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I am up to my ears in research papers doing my literature review, but am not finding exactly what I want. Facilitators intervene in complex social systems (F2F and increasingly virtual) to try to change them towards their client's goals (if they are external). I have articles on what facilitators are (aren't), do (don't do), and bring (don't bring), but what happens after they leave and what can be attributable to their intervention? What changes? What is learned? Because I am using systems theory as a framework, I would be happy to see how scholars use that lens to look at facilitation/facilitator interventions - this could be in F2F processes or virtually.? International environmental NGOs are my research focus, but any sector will do for now. I have found some studies conducted in universities on students, thus not a real-life context which would be ideal. I will be happy to share my research once it is published.
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Hi Gillian,?
Two things come to mind.?
One is a developmental evaluation which uses a facilitative style in order to evaluate outcomes over time?
The second is the work of Kirkpatrick and Kirkpatrick, which is geared towards training but I find can also be applied to any facilitative session as the outcome is often to build capacity towards a goal?
I haven't given you any links to articles but these two starting places could lead to different directions.?
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Hi Gillian
?Maybe the Journal on Group Facilitation can bring something to
you research
±á¨¦³¦³Ù´Ç°ù
Hi Gillian,?
Two things come to mind.?
One is a developmental evaluation which uses a facilitative
style in order to evaluate outcomes over time?
The second is the work of Kirkpatrick and Kirkpatrick, which is
geared towards training but I find can also be applied to any
facilitative session as the outcome is often to build capacity
towards a goal?
I haven't given you any links to articles but these two starting
places could lead to different directions.?
--
.?
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±á¨¦³¦³Ù´Ç°ù
Villarreal Lozoya
CDA
Managing Director & Partner
hector.villarreal@...
Proyectum
Dominicana & Kunlaboro Latam
Making Strategy Work
Tel:?
(829) 740-3500
WhatsApp:
+528112283500
Santo
Domingo, Rep¨²blica Dominicana
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Hi Gillian,
Constellation's approach to facilitate groups and communities to own and respond to their issues aims to move NGO staff from interventionist to facilitative mode.See this link?
Best wishes for your important research. Would love to read the end product.
Warmly, Rituu Constellation? Join our online community:?
Twitter:?
FB:?
Instagram: constellationclcp Youtube channel:?The Constellation SALT-CLCP
On Tue, 21 Jul 2020 at 22:38, Gillian Martin Mehers < gillian@...> wrote: I am up to my ears in research papers doing my literature review, but am not finding exactly what I want. Facilitators intervene in complex social systems (F2F and increasingly virtual) to try to change them towards their client's goals (if they are external). I have articles on what facilitators are (aren't), do (don't do), and bring (don't bring), but what happens after they leave and what can be attributable to their intervention? What changes? What is learned? Because I am using systems theory as a framework, I would be happy to see how scholars use that lens to look at facilitation/facilitator interventions - this could be in F2F processes or virtually.? International environmental NGOs are my research focus, but any sector will do for now. I have found some studies conducted in universities on students, thus not a real-life context which would be ideal. I will be happy to share my research once it is published.
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Gillian,? ? ? I appreciate?that you are diving into this research into long term impact.? ?Most of what I have seen have been?investigation and suggestions for what to do within sessions.? As a practitioner?for many years,? I have often wondered? about long term impact for the people,?institutions and communities we work for.? Currently there is a controversy about the usefulness of "anti-racism" training interventions.? We are very much in need of research into long term? impacts of the various interventions.? ? I look forward to seeing what your literature review and eventual research shows. Best, Bill? William Aal 2067199665 Principal Associate Tools for Change Managing Partner Unconference.net
On Tue, Jul 21, 2020 at 10:08 AM Gillian Martin Mehers < gillian@...> wrote: I am up to my ears in research papers doing my literature review, but am not finding exactly what I want. Facilitators intervene in complex social systems (F2F and increasingly virtual) to try to change them towards their client's goals (if they are external). I have articles on what facilitators are (aren't), do (don't do), and bring (don't bring), but what happens after they leave and what can be attributable to their intervention? What changes? What is learned? Because I am using systems theory as a framework, I would be happy to see how scholars use that lens to look at facilitation/facilitator interventions - this could be in F2F processes or virtually.? International environmental NGOs are my research focus, but any sector will do for now. I have found some studies conducted in universities on students, thus not a real-life context which would be ideal. I will be happy to share my research once it is published.
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It¡¯s an important area of research. Marv Weisbord, cocreator of Future Search, ran what they called the ¡°ripple project¡± a few years back. Marv interviewed people he had worked with 15+ years earlier. He wrote about it in the revised edition of Productive Workplaces. His quick summary:
Forty percent of the organizations I wrote about in Productive Workplaces, including some "big successes," no longer exist. Only two of ten have the same owners. That's why we will do best to make the most of ?each encounter and let the cosmos take care of ever after. Each time we do principles over techniques whatever the time frame we make the world a little better than it was the day before.
BTW, have you considered complexity theory as a framework rather than systems theory? I think it transcends and includes systems theory. You can find more in??or my?. You can get a taste from this?, which is an update from the way I looked at it in the book.
Peggy
________________________________ Peggy Holman Co-founder Journalism That Matters 15347 SE 49th Place Bellevue, WA ?98006 206-948-0432 www.peggyholman.com Twitter: @peggyholman JTM Twitter: @JTMStream Enjoy the award winning?
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Gillian,? ? ? I appreciate?that you are diving into this research into long term impact.? ?Most of what I have seen have been?investigation and suggestions for what to do within sessions.? As a practitioner?for many years,? I have often wondered? about long term impact for the people,?institutions and communities we work for.? Currently there is a controversy about the usefulness of "anti-racism" training interventions.? We are very much in need of research into long term? impacts of the various interventions.? ? I look forward to seeing what your literature review and eventual research shows. Best, Bill? William Aal
2067199665 Principal Associate Tools for Change Managing Partner On Tue, Jul 21, 2020 at 10:08 AM Gillian Martin Mehers < gillian@...> wrote: I am up to my ears in research papers doing my literature review, but am not finding exactly what I want. Facilitators intervene in complex social systems (F2F and increasingly virtual) to try to change them towards their client's goals (if they are external). I have articles on what facilitators are (aren't), do (don't do), and bring (don't bring), but what happens after they leave and what can be attributable to their intervention? What changes? What is learned? Because I am using systems theory as a framework, I would be happy to see how scholars use that lens to look at facilitation/facilitator interventions - this could be in F2F processes or virtually.? International environmental NGOs are my research focus, but any sector will do for now. I have found some studies conducted in universities on students, thus not a real-life context which would be ideal. I will be happy to share my research once it is published.
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Gillian: I have a few suggestions: - See if you can determine what changed between the time period before the intervention and the time period after. It may be due to the facilitator or something else but see if you can narrow your focus to some effects you can measure. Then you have to determine if they were improvements. As C. S. Lewis observed, "You can break eggs without making an omelet."
- Complex social systems wander and oscillate so you may want to look at a few time periods before to see if the "after" state is a return to an old state or the system is visiting a new state.
- Can you establish a benchmark of similar complex social systems and evaluate what other external forces were at work on them collectively. This may allow you to tease out some of the facilitation effects from other environmental / background changes.
- One book you may find useful is ¡°¡± by . He takes an ecological perspective (he calls it ecolate). He has a couple of rules of thumb that I think are equally applicable to complex social systems
- ¡°The world is a complex of systems so intricately
interconnected that we can seldom be very confident that a proposed
intervention in this system of systems will produce the consequences we
want.
- ?¡°The natural world is organized into a web of life more
complex than we know. We have only a limited ability to predict what
will happen in time as the result of any intervention, however well
meant, in the natural order of things. Caution and humility are the
hallmarks of the ecolate attitude toward the world.¡±
- ¡°Whatever plan of action we adopt in our attempt to remake the world,
our usual first step is to pin a laudatory label on what we are doing.
We may call it development, cure, correction, improvement, help, or
progress. We load untested conclusions onto ill-stated premises. But
every intervention in an existing system is, for certain, only an
intervention. We will make progress faster if we honestly call the
changes ¡°interventions¡± only, until an audit shows what we have actually
done. Needless to say, such honesty will be resisted by most promoters
of change.¡±
Final thought: "Nothing is so irrevocably neglected as an opportunity of daily occurrence.¡± Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
I hope this helps. Please write in again and let us know how you proceed and what you learn.
Sean Murphy 408-252-9676
Gillian,? ? ? I appreciate?that you are diving into this research into long term impact.? ?Most of what I have seen have been?investigation and suggestions for what to do within sessions.? As a practitioner?for many years,? I have often wondered? about long term impact for the people,?institutions and communities we work for.? Currently there is a controversy about the usefulness of "anti-racism" training interventions.? We are very much in need of research into long term? impacts of the various interventions.? ? I look forward to seeing what your literature review and eventual research shows. Best, Bill? William Aal 2067199665 Principal Associate Tools for Change Managing Partner Unconference.net
On Tue, Jul 21, 2020 at 10:08 AM Gillian Martin Mehers < gillian@...> wrote: I am up to my ears in research papers doing my literature review, but am not finding exactly what I want. Facilitators intervene in complex social systems (F2F and increasingly virtual) to try to change them towards their client's goals (if they are external). I have articles on what facilitators are (aren't), do (don't do), and bring (don't bring), but what happens after they leave and what can be attributable to their intervention? What changes? What is learned? Because I am using systems theory as a framework, I would be happy to see how scholars use that lens to look at facilitation/facilitator interventions - this could be in F2F processes or virtually.? International environmental NGOs are my research focus, but any sector will do for now. I have found some studies conducted in universities on students, thus not a real-life context which would be ideal. I will be happy to share my research once it is published.
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I just thought of? ?Donald Kirkpatrick's work.? His dissertation?in from the 50's? Evaluating Human Relations Programs for Industrial Foremen and Supervisors. It has had an impact over the years,? and? his organization is still going.? The model has 4 levels,? impact, learning, behavior?change, and impact. Best, ?Bill |
William Aal 2067199665 Principal Associate Tools for Change Managing Partner Unconference.net
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Dear Antonio, Hector, Rituu, William, Peggy and Sean,
Thank you very much for these leads, I will enjoy the journey's they take me on.?
Hector, it seems that the IAF Journal has not been published since 2016 (if I am not mistaken), but past articles will be useful.?
Peggy, thank you for the resources around complexity theory, I will review your unpublished chapter, and look at the two references with interest and thank you for sharing that!
Rituu, thank you for the specific link to your NGO work, I think that is valuable and it is interesting to think about their external versus their internal work.
Sean, thank you for the Hardin reference, and those rules of thumb. This sounds very much like Jay Forrester from MIT who observed (and I paraphrase broadly) that complex social systems are incredibly resistant to change, that people do not tend to understand them, and when they try to intervene they are also likely to get the inverse of what they intended (or even to make matters worse).? I will enjoy reading Hardin.?
Bill, thank you for Kirkpatrick connection and it is interesting what Peggy shared about Marv Weisbord's reference to principles over techniques. I am finding literature from practitioners, but less with an empirical component. There are a number of studies that use university students as their subjects but less in real organizational contexts and even less in NGOs. The health sector is pretty good at documenting impact of faciliation in the field of nursing, mental health, and counseling, etc.? - business too from quality circles to large-scale facilitated change processes. Even short term impacts seem to be less a focus than tools, techniques, qualities, prestige of facilitators, etc.?
And, thanks Antonio, for those two additional avenues to follow, I hadn't thought of outcome evaluation.?
What a rich list, thank you all so much! I really appreciate this community for this kind of crowdsourcing.? This will keep me busy for a while (and if you think of others I will be happy to have them!)
All the best, Gillian
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Gillian: thanks for pointing that out. I had collected Forrester's Law in my Feb 2019 "Quotes for Entrepreneurs"() but had not noticed the similarity until you suggested it.
¡°In complicated situations efforts to improve things
often tend to make them worse, sometimes much worse, on occasion
calamitous, because the obvious thing to do is often dead wrong.¡±
This and several variations are known as ¡°Forrester¡¯s Law.¡± Related quotes from is his Urban Dynamics (1969):
In complex systems cause and effect are often not closely
related in either time or space. The structure of a complex system is
not a simple feedback loop where one system state dominates the
behavior. The complex system has a multiplicity of interacting feedback
loops. Its internal rates of flow are controlled by nonlinear
relationships. The complex system is of high order, meaning that there
are many system states (or levels). It usually contains
positive-feedback loops describing growth processes as well as negative,
goal-seeking loops. In the complex system the cause of a difficulty may
lie far back in time from the symptoms, or in a completely different
and remote part of the system. In fact, causes are usually found, not in
prior events, but in the structure and policies of the system.
in (1969)
also
¡°Any intuitive alteration of a complex system will cause it to become worse off.¡±
in (1969) page 9
last is h/t Henry M. Boettinger in (HBR Jan 1975) It's a somewhat pessimistic view but probably realistic. I think Forrester and Hardin are both illuminating that in an established system you are in a local maximum and small changes will normally make it worse. Pareto optimal moves are probably only available early in the evolution of a new system.
Sean Murphy 408-252-9676
On Mon, Jul 27, 2020 at 3:18 AM Gillian Martin Mehers < gillian@...> wrote: Dear Antonio, Hector, Rituu, William, Peggy and Sean,
Thank you very much for these leads, I will enjoy the journey's they take me on.?
Hector, it seems that the IAF Journal has not been published since 2016 (if I am not mistaken), but past articles will be useful.?
Peggy, thank you for the resources around complexity theory, I will review your unpublished chapter, and look at the two references with interest and thank you for sharing that!
Sean, thank you for the Hardin reference, and those rules of thumb. This sounds very much like Jay Forrester from MIT who observed (and I paraphrase broadly) that complex social systems are incredibly resistant to change, that people do not tend to understand them, and when they try to intervene they are also likely to get the inverse of what they intended (or even to make matters worse).? I will enjoy reading Hardin.?
Bill, thank you for Kirkpatrick connection and it is interesting what Peggy shared about Marv Weisbord's reference to principles over techniques. I am finding literature from practitioners, but less with an empirical component. There are a number of studies that use university students as their subjects but less in real organizational contexts and even less in NGOs. The health sector is pretty good at documenting impact of faciliation in the field of nursing, mental health, and counseling, etc.? - business too from quality circles to large-scale facilitated change processes. Even short term impacts seem to be less a focus than tools, techniques, qualities, prestige of facilitators, etc.?
And, thanks Antonio, for those two additional avenues to follow, I hadn't thought of outcome evaluation.?
What a rich list, thank you all so much! I really appreciate this community for this kind of crowdsourcing.? This will keep me busy for a while (and if you think of others I will be happy to have them!)
All the best, Gillian
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Hi Gillian? Please keep me posted on your?progress. I have written?back in 2000 my PhD dissertation without actually being aware that facilitation existed as a discipline, yet when I have republished recently I immediately?discovered why I am in this profession today, because?I always have been.? I used a systems framework to analyse intervention in organizational change and learning processes it's called SSM Soft Systems Methodology.? My thesis is available on Amazon, should you be curious to find out more?about it. Best wishes
I just thought of? ?Donald Kirkpatrick's work.? His dissertation?in from the 50's? Evaluating Human Relations Programs for Industrial Foremen and Supervisors. It has had an impact over the years,? and? his organization is still going.? The model has 4 levels,? impact, learning, behavior?change, and impact. Best, ?Bill |
William Aal 2067199665 Principal Associate Tools for Change Managing Partner Unconference.net
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Gilllian, ?I think your research direction is very important. You accurately point out that there a lot of opinions about what works, and a lot of frameworks proposed for evaluation, but most of those seem limited in their usefulness in comparing the effectiveness of various techniques.? It will be interesting to see what you might emerge with... Bill
? ? ? William Aal 2067199665 Principal Associate Tools for Change Managing Partner Unconference.net
On Mon, Jul 27, 2020 at 3:18 AM Gillian Martin Mehers < gillian@...> wrote: Dear Antonio, Hector, Rituu, William, Peggy and Sean,
Thank you very much for these leads, I will enjoy the journey's they take me on.?
Hector, it seems that the IAF Journal has not been published since 2016 (if I am not mistaken), but past articles will be useful.?
Peggy, thank you for the resources around complexity theory, I will review your unpublished chapter, and look at the two references with interest and thank you for sharing that!
Sean, thank you for the Hardin reference, and those rules of thumb. This sounds very much like Jay Forrester from MIT who observed (and I paraphrase broadly) that complex social systems are incredibly resistant to change, that people do not tend to understand them, and when they try to intervene they are also likely to get the inverse of what they intended (or even to make matters worse).? I will enjoy reading Hardin.?
Bill, thank you for Kirkpatrick connection and it is interesting what Peggy shared about Marv Weisbord's reference to principles over techniques. I am finding literature from practitioners, but less with an empirical component. There are a number of studies that use university students as their subjects but less in real organizational contexts and even less in NGOs. The health sector is pretty good at documenting impact of faciliation in the field of nursing, mental health, and counseling, etc.? - business too from quality circles to large-scale facilitated change processes. Even short term impacts seem to be less a focus than tools, techniques, qualities, prestige of facilitators, etc.?
And, thanks Antonio, for those two additional avenues to follow, I hadn't thought of outcome evaluation.?
What a rich list, thank you all so much! I really appreciate this community for this kind of crowdsourcing.? This will keep me busy for a while (and if you think of others I will be happy to have them!)
All the best, Gillian
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Hi Gillian,
some interesting empirical research on effects of facilitation. In the context of deliberative democracy, rather than organizations, and not particularly coming from a systems perspective.
Kuhar, M., Krmelj, M., & Petri?, G. (2019). The impact of facilitation on the quality of deliberation and attitude change. Small Group Research, 50(5), 623-653.
all best wishes,
Rosa
Rosa Zubizarreta
coaching in participatory leadership ? advanced group facilitation services & learning opportunities
Gilllian, ?I think your research direction is very important. You accurately point out that there a lot of opinions about what works, and a lot of frameworks proposed for evaluation, but most of those seem limited in their usefulness in comparing the effectiveness of various techniques.? It will be interesting to see what you might emerge with... Bill
? ? ? William Aal 2067199665 Principal Associate Tools for Change Managing Partner Unconference.net On Mon, Jul 27, 2020 at 3:18 AM Gillian Martin Mehers < gillian@...> wrote: Dear Antonio, Hector, Rituu, William, Peggy and Sean,
Thank you very much for these leads, I will enjoy the journey's they take me on.?
Hector, it seems that the IAF Journal has not been published since 2016 (if I am not mistaken), but past articles will be useful.?
Peggy, thank you for the resources around complexity theory, I will review your unpublished chapter, and look at the two references with interest and thank you for sharing that!
Sean, thank you for the Hardin reference, and those rules of thumb. This sounds very much like Jay Forrester from MIT who observed (and I paraphrase broadly) that complex social systems are incredibly resistant to change, that people do not tend to understand them, and when they try to intervene they are also likely to get the inverse of what they intended (or even to make matters worse).? I will enjoy reading Hardin.?
Bill, thank you for Kirkpatrick connection and it is interesting what Peggy shared about Marv Weisbord's reference to principles over techniques. I am finding literature from practitioners, but less with an empirical component. There are a number of studies that use university students as their subjects but less in real organizational contexts and even less in NGOs. The health sector is pretty good at documenting impact of faciliation in the field of nursing, mental health, and counseling, etc.? - business too from quality circles to large-scale facilitated change processes. Even short term impacts seem to be less a focus than tools, techniques, qualities, prestige of facilitators, etc.?
And, thanks Antonio, for those two additional avenues to follow, I hadn't thought of outcome evaluation.?
What a rich list, thank you all so much! I really appreciate this community for this kind of crowdsourcing.? This will keep me busy for a while (and if you think of others I will be happy to have them!)
All the best, Gillian
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Gillian Martin Mehers
Peggy Holman
Paul Nunesdea