What kind of workshop? Some metaphors

I've been working with a small client team to design a workshop.  The client team see lots of weaknesses in the current set-up that the group is a part of.  As the fighter pilot said when surrounded by enemy planes, it is a target-rich environment.  So where do we begin? 

We discussed jumping in and asking the biggest, baddest questions about the group's role and existence.  We played around with focusing on process tasks like revisiting terms of reference.  We thought about starting with easy wins.

The someone suggested a garden metaphor: the group and its work is a garden and - so he thought - the implication is that we want to do something evolutionary not revolutionary.

Maybe.

It got me thinking about the different kinds of interventions you might make in a garden - which could be radical as well as incremental - and we used these metaphors to help us reach a clearer common view about what the workshop should be like.

Dreaming of warm sunny evenings

Especially at this time of year, when nothing much is growing and the days are moist and cold, many gardeners will be dreaming of long summer evenings with a glass of wine and artfully placed candles. Scents and seating and shade. We could use the workshop to dream about the desired future, building a rich shared vision that inspires us during the hard months ahead. 

Rip it up and start again

Not all interventions in gardens are evolutionary.  People sometimes decide to completely remodel their garden: hard landscaping, tree removal, new soil, the works.  So a workshop could work on new plans: where to put the pond, as it were.  And people could even move on to project planning: when to get the diggers in.

Weeding party

Or the workshop could be like a work party: lots of practical immediate stuff to get on with: weed the borders, turn the compost heap, sew the broad beans and repair the fence.

Using metaphors helped us decide

Tossing these options around helped us decide on the kind of workshop we wanted, before we agreed on the detailed draft aims.  We went for the weeding party. Trowels at the ready!

What metaphors have helped you, in designing and planning workshops? 

Three legged stool

Last week I trained 14 people in facilitation skills, at the quirky and rather wonderful Creekside Discovery Centre (see more below).  I came up with a metaphor that I quite liked, to tie together the main strands of the training - the three legged stool.

The three legged stool of facilitation

Facilitators help the group through:

• Clarity on the purpose and aims of the meeting - helping the host, convenor, planning group be clear about these, ensuring the group is happy with them.  There's a download on this here.
• Choice of techniques, meeting design - to meet the aims, suit the time/space/people.
• Interpersonal skills - listening, reflecting, clarifying, responding, intervening to help the group hear and talk to each other, see what's happening and make choices about what to do.

Carpentry prizes for most beautiful stool?

But when I was explaining this, I realised that I hadn't given enough emphasis to the underlying basic assumption and values of facilitation: the desire to serve the group and the assumption that the group can, through conversation, work together to further its own aims and purpose.

So my three legged stool needs an addition: the group, supported by the facilitator, doing something great together.

No prizes for carpentry - it's about supporting the group.

It doesn't matter how well you clarify the aims, design the meeting and intervene, if at heart your intention is misplaced.  If you believe that you know best, or the group is not capable of finding its own best solution, or your intention is to show what a great facilitator you are....

So, the three legged stool is there to support the group, not to win carpentry prizes.

More on Creekside

This venue is just 5 minutes walk from Greenwich Station (DLR, Overground) in London, and has the most beautiful collection of found objects, scavenged from the Thames mud. Like this amazing old typewriter.

Thames Typewriter

It has some lovely more recent touches too - gates below.

"But can you blu-tack flip chart paper to the wall and move the tables?" I hear you cry.

Yes.

I trained 14 people and it was comfortable working flexibly with this number.

So check it out.

Finding the house keys

I facilitated a workshop once, where everyone knew that they wanted to work together on something, but they didn't know what. They were all lawyers of one kind or another: barristers in private practice, in-house legal eagles for NGOs, members of the judiciary.  They shared an interest in human rights and climate change.  They shared a suspiscion that existing human rights legislation (including conventions) and existing courts which hear human rights cases (including some international ones) might be a good way to take forward cases which would catalyse action to reduce emissions and ensure victims of the impact of climate change get proper help.

During the workshop they shared information and stories, hoping that they would find one exciting thing to work on which had real potential. They discussed the detail of different legal approaches, what a perfect case would need to look like, the pros and cons of bringing cases in different jurisdictions.

As the workshop went on through its first day and towards lunch on the second day, they still hadn't found it.

And then suddenly they had!

How did that happen?

What did they do to find the focus? What did I do to help?

I don't know.  Nothing different than we had been doing for a day and a half.

Bingo!

It was like that moment when you find the house keys.  We had been looking and looking in all the right places and all the right ways.  It wasn't that we started looking better just before we found them.  It's just that we finally found them.

(It's funny how they're always in the last place you look.)

I don't want to go back in the box!

This post is about coaching, the power of unexpected questions and the alchemy of metaphor. I have just completed the first two days of a Diploma in Intermediate Executive Coaching, run by AOEC.  I've learnt loads, including realising once more the power of metaphor.  The striking thing I'd like to share is an insight I had about a project I discussed, as part of a practice session run by one of my fellow trainees.  Hats off to Simon!

The problem

The project had been bugging me.  It's enormous and complex, and I'm a relatively small cog in a very large consultant / client team. Things have been rushed and not all the plates have been spinning smoothly. It had been on my mind the previous evening, and I knew I was angry about how out of control it was feeling.

I came to the coaching session with a metaphor already in my mind, that the project was like a semi-wild cat, which was currently spitting and using its claws.  I wanted to speak calmly to it until it was pliable and tame enough to coax back into its box.

My focus was on the cat: wild and capable of causing a lot of pain, in its anarchic panic.  It was afraid and it could smell my fear.

I saw my own role as needing to move from being angry with it or afraid of it, to being the calm person who could 'cat whisper' it back to being tame, for just long enough to get it where I wanted it.

And anyway, this was only training: I felt I probably wouldn't get much out of the twenty minute session and I - wrongly - thought I knew already what my learning would be.

Surprising question

The training partner who was coaching me in this practice surprised me.  He didn't ask about the cat, he asked about the box.

That was definitely left-field for me.  I hadn't paid much attention to the box until he asked, and it stopped me in my tracks.  I described the box that I was picturing: small, carboard with a hinged lid and a padlock.

As I got a clearer picture in my mind of this box, I had a revelation.   I was trying to play a terrible trick on the cat.  I wasn't serving the cat, I was only trying to deal with my feelings.  And what a disrespectful attitude I had towards it.  I was looking at it all wrong.  This project is hard because it is ambitious and complicated and taking place in difficult circumstances.  If it wasn't hard, it wouldn't be worth working on.

I care about it, and I am proud of its ambition and the attempts the team is making to keep things going and to realise that ambition.

I shouldn't be trying to turn it into a pussycat.

Pride of a lion

Without really understanding how, my attitude to the project was transformed - and it has stayed transformed (at least so far).

This project is a lion, and I am proud to be walking alongside it in the open air, head up and back straight, not flinching when the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune assail us.

The take-away

So the original metaphor was powerful in enabling me to raise this subject matter in the session, but it was the unexpected question from the coach inviting me to explore an aspect of it which I had overlooked, which really transformed my perspective. I had gone into the session with the explicit aim of 'sounding off', and I emerged from it with renewed pride and purpose.