How to Honor and Recognize Diversity, Ensuring Meeting and Workshop Inclusiveness
September 22, 2011 12 Comments
The primary responsibility of a facilitator is to protect the participants. Secondarily, the facilitator helps drive the group toward its desired deliverable. Since the deliverable is built to serve the participants, the people should take priority over the issues. To some extent, both people and issues are managed by creating an environment that is conducive to productivity. Easier said, than done.
Additionally the International Association of Facilitators (IAF) aspires for you to:
- Encourage positive regard for the experience and perception of all participants
- Create a climate of safety and trust
- Create opportunities for participants to benefit from the diversity of the group
- Cultivate cultural awareness and sensitivity”
Dr Edward de Bono provides expert insight about parallel thinking; ie, there can be more than one correct answer. Listening to others, their perspective, and rationale will create a more robust product. Since we are all guilty of selective perception, the aggregation of all points of view provides stronger understanding and insight than any single point of view. When facilitating a group of nine people for example, we are looking for the tenth answer. The FAST technique refers to this concept as N+1, where N equals the quantity of participants, we are always seeking the +1 perspective.
Remember to embrace and enforce meeting and workshop ground rules to create a climate of safety and trust. See our earlier discussion (http://wp.me/p1ki0r-5Q) for more specific comments and suggestions.
Diversity, or plurality as we prefer to call it (suggesting the beauty of a mosaic rather than the fracturing of something), is undoubtedly the key to innovation. Embrace de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats (modified to Seven Thinking Hats with the FAST technique to also include the “Process” or royal purple view) or others means of facilitating perspective found in your FAST manual or in other expert sources such as Roger von Oech‘s Creative Whack Pack (most recently made available for the iPhone®).
Consider special ice breakers, break out sessions, or team building exercises that emphasize the value of plurality. Scannell and Newstrom offer hundreds of options (eg, http://www.amazon.com/More-Games-Trainers-Edward-Scannell/dp/007055045X) among other expert tools. Take this opportunity to leverage the tactile sense, and consider some of the professional Legos® activities or others designed to prove the value of plurality and its positive impact on the quality of deliverables.
For detailed support, see your FAST Facilitator Reference Manual or attend a FAST Professional Facilitative Leadership training session offered around the world (see http://www.mgrush.com/ for a current schedule).
Related articles
- The DNA of a Modern Leader (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
- How To Structure the Introduction to Meetings and Workshops (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
- How to Communicate Meeting and Workshop Results (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
- Benefits of Facilitative Leadership (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
- When To Use Facilitative Leadership (facilitativeleadership.wordpress.com)
About FASTInstructor
Sound advice. Relevant in many work situations and especially so when there is conflict. De Bono’s 6 thinking hats can help you get inside other people’s heads and see a problem or dispute from a different angle. Quite often I’ve found that people want the same thing but express things quite differently.
Asking participants to shift other perspectives can also be quite revealing. For example, how would Steve Jobs deal with “this” as opposed to Bill Gates? How would a monastery deal with “this” as opposed to the Mafia? How would the ecosystem manage “this” as compared with an ant colony (ie, highly collaborative species)?
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