Decision Making / 6 / 6.5

6.5 PUTTING THREETWOONE-READY BACK ON TRACK—FIRST STEPS

Over several months, sufficient data has been gathered to permit detailed quantitative analysis, but this is set aside for the time being. The critical first step is to investigate the nature of the problems ThreeTwoOne faces by eliciting knowledge about those problems from key stakeholders.

Stakeholders are gathered together so that their operative knowledge can be elicited as a pre-cursor to systematic problem conceptualisation. A series of workshops attended by subgroups of stakeholders with similar interests are recommended. However, the need to revert to conducting interviews may present particularly when disparate views of the problem are expected, or conflict is likely. Note however that interviews consume a lot of time. It is important to identify gatekeepers who need to be consulted, or interviewed, before workshops begin. Gatekeepers often control access to parts of an organisation or people within it. Andersen and Richardson (1997) identify a number of activities to be undertaken in the process of planning knowledge elicitation, problem conceptualisation and group modelling workshops. They call these ‘scripts for group model building’. Their script headings, shown in italics below, have been augmented by the author’s research and consulting practice:

• Goal setting /managing the scope of work. The intervention sponsor2 helps in setting the scope of work and identifying appropriate people with whom to work before workshops are formally conducted.
• Interviews with key stakeholders. These people help frame the first conceptual models used to initiate the group workshops. In ThreeTwoOne’s case, the output of this initial meeting might be as shown at Figure 6-1, below. Equally it might be a sketchy concept map produced ‘on the fly’ during the entry interview.
• Clarify audience and purpose. The most important aspect is to ensure the right people are involved. Also, top-level management support for the effort can be critical. Support by top management must be demonstrated by their public sanctioning, and by their attendance at least for some of the time.
• Clarify products. It must be established from the outset what the expectations are in relation to the products deliverable at the end of each workshop.
• Logistics: Having the right room and logistic support is probably the second most important success factor.
• Room layout. Chairs should be comfortable, preferably swivelling to allow participants to turn easily to address each other or to combine into small sub-groups of three or four. Any medium that fosters dialogue and expression of ideas is valuable. Experience has shown that:
• Large whiteboards are most useful: the bigger the better.
• Large Post-it® Notes, or ‘stickies’, are useful for recording individual ideas, or concepts. They can be stuck on whiteboards or flip sheets in clusters or dispersed with additional information, such as arrows, drawn on the backing media.
• Electronic whiteboards, which incorporate the facility to produce photocopies of drawings, enable progressive recording of the flow of ideas. Screens of information can be copied and then detail on the whiteboard can be erased. A digital or Polaroid® camera can also be most helpful as they permit the group to continue pursuing ideas without loss of earlier thoughts.
• A projected computer screen can be highly valuable for focusing the attention of group members. However, used unwisely this same device can inhibit the flow of ideas.
• Roles in the room. Besides the participants there is a workshop, or group modelling, support team, which varies in size from two to five. The team members take on the following roles. Whilst these roles are distinct and essential, more than one role may have to be filled by an individual when the size of the support team is constrained.
• Facilitator/elicitor. Functioning as group facilitator and knowledge elicitor, this person pays constant attention to group process, the roles of individuals in the group, and the business of drawing out knowledge and insights from the group. This role is the most visible of the five roles as the facilitator constantly works with the group to further the model-building effort.
• Modeller/reflector. This person focuses on the model that is being explicitly (and sometimes implicitly) formulated by the facilitator and the group rather than on group processes. The modeller/reflector serves both the facilitator and the group. He thinks and sketches independently, reflects information back to the group, restructures formulations, exposes unstated assumptions that need to be explicit, and in general serves to crystallise important aspects of structure and behaviour.
• Process coach. This person focuses not at all on content but rather on the dynamics of individuals and subgroups within the group. The process coach tends to serve the facilitator; his efforts being largely invisible to the client group. This person may also be the facilitator /elicitor when a small facilitation team is used.
• Recorder. Writing down or sketching the important parts of the group proceedings is the task of this person. Together with the notes of the modeller/reflector and the transparencies or the notes of the facilitator, the notes and drawings made by the recorder should allow a reconstruction of the thinking of the group. This person must be experienced enough as a modeller to know what to record and what to ignore. This person may also be the modeller/reflector when a small facilitation team is used.
• Access coordinator. This role is filled by a person within, or related to, the client group who carries internal responsibility for the project, usually initiates it, helps frame the problem, identifies appropriate participants, works to help structure the workshop sessions. Access coordinator is an advocate in two directions: within the client organisation he or she speaks for the group modelling process, and within the modelling support team he or she speaks for the client group and the problem. The position held by the access coordinator in the client organisation can significantly influence the process and the results.
• Types of group task structure. The process involves working through alternating divergent and convergent activities, that is, an initial search for ideas and data followed by a narrowing of focus or distillation of the data. It is necessary to work through several cycles of divergent and convergent thinking. In Creative Problem Solving (CPS), VanGundy (1992: 17) suggests that as many as six cycles might be used, although this number is not always needed. The whole group moves rapidly and often from individual work to subgroup work to plenary-group work. Tasks can vary from divergent (brainstorming) tasks to ranking and evaluating tasks, to integrative or design-oriented tasks. Selecting sequence of elicitation exercises that yield fruitful focused, and maturing group discussions is the challenge.
• Divergent tasks. Divergent thinking tasks, such as getting as many ideas as possible out on the table, are best supported by nominal group techniques. One group, or a number of small groups, generate lists of ideas or concepts. A nominal group is formed even though members are not physically removed from the sub-groups. This is done by eliciting ideas from each subgroup in turn. A nominated person is asked to contribute only one idea at a time on behalf of the group, presumably their best remaining one, to the growing list of plenary group ideas. They then go around the plenary group as necessary to allow all the emergent ideas to be exploited. Experience from the author’s research and consulting is that such a nominal group approach:
• is more effective in divergent thinking tasks than inviting the entire group to be involved in a brainstorming workshop;
• avoids the tendency of a group to anchor its thinking on the first several ideas, concepts, or items put forward; and
• enables each sub-group to contribute and comment before any subgroup gets a chance to dominate.
• Convergent tasks. Once ideas have been elicited by the divergent thinking task, such as brainstorming, and ranked in order of importance, convergent thinking commences. Products of the various iterations, earliest to latest, at the convergence stage, include:
• Choices regarding level of aggregation at which to work. This choice naturally follows a process of selecting which concepts to include or exclude. From that point it is a matter of working consistently at the same level.
• In Soft Systems Methodology (Checkland, 1993), a conceptual model is created to represent the human activity system of interest. This becomes the formal systems model. Once developed it is used as the basis for all subsequent analysis. The concepts contained in the model are specified according to convention to form a root definition, which is a concise, tight specification of the system under study. A well-formulated root definition will make explicit six crucial characteristics encapsulated by the mnemonic CATWOE:
• Customer —beneficiary or victim of the system’s activity.
• Actor —a person who carries out one or more of the activities in the system.
• Transformation process —the core transformation process of a human activity system is expressed as the conversion of some input to some output.
• Weltanschauung —the (unquestioned) image or model of the world, which makes this particular human activity system (with its particular transformation process) a meaningful one to consider.
• Owner —the person or persons who could modify or demolish the system.
• Environmental constraints —impositions which the system takes as given.

A completely general root definition embodying CATWOE might take the following form: A (… O …)-owned system which, under the following environmental constraints which it takes as given: (… E …), transforms this input (…) into this output (…) by means of the following major activities among others: (… … …), the transformation being carried out by these actors (… A …) and directly affecting the following beneficiaries and/or victims (… C …). The world-image which makes the transformation meaningful contains at least the following elements among others: (… W …). Identification of the six crucial CATWOE characteristics, which should be included in a well-formulated Soft Systems Modelling root definition, if Soft Systems Modelling is being used. Use of Soft Systems Modelling does not preclude the use of other systems thinking techniques at other stages in the process.

• A rich picture of the problem situation, if Soft Systems Modelling is being used. See Figure 6-1.
• Concept maps produced by each subgroup.
• Concept maps produced by the plenary group.
• Identification and specification of the boundaries to the problem space and solution space.
• Causal loop diagrams, following the conventions described by Sterman (2000) or influence diagrams, following the conventions used by Coyle (1996: 18), are used for the analysis of hypotheses about the dynamics in operation. See Section 6.9 onwards.
• Ranking and evaluation. Ranking and evaluation of important ideas, see c. (2) above, can be accomplished by simple voting procedure in situations where little disagreement is expected. However, it may be necessary for the facilitator /elicitor to draw out from the group the objectives of the workshop and criteria for ranking and evaluation and stress these before further discussion and voting take place.
• Presentations. At key points the modeller /reflector provides structured reflections back to the group. This becomes increasingly important with the development of complex feedback models.