The organization assessment went as anticipated without major issues. However an old issue popped up on the last day (3rd Day). This is; including new people mid way through a process.
When facilitating a group on any matter you need to facilitate at a sophistication level which is understood by everybody. I must say that some consultants call it sophistication level while others call it abstraction level yet others call it conceptualization, complexity etc. The point is when doing a self assessment we assume that the participants have the same understanding of the terms and concepts used in the assessment tool as well as they have the background knowledge to quickly fill in the blanks and understand new things. However this is never the case (That’s why we need a facilitator) and the facilitator needs to facilitate using language and terms, which is commonly understood by all. This was the case for the first 2 days. On the last day it was decided to increase the number of participants to have a wider input to the process. Even though my gut instinct and experience told me that this would not be such a good idea, I held my thoughts as there were other “buy in” issues to consider.
This meant that we brought in people
a) who were of a lower level in the organization; thereby inevitably with a lower sophistication level.
b) who had no idea regarding what has happened in the past 2 days; or a pissed off at being left out
c) who needed a lot of time to grasp what is going on; or who do not have a high degree of commitment to the process
At the same time what happens with the people who were there from the beginning is that
a) they tend to get board quickly
b) they become impatient and overwhelm the new comers
As a result you loose the momentum of the process and you have to deal with new group dynamics which is invariably unpredictable.
It was funny for me to watch this happening as I went through the day. Some of the participants from the crowd that was there from the first day were even using hand gestures asking the new lot to hold back; while other voiced their opinion even when others showed impatience or dismissive gestures.
What was indeed tough was to establish the new sophistication level of the new group. In fact I don’t think I was able to settle at any level for any length of time on the 3rd day. The group was now so diverse that when discussing one issue they seem to get it very quickly but with others it was completely different some would get it but the others simply could not comprehend. Therefore there was this constant shifting of the level of sophistication required to understand a concept
The end result was that what was planned for half a day now took one whole day. This is acceptable as this meant that a similar level of quality was maintained right through out the assessment process. The danger is that some consultants may be tempted to rush through which might compromise the quality as well as alienate the participants.
So all in all it was an interesting assignment with some learning’s and reinforcement of some do’s and don’ts.
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