Facilitation – Page 2 – Integration and Implementation Insights

Stakeholder engagement primer: 7. Listening and dialogue

December 21, 2021November 25, 2021

By Gabriele Bammer

primer_stakeholder-engagement_7

What skills should every researcher involved in stakeholder engagement seek to cultivate? What key tools for engaging stakeholders should they be familiar with?

In the next two blog posts, I present key skills and tools that are essential for engaging with stakeholders. Understanding these skills can help teams decide who would be best among their members to be responsible for stakeholder engagement. Those involved in stakeholder engagement can also work to strengthen these skills to underpin other useful methods such as surveys, interviews, focus groups and participatory modelling.

This blog post presents skills involved in listening and dialogue. The next presents tools for generating ideas and reaching agreement.

Listening to understand

Developing facilitation capacities in graduate students

November 9, 2021

By Gemma Jiang and Robert Hacku

authors_gemma-jiang_robert-hacku — 1. Gemma Jiang (biography)
2. Robert Hacku (biography)

What does it take for graduate students to become good at facilitation? What skills do they need to learn and how can such skills best be imparted?

A facilitator is someone trained in the skill of shaping group dynamics and collective conversations. In cross-disciplinary research, thoughtful facilitation is necessary to enable effective interaction across disciplines and sectors.

We describe an apprentice facilitator program developed in a cross-disciplinary research team comprised of nine faculty and 15 graduate students from four academic institutes, representing six disciplines.

Five apprentices were selected from the graduate students on the team. The program was one semester long and took on average one hour per week.

A framework for identifying diversity in epistemic communities, linguistic variety and culture

August 3, 2023November 2, 2021

By Varvara Nikulina, Johan Larson Lindal, Henrikke Baumann, David Simon, and Henrik Ny

authors_varvara-nikulina_johan-larson-lindal_henrikke-baumann_david-simon_henrik-n — 1. Varvara Nikulina; 2. Johan Larson Lindal; 3. Henrikke Baumann; 4. David Simon; 5. Henrik Ny (biographies)

How can facilitators take into account diversity stemming from epistemic communities, linguistic variety and culture when leading workshops aimed at co-production in transdisciplinary research?

Although facilitators are skilled in mitigating conflicting interests and ideas among participants, they are often poorly prepared for dealing with these other types of diversity.

We have developed a framework that allows diversity in epistemic standpoint, linguistic diversity and culture to be mapped in a workshop setting. This is illustrated in the figure below and each box in the framework is described next.

Epistemic standpoint

Epistemic communities or thought collectives are groups with shared and agreed forms of knowledge, thought styles or rationalities, and world views. These often differ from or even conflict with those of other groups. For example, engineers, social scientists, public servants and entrepreneurs are four different epistemic communities.

How informal discussion groups can maintain long-term momentum

August 3, 2023October 26, 2021

By Kitty Wooley

What does it take to motivate competent professionals to show up for mission-focused conversation on their own time? What is the result? How can interaction, knowledge exchange, and knowledge transfer be achieved when some participants are meeting for the first time – especially if they’re coming from different kinds of organizations and hierarchical levels?

In this blog post, I describe the experience of Senior Fellows and Friends, a group meeting for conversational events that has kept its momentum for 17 years, over 91 meetings, and become an organic engine of opportunity for new and midcareer leaders. The group started with an informal dinner discussion for recent graduates of the Excellence in Government Fellows Program in Washington, DC, USA.

The sub-headings that follow draw on a systems thinking article by Stephen Haines (1972) that reanimates the 12 Natural Laws of Living Systems framework.

Six lessons for implementing technological change in developing country communities

June 23, 2023September 7, 2021

By Jonathan Ensor, Daniel Vorbach, Steven Johnson and James Moir

authors_jonathan-ensor_daniel-vorbach_steven-johnson_james-moir — 1. Jonathan Ensor (biography)
2. Daniel Vorbach (biography)
3. Steven Johnson (biography)
4. James Moir (biography)

How does the provision of new technology, infrastructure or community institutions interact with the social setting, especially at the village community level in developing countries? How does this interaction determine the sorts of changes that are experienced? Given this interconnection between the technical and social worlds, what are the implications for the design and implementation of interventions? And what does this more holistic perspective suggest that implementing agencies should be considering and advocating for alongside their on-the-ground activities?

Three lessons for project design and implementation

1. Design the interventions with the village community

Any technological change, such as the introduction of new infrastructure or technologies, will have an impact that emerges from the interaction between that technology and the social, cultural and institutional systems in the community.

Gradients of agreement for democratic decision-making

August 3, 2023May 25, 2021

By Hannah Love

How does your team make decisions? Do you vote? Does the loudest voice usually win? Does everyone on the team generally feel heard? Does your team have a charter to provide guidance? Or maybe there is often just silence and the team assumes agreement?

The next time your team makes a decision, here is something new you can try! Kaner (2014) proposes using a gradients of agreement scale. The gradients of agreement, also known as the consensus spectrum, provides an alternative to yes/no decision-making by allowing everyone to mark their response along a continuum, as shown in the figure below.

What are the gradients of agreement and the benefits of using them?

This is a tool to support democratic decision-making. The gradients of agreement has a scale with numbers (1-8) and short descriptions.

Six ways facilitation skills can improve cross-disciplinary team leadership

October 25, 2023April 20, 2021

By Manal Affara

An Arabic version of this post is available.

author_manal-affara — Manal Affara (biography)

What facilitation skills are useful for leading teams in cross-disciplinary projects?

Facilitation and leadership are usually considered to involve different skills, but in a recent article Carrie Addington (2020) examined how facilitation skills can improve leadership. I take this one step further to examine how facilitation skills can improve leadership of cross-disciplinary projects.

Collaboration is central to cross-disciplinary research, requiring facilitation to engage partners, unlock their potential, organize the project, and encourage continuous learning, as well as applying insights from that learning.

Addington argues that facilitators have the ability to:

Six lessons from students about transdisciplinary learning

August 3, 2023October 6, 2020

By Irina Dallo, Jan Freihardt and Juanita von Rothkirch

mosaic-image_dallo_freihart_von-rothkirch — 1. Irina Dallo (biography)
2. Jan Freihardt (biography)
3. Juanita von Rothkirch (biography)

What is an effective way of providing students with practical experience in stakeholder engagement? How can students learn to communicate and engage with community members on a transdisciplinary project, as well as how to create a space for those community members to reflect on their daily lives through interactions and discussions with the student outsiders? What makes it possible for students to broaden their horizons and to acquire new competences and skills?

We present our reflections on how the Winter School 2020 “Science meets Practice” run by ETH Zürich successfully contributed to our transdisciplinary learning process. We suggest there are six key lessons for those who want to design a successful course.

Lesson 1: A diverse and motivated group

A key element in fostering the transdisciplinary learning process was the diversity of the participant cohort.

Scaffolding transdisciplinary contributions

May 17, 2023September 1, 2020

By Roderick Lawrence

author-roderick-lawrence — Roderick Lawrence (biography)

What do we mean by “scaffolding” and how is it used in transdisciplinary research?

Scaffolding is a metaphor transferred from building construction and used in pedagogy and teaching methods since the 1970s to assist learning processes. This metaphor has also been applied to multi-stakeholder processes that require collective decision making about complex societal challenges including conflictual situations. In this context scaffolding is used in deliberative processes, identifying those constituents that require facilitation, and selecting the appropriate methods and tools to achieve desired outcomes.

Scaffolding is increasingly recognized as necessary to assist bridge building between people, especially in transdisciplinary research and project implementation about complex situations and persistent problems that have no simple solutions.

Collaboration: From groan zone to growth zone

August 11, 2023May 28, 2019

By Carrie Kappel

What is the groan zone in collaboration? What can you do when you reach that point?

As researchers and practitioners engaged in transdisciplinary problem-solving, we know the value of diverse perspectives. We also know how common it is for groups to run into challenges when trying to learn from diverse ideas and come to consensus on creative solutions.

This challenging, often uncomfortable space, is called the groan zone. The term comes from Sam Kaner’s diamond model of participation shown in the figure below. After an initial period of divergent thinking, where diverse ideas are introduced, groups have to organize that information, focus on what’s most important, and make decisions in order to move forward into the phase of convergent thinking.

Navigating that transition between divergent and convergent thinking is the realm in which creativity and innovation emerge, if we let them.

Improving mutual consultation among key stakeholders to optimize the use of research evidence

August 24, 2022June 15, 2017

By Allison Metz

Processes to support the uptake of research evidence call for each of the key stakeholders to consider the challenges faced by other key stakeholders in making good use of research evidence. When stakeholders have the opportunity to consider perspectives other than their own, they will generally have a broader understanding of the problem space, and, in turn a greater commitment to co-creating prototypes for improving research translation.

Let’s consider a real world example in New York City’s public child welfare system.

Research team performance

December 28, 2021January 17, 2017

By Jennifer E. Cross and Hannah Love

jennifer-cross — Jennifer E. Cross (biography)

How can we improve the creativity and performance of research teams?

Recent studies on team performance have pointed out that the performance and creativity of teams has more to do with the social processes of interaction on teams, than on individual personality traits. Research on creativity and innovation in teams has found that there are three key predictors of team success:

group membership,
rules of engagement, and
patterns of interaction.

Each of these three predictors can be influenced in order to improve the performance of teams, as the following examples show.