Our assignment seemed simple: we had 24 hours to divide ourselves into 5 groups of 6 people each. The groups would be persistent for the next two years and would need to do important work together, so the stakes were high. The only constraint was that we could not assign them randomly.
What unfolded in that 24-hour period, and the days spent debriefing it, shed light on group dynamics in a way that can only be learned through first-hand experience. And as our instructor continued to remind us, “you can’t outrun group dynamics.”
We were in our second of six 10-day intensives for the Pepperdine Graziadio Business School Masters in Organization Development (MSOD) program. And (as most group before us) we had tried our best to outrun the uncomfortable tensions that lay below the surface of an otherwise positive group dynamic. One of my key lessons from this exercise was to surface tensions early because the longer you wait, the greater the tensions become and the harder it gets to address them.
Two years later, I was facilitating a senior leadership team and it hit me like a ton of bricks: “this team is experiencing the group formation exercise!” There were underlying tensions that I had discussed with team members individually, but they remained unacknowledged in the group as a whole and were holding them back as a team. That night at dinner I tested the idea with a few people of broaching the undiscussable and was met with cautious optimism. So, in the morning after a warm-up, each individual wrote some reflections on the prompt “What needs to be discussed by this team that is not being raised?” Then people went into trios and had dialogue around a few sensitive topics that needed to be aired out. Coming back into the main room, there was a palpable feeling that some tension had been released. Rather than debriefing the content of the discussions, we talked about how the discussions had felt to have, and how people were feeling now (taking a page from Patricia Shaw’s ideas about dialogic OD). This group of leaders was now starting to have real dialogue about what mattered to them – a critical element of team-building and organization change.
MSOD References:
- Community, Block, 2008
- Groups in Context, edited by Gillette and McCollom, 1995
- Changing Conversations in Organizations, Shaw, 2002
- Paradoxes of Group Life, Smith & Berg, 1987
Link to some excellent videos by Peter Block that illustrate his “6 Conversations” method.