Interesting insights from Philippe Coullomb, Transformation Designer & Group Genius Facilitator of Openfield.
Our role as facilitators is to create a favourable environment to enable everyone to be at their best and to bring out the most pertinent solutions. We are like gardeners who create the conditions for plants and trees to grow.
You call upon several skills other than facilitation for your assignments. What are they?
On my projects, principally I call upon 4 professions: facilitator, coach, consultant and, from time to time, event specialists. Facilitators often straddle one of the other three professions: facilitator coach, facilitator consultant or facilitator master of ceremonies. In all cases, they are experts in their field, with an awareness of collective intelligence trends and codes.
Of course, we don’t call upon the entire skillset for every single project, but there is always a coaching dimension, more or less explicit. We become very close to our customers, helping them to position themselves and to think in depth about their organisations and the ways in which they interact. The coaching aspect is fundamental to the transformation process.
What’s the advantage of using a specific coach?
It opens up a second line of dialogue. An alternative channel for discussion that’s less concerned with business and organisational management, and more focused on the relationships between people and their experiences. When a coach is involved, the human element is at the heart of the matter.
When do you involve a consultant?
I call upon consultancy skills when the business issues are central and complex: strategy, governance, structure, culture, systems, etc. I used to be a consultant myself, so I sometimes swap my facilitator’s hat for a consultant’s when I see that a change of attitude can help the group’s thinking, but that’s quite rare.
Sometimes you call upon event experts: how do you work together?
We’re experts in events, but not events that are devoid of content, just “for the fun of it”. Balancing the focus on experience and content to design and facilitate sessions that are productive, useful and engaging, is our specialty.
On the other hand, it’s not uncommon in major transformations for some sessions to bring together several hundred or even thousands of people. In such cases, we rely on production companies to do the “heavy lifting” for the event, so that we can concentrate on the fine work of consulting and experience design.
Do the teams work collaboratively on everything?
No, not everything can be done collaboratively. A value creation process alternates between intense and less intense moments, synchronous and asynchronous. If we are to perform at our best in collective high points, we all need less intense moments to reflect and produce work individually. It’s the balance between the two that makes the most of everyone’s individual expertise and the collective intelligence of the group.
Our challenge is to design a “suite” of sequences that values the power of collaboration without going overboard.
And how do you balance these intense and less intense moments?
You have to alternate them throughout the transformation process. The high points of collaboration can be particularly intense, and sometimes exhausting. In fact, I never recommend more than three major sessions a year.
These times should be reserved for taking the most structuring decisions and dealing with the most complex issues. Around this, we can imagine a multitude of ways of working, ranging from the individual to large-scale collective action, but always with the intention of transforming and creating value. We try to organise an approach that optimises the process. In particular, we try to be more efficient when it comes to phases that can be time-consuming if they are badly designed, such as validation, for example.
How do you optimise the validation process you’re talking about?
That’s a huge subject! The first challenge is to identify all the parties involved in the decision-making process. Who has authority on the subject? Who has substantive expertise or first-hand experience? Who will have to live with the consequences of the decision? And so on. Then there’s the question of the management’s position. Do they want to participate in the decision making process upstream of the structuring points and then trust their teams to implement the implications, or do they want to act as censors at the end of the process once the work is well advanced? The risks of this second option are clear if all or some of the proposed options are rejected.
Decisions have to be designed, just like a product, a service, a process or an information system.
Our role as facilitators is to create a favourable environment to enable everyone to be at their best and to bring out the most pertinent solutions. We are like gardeners who create the conditions for plants and trees to grow. The gardener is less concerned with the plant than with the context in which it grows.
Need a bilingual professional facilitator for your collaborative workshops? Let’s connect ! kasha@leapfrog.paris