Facilitating Collective Intelligence

A Handbook for Trainers, Coaches, Consultants and Leaders

Chantal Nève-Hanquet, Agathe Crespel, Kathleen Llanwarne

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429559525
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Psychologie
• Sous-sujet: Industrie- & Organisationspsychologie

Chantal Nève-Hanquet and Agathe Crespel provide an accessible and ground-breaking guide to genuinely effective group work, sharing excellent hands-on assistance for coaches and facilitators. Offering a unique selection of guidelines and illustrations for group work, the authors demonstrate the benefits of using creative action methods in practice, helping leaders discover new ways to achieve dynamic group sessions and endowing their work with new vigour, as well as pleasure.

Facilitating Collective Intelligence brings together a wealth of knowledge and techniques from psychodrama, Jungian and systemic analysis to inform group facilitation. Throughout the book's four parts, key inner attitudes, questions and action techniques are explored to help facilitators nourish open and flexible forms of communication within groups, stimulate collective intelligence and foster creative approaches to collective problem-solving. With the help of numerous sensitively related case studies, the book guides the reader through the process of achieving more dynamism in group work, fostering creativity, encouraging agility and developing co-construction within groups. It contains more than thirty practical reference sheets which provide an instant aid for implementing the methods and models in the book. Nève-Hanquet and Crespel's approach advocates the use of actions methods, specifically the ARC model, to encourage 'out of the box' thinking and develop new paths and strategies in working with teams and organizations.

Facilitating Collective Intelligence is an invaluable and essential tool in cultivating effective group dynamics for all coaches, coach supervisors and consultants, both experienced and in training. Due to its clear and practical structure, it will also be useful for counsellors, coaching psychologists and other professionals who work with groups, as well as students and academics of coaching and coaching psychology.

Part 1

Key inner attitudes to facilitate communication

An openness combined with a developed inner sense of the other person’s reality is required in every professional situation that entails work with others in pursuit of a common aim

What kind of context will foster osmosis within the group, favouring an alchemy in which the group takes on an identity of its own such that it becomes more than the sum of the individuals forming it? What is it that enables one group to ‘gel’ while another does not? How can we work towards an inner process of openness to others, of a sense of the collective, of empathy, of solidarity in professional contexts where such qualities will enable the group to be imbued with a special kind of purpose and strength?

The approach via the neurosciences – and, specifically, some of the recent research considering the applicability of ‘mirror-neuron’ findings to the human brain and psyche – enables us to become even more aware that empathy, as well as being a psychological and deeply human disposition, is also a capability directly linked to our brain and one which, like all skills, can be stimulated and learned.

A group’s capacity to co-create is dependent on participants’ ability and preparedness to demonstrate an inner sense of another person’s reality. Such ‘empathy’ may be considered in the light of, among many other things, the discovery of mirror neurons first reported in 1995 by Giacomo Rizzolatti and his team.

What some recent scientific research may seem to suggest is that neurological processes enable us to connect information in the realm of the senses, emotions and intellect, and thus to capture ‘something’ of another person’s intention and emotion. The mirror neurons may thus enable us to put ourselves ‘in another’s place’. Unleashed by, among other things, the other person’s emotions, they are sometimes referred to as ‘empathy neurons’; and so it comes to seem that emotion may perhaps literally be labelled ‘contagious’. The developing field of neuropedagogy stresses the importance of stimulating children’s emotions and sensitivity as well as cognition and bodily movement.

Mimicking, or the act of imitating someone else, is not merely a formal – or ‘surface’ – imitation; it connects with the inner life of another person, with that person’s intentions, representations, emotions and desires. It may therefore be thanks to the mirror neurons that we can improve our ability to fine-tune our emotional and cognitive capacities, enabling us to identify the desires and intentions of the other, to understand this other person better, and to enter into relation with him or her.

Through experiments designed to foster our empathy, our brains are physiologically linked up with one another and thus, in the words of Jean Michel Oughourlian, they operate in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth mode!

To understand the other person, with all the implications in terms of psychological and neurological disposition, is to broaden one’s individual and one-sided point of view and to think more broadly.

Training for communication – the different forms of coaching, supervision, mediation and group facilitation – could refer more widely and specifically to the findings of the neurosciences, taking account of the importance of stimulating emotion and sensitivity together with cognition and bodily movement in order to create contexts that would stimulate empathy and understanding of the other.

Setting up a safe frame and stimulating cohesion within the group is a first route into fostering empathy. Simultaneously, the facilitator’s inner stance, the fact that s/he has devoted time and effort to developing a sensitively attuned personal mindset and way of being, will have effects on the group.

Figure 1 Nine key inner attitudes to facilitate communication

What inner stance or attitudes can I seek to adopt and develop?

A particular philosophy of life, or inner disposition, and the associated approaches chosen for engaging with the group will foster within oneself and in the group context new forms of presence to oneself and others. And this reflective approach – an inner stance on which it can be hard to pin a label – represents a necessary and important step in fostering collective intelligence.

The inner attitudes described next may inspire facilitators to develop new ways of engaging with the group while in each case respecting a facilitator’s personal style.

Attitude 1: becoming ‘safe for adoption’

Opening up space in oneself and inviting the other to step forward

Adopting a ‘one-down position’, becoming sensitive to the other person’s characteristics, resources, and skills, lending oneself to ‘adoption’, are ways of enabling co-construction, of incorporating resources contributed by all persons present.

How can I become ‘safe for adoption’?

To become ‘safe for adoption’ within a group setting is, for a facilitator, to show sensitivity to participants’ resources and characteristics and to seek ways of making oneself ‘adoptable’. Adjustment of one’s own stance along these lines will foster relationship in the manner in which an adoptive parent seeks to become ‘adoptable’ by the child, enabling this child to find closeness – including physical closeness – to this adoptive parent. For such closeness to become a reality requires a holistic approach, entailing much inner work in the realms of the psyche, the emotions, and the body.

What takes place in the meeting with a group is something akin to a reciprocal ‘adoption’.

The whole art of the facilitator is to adjust to the group in this way, thereby enabling this group and its members to ‘adopt’ this facilitator in the context of the topic or set of issues that they have come together to explore.

In a group setting, one way of becoming adoptable may be, for example, to focus on the abilities and specific skills of those present. The facilitator takes up a position – of the body and of the psyche – that signifies: ‘I am here to encourage and to foster a meeting, to receive what you are bringing to our gathering today’. The facilitator’s ‘adoptability’ will thus find expression through a welcoming stance and gestures: a physical posture, tone of voice, look, and manner of addressing the group.

There may be times when a facilitator takes herself in hand, momentarily placing her personal expectations or demands on hold, deciding to withhold a comment that she had thought essential. This attitude sometimes helps the group to move closer to her stance.

In this way, each facilitator can, while retaining his or her own style, seek a way of becoming more adoptable, taking account of the other, opening up a space for the other to inhabit.

Attitude 2: requesting permission

And if a person says ‘yes’, it means that a space has opened up

When we are about to ask people to open their minds to new situations or experiences and we first enquire whether they are prepared to do this, we allow each the opportunity to state where s/he stands.

Do I have your permission to propose a new experiment to you?

How?

The request for permission is an invitation to open up. It is a way of allowing each group member to say where he or she stands and to create a climate of explicit endorsement. It is a way of ‘knocking before entering’, of asking whether or not it is permissible to burst the bubble of the individual person or the group.

It may also be a precaution taken, before addressing persons and groups, with a view to respecting their own pace and rhythm. ‘Do you think you might agree to share here some aspects of professional situations that you find problematic?’ or ‘Do you think that, at this stage, you might consent to modify your usual way of operating in a team?’

In requesting permission from persons and from groups, a facilitator pauses to draw attention to the fact that ‘something is going to happen’, that change is in the air. He may, for example, address the participants by saying:

• – Could you, at this stage, consent to share the difficulties that you experience in your team?

To ask for permission is to invite groups to become receptive and prepared to contribute to building progress together with others.

The request for permission can be very useful in joint facilitation situations where two facilitators are working in tandem. It then becomes a flexible way of putting forward suggestions for procedure, while showing respect for the co-facilitator’s leadership. These adjustments can be made out loud, in front of the group, which also has much to learn from such exchanges:

• – Would you, as co-facilitator, agree if I were to propose to the group an action technique to tackle the issue that has arisen?
• – Yes, why not, but let’s perhaps wait until after the break.
• – Of course.

In this way it is possible to let the co-facilitator know that one is ready to help and accede to his wishes in a context of co-construction.

Attitude 3: noticing connections

What connections exist between you and me?

To be constantly attentive to the notion of connection, to set out from the conviction that all things are interlinked and dependent on each other, is to feed a living process. Working on what connects people to one another is to foster cohesion and co-construction.

What is it that connects you?

How?

The factor connecting people in a group is something that takes place in the interactive field and therefore belongs neither to one person present nor to another. It is built up mutually, co-constructed by those present.

Connections between the members of a group are transmitted by dimensions linked to spoken language as well as by others associated with non-verbal language. When a facilitator has developed a sensitivity to these factors of interconnection within a group or...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Daniela Simmons
• Introduction
• Part 1 Key inner attitudes to facilitate communication
• Part 2 Key questions to activate collective intelligence
• Part 3 Five key action techniques for broadening the field of possibilities
• Part 4 Thirty-three reference sheets for group facilitation
• Glossary
• Resources
• Index