Newsletter
May 2004
Spotlight: Exploring the “Whole Elephant”, Finding Common Ground
He is a major mover in organization development and, we are proud to say, a Queen's IRC faculty member. Marvin Weisbord is also author of the seminal books Productive Workplaces and Future Search: An Action Guide to Finding Common Ground in Organizations and Communities (co-authored with Sandra Janoff). Recently we talked to Marvin about the “future search” planning process, its applications in organizations, and how it helped Ikea and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration make massive and rapid transformations....more
This Issue:
Research call: IRC launches a research initiative relating to high performance professional teams....more
Negotiating faux pas: Linda McKenna on the most maddening missteps that derail a collective bargaining session...more
Alumni in action: How Stacey Dow decides when to be a “doctor” and when to be a “paramedic.”...more
Mr. Banana to the rescue : A simulated bargaining game gets a surprise intervention....more
Winners: We have the prizes that folks want to win....more
Future search in the present tense: OD guru Marvin Weisbord tells how to discover common ground in organizations large and small....more
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Sept. 21 - 26, Kingston
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Building Smart Teams
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New Queen's IRC Research Initiative
The Industrial Relations Centre is pleased to issue a Call for Research Papers on the topic of high performance professional teams. We are inviting all researchers who currently have a faculty appointment at Queen's University to submit a proposal for a research paper that is to be presented at a symposium in October, 2005. Three grants of $5,000 each are available to help fund work on the paper. The deadline for submission of a research proposal is May 31, 2004.
For information on this call for research papers, go to: www.IndustrialRelationsCentre.com/research/call2004.htm
You Know You're Headed for a Rocky Negotiating Session When...
A key member of the Queen's IRC training team, Linda McKenna is a management consultant who works primarily with Fortune 50 firms in building capability in the areas of negotiations, shared service models, senior executive alignment, and workplace change. Linda has been on the hot seat in many challenging labour negotiations and is also on faculty of our Industrial Relations and Negotiating Skills programs. According to her, any one factor on the following list will send a bargaining session into the red zone.
Top 10 Obstacles to a Negotiated Agreement
- Missing key participants
- Unclear or undeveloped mandates
- Hidden agendas
- Inadequate analysis and preparation
- Inadequate disclosure
- Incredible or indefensible position
- Failure to build momentum
- Intense mistrust between parties
- Need to save face
- Failure to establish “time” pressure points to facilitate closure
Alumni in Action: Stacey Dow on OD tools
Stacey Dow, Organizational Development Manager at Goodrich Landing Gear in Oakville, Ontario, discusses what she has taken away from the Queen's IRC OD Foundations program:
“There were a few ‘a-ha' moments I had during the session in which things really came together. Among them was the medical model, which talked about the parallel between medical roles - for example, doctor versus paramedic - and our roles as OD practitioners. The question of whether or not any given issue is one of survival or longer-term strategic improvement really helps you gauge your intervention. If it is a critical issue, then the OD intervention needs to be driven by the OD expert and it needs to be now; if it is not a critical issue, then more time can be spent on strategy development, and the OD expert's role is more of a guider toward solutions than it is a prescriber of solutions.
“As well, the power of the future state visioning process really stayed with me. It helps to counter the reality that managers can be so focused on dealing with today, they allow themselves to be constrained by that. Too often when a good idea is put on the table, the next word is, ‘But....' If you use the future state visioning process, you are not constrained by current conditions and the options and potential for improvement are endless.”
For These Negotiators, It Ain't Over ‘til the Banana Has Eyes
 Last month, Neil Lenihan, Human Resources Manager with the LCBO in Whitby, Ontario, took part in a fruitful Queen's IRC Negotiation Skills seminar in Kingston. Read on for his account of how a banana became a deal-making prop during management/union strategic bargaining exercises.
“On the first Monday of the course, I picked up a banana during one of the breaks and left it on the table, planning on eating it later. When I got to the room on Tuesday morning the banana was still there. It was during one of the first management/union exercises when the union came to our table that the banana first drew some attention. The union team members asked, ‘What's with the banana?' At this point nothing was going on with it as I still planned on eating it.
“After they left I created a ‘collar' using Post-it notes, and put it around the banana. I then drew ‘ears' on either side of the banana. The next time that the union came to our table they noticed the ears on the banana and asked why this was. My teammates and I responded that the banana is ‘listening intently to all that is going on around it.' The union asked, ‘What about the rest of its face?' We responded, ‘That all depends on how things go with the negotiations.'
“When we moved into our separate rooms, the banana came with us and took pride of place on the negotiation table (it sat in a glass on the table and looked over the proceedings). Over the course of the next couple of days, it drew attention from the union each time they came into our room. As we moved forward with our negotiations, it developed eyes - but only when it could ‘see that we as a group were moving in the right direction.' It grew a nose when it was able to ‘smell that a deal was close at hand.' At the end, once we had reached our agreement, a ‘huge smile' was drawn on.' And that, basically, is the story of the banana.”
We Have Our Winners
Congratulations to Deb Thivie who won a copy of Design for Community: The art of connecting real people in virtual places in April's e-newsletter contest.
Spotlight: Exploring the “Whole Elephant”, Finding Common Ground
He is a major mover in organization development and, we are proud to say, a Queen's IRC faculty member. Marvin Weisbord is also author of the seminal books Productive Workplaces and Future Search: An Action Guide to Finding Common Ground in Organizations and Communities (co-authored with Sandra Janoff). A “ future search” is a planning meeting that helps people quickly transform their capabilities into actions, bringing together those with resources, expertise, formal authority, and need. Through two-and-a-half days of dialogue, they discover their common ground and make concrete action plans.
Recently we talked to Marvin about the “future search” planning process, its applications in organizations, how it helped Ikea and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration make massive and rapid transformations. and how managers, policymakers, and consultants can get involved in the international Future Search Network.
What is the overall goal of future search?
It is a way of putting control of the system in the hands of people who have the biggest stake in it. We think of future search as a way to help the system to transform its capability for action. When a future search is successful, people can do things on Monday morning they considered impossible on Friday. People empower themselves when they get the opportunity to do things they've always wanted to, but haven't had the chance.
What are the principles underlying future search?
There are four key principles, which are backed up by years and years of research and experience.
The first is to get the whole system in the room. By “whole system” we mean people with authority, with information, with resources, with expertise, and with need. Get the people with these qualities who are interdependent all in the one place at one time to dialogue with one another.
Number two is to have everyone explore together what we call “the whole elephant” – that's a reference to the old Sufi story of the blind men and the elephant. Each one has a piece of the puzzle. Collectively, they have the whole puzzle. But no one of them can see the whole thing. So when you have the whole system in the room, you then have the potential to get the whole picture that no one person can assemble. We spend a lot of time in future search doing that before we try to figure out what to do. We are trying to get everybody talking about the same world, and that's a world that includes all of their perceptions, and all of their experiences.
The third future search principle is to focus on the future and the common ground rather than the problem list or the conflicts. This means to put conflicts and problems into the background and to treat them as information, rather than action agenda items. So nothing is swept under the rug and nothing is considered irrelevant. But the emphasis is on discovering where people are already together and what it is they want to do.
The fourth principle is to have people take responsibility for managing themselves and their perceptions and decisions and action planning. In other words, we strongly invite the participants to be responsible rather than have facilitators take charge of what happens. In future search, the facilitators don't organize or analyze information for participants. Participants already know how to do that, but don't always know that they know.
What are the applications for future search in the workplace?
There are three things you can get out of a future search. One is a shared understanding of where everyone is together, and what it is that everyone in the room wants – that is, the common ground. The second is an action plan. The third is an implementation strategy. You can get all or any of these depending upon your objectives.
In the workplace situation, future search is a very good umbrella for strategic planning of any kind because you not only get a plan, but you get immediate action steps. You have the beginnings of the implementation folded into the meeting, and because all the people are there, you have commitment at all levels where you need commitment – you don't have to go and sell it to anybody. And that's a big advantage.
In the last year or so we used future search twice at Ikea to do a complete redesign of global systems, worldwide systems involving thousands of people and products. We made quite a heady discovery. It is rather contradictory to socio-technical thinking and theory, but if you can get the whole system in the room – which means bringing the whole environment together, the organization's suppliers, customers, etc. – and you have all the people with authority there, you can rethink the whole system and start down a whole new track in 18-20 hours.
(For more information see “The Ikea Story” at http://www.futuresearch.net/method/applications/sectors.cfm?sid=1)
At the Federal Aviation Administration not so many weeks ago, we had people looking at the whole air traffic control system of the United States and making decisions about how to manage that system in a whole new way. Some have already been implemented. This is a new insight for me: there is a simple, fast way to redesign work systems in cases where nobody really has their arms around the whole thing, and change is happening too fast to “study” it.
Is future search best for large applications, or can it work for departments or smaller work groups?
It has been very effective for departmental issues and problems when the department sponsors of the conference invite interdependent people from surrounding organizations – up, down, and sideways. This is because in order to change a work system – and this isn't always obvious – it has to change its relations with the larger system of which it is a part. So if the department's members only meet with one another on their internal problems, they can't really change their system because it is always subject to the policies, procedures and relationships it is embedded in. Unless the department can influence those other relationships, it can't get significant change in its own work structures. That's why team-building tends to drive people deeper into their relationships with each other. It doesn't give them much leverage on the whole organization.
What you discover when you do this kind of work is that the significant problems are always outside the boundaries of the organization, and even a lot of interpersonal conflicts can be traced to the structural elements outside the unit that the people don't have much leverage over. Where there is a personal clash it is always an exacerbated by structural issues, meaning who is allowed to do what, the policy by which you are operating, the norms, etc. A lot of times people will personalize goal conflict. In future search, we try to legitimize all of the various objectives and goals that people have. This means putting conflicts and problems into the background and treating them as information. We try to get people to accept their differences as natural and inevitable and something to be lived with, rather than a problem to be solved by one party or another changing his or her mind, personality, or leadership style.
For more information on future search, go to: http://www.futuresearch.net
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