then I move back to the front of the room and take up the marker pen and stand by the whiteboard and say something like, "Okay, what do you want to do now?"
Leanne: Just that tiny shift of moving your physical location and is it just more of a status thing and saying, I'm actually out of the role of facilitator now. Is that what it does subconsciously to your audience and participants?
Bob: That's the intention that people denote authority to facilitators to look after the process. That's why they ask a facilitator in. If I intervene in content from the front of the room in my facilitator persona, then the danger is that they will pay attention to that because I've said it. The danger is what I mentioned before that they may think I have some agenda about a particular outcome. At the end of a facilitation session, the ideal for me is they don't know what views I had about the content or even better is that they think I'm on their side whether I'm or not.
Leanne: Have you ever had a client approach you just on that and asked you to drive a specific outcome? What would your response be if that was the case?
Bob: I say, "I don't think I'm the person for this. Would you like me to suggest some other people who might be able to do what you want?"
Leanne: Absolutely, great. Let's say you're talking to Bob 45 five years ago, Bob just stepped up as a facilitator, what advice would you give to your younger self?
Bob: Whatever happens, you're going to survive it.
Leanne: That's brilliant.
Bob: That means you can afford to experiment if things aren't working. If the process isn't working, it's pointless to continue with it. Drop the content, fix the process, then when the process is fixed you can return to the content.
Leanne: That's really good advice. I think this whole content and process, not philosophy but the way that you approach that as a mode of delivery is really useful. I've never really thought about that before. I know that I've been in meetings and frustrated with because you're not actually making progress but you continue ahead and talk about the content no one really stops that conversation and says, what we're doing here sitting in this room is not working maybe we need to go for a walk or maybe we need to rethink. Do we need more information, should we consult with someone else? I think that's really helpful. Bob, is there anything else that you'd like to add to any of our first time facilitators that are starting the journey?
Bob: Facilitation can be an enormous buzz and it seems to me that the way in which we structure our organizations and our teams and meetings and our social structures generally suit the world we moving from and often spectacularly unsuited to the world we're moving towards with much more ambiguous and complex environments and much faster rates of change and solutions that don't stay appropriate for as long as they used to. The more of us that can be competent in both content and process, the better placed we are to help the world survive some of the trauma that's headed towards us down the road.
Leanne: Yes. It's a very volatile environment we're heading into and I think the today's of going into a meeting with a set agenda and 10 minutes on this topic, it's no longer relevant. I think your strategy of being prepared but also being flexible and open to where the discussion could lead is such a crucial step for any facilitator. Finally, Bob, you're also running workshops for facilitators, where can people find more information about you and those workshops?
Bob: I have quite a large website, some of it about facilitation, most of it about action research really, which is the mindset that I carry around with me in most of what I do. The URL for the website is www.aral.com.au. The A-R-A-L is short for action research and action learning.
Leanne: I was wondering what that stood for.
Bob: There is a load of material there. If after that URL you finish with a slash, it will automatically give you an index to the main versions of the site. One of the links that come up on the index page will be workshops and that will take people through to a description of my program for the year and some of the other workshops that I've offered in the past or plan to operate in future years or offer in-house.
Leanne: Fantastic. We will link to your website and those workshop details on our show notes for this episode. Bob, thank you so much. It's been great meeting you and talking and you've really broadened my perspective on facilitation in terms of splitting up into content, process and keeping focused on what's actually happening and what we need to fix in that situation. I've learned a lot from you and I'm sure our listeners have as well as. Thank you for taking the time out for our conversation.
Bob: My pleasure.