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White Papers
The Role of Manager as Facilitator: Southern California Edison's
(SCE) Experience Using the IBIS Method
Reprinted with permission from The Facilitator Newsletter
Issue 5 September 1994
by Pat Freeman
Imagine our surprise as Lansing Bicknell, instructor, consultant,
and expert facilitator told us "You don't need me -- you
can do this yourselves." We were sitting in Creating Collaborative
Meetings (CCM) - the Issue Based Information Systems (IBIS)
Methods Class held by Corporate Memory Systems, Inc. (CMSI)
(see note*). We didn't believe we could facilitate our own meetings
or that this high priced consultant could possibly mean what
he was saying.
That was last October. Today, throughout I/T and a number of
its client organizations in SCE, upper and middle managers are
actively engaged in bringing better productivity to their meetings
in the role of manager as facilitator using the IBIS method.
It all began last May when the head of I/T asked Jan Halliwell
(head of Communication Planning) to clear her calendar for a
week to work with a couple of guys from Austin on one of the
wicked problems facing SCE today. The head of I/T had heard
about a software product being used in Environmental Affairs
to map and track conversations thus providing a corporate memory
of the decision making process. He decided to try it. The software
product, QuestMap, was developed by CMSI to support the IBIS
method -- it provides an unlimited whiteboard for conversation
mapping.
Reluctantly, and with some aggravation at the impact of her
schedule, Jan agreed to meet with Lansing Bicknell and Jeff
Conklin of CMSI. Jeff and Lansing had little idea why they had
been summoned by SCE. It was with this lack of clear understanding
that day one of the week long IBIS facilitation began.
Very quickly, the facilitators were immersed in SCE culture.
People came and left the room at irregular intervals, either
for scheduled or unplanned interruptions. Key outside stakeholders
from the regulatory agencies were scheduled on different days.
For other methodologies, the scene might have been a facilitators
nightmare, but not for IBIS:
- The process captures open conversations in a shared display
using a model to capture pros and cons within the context
of the conversation.
- Since argumentation is captured, there is no pressure to
come to agreement before something is written down.
- Potentially, valuable thoughts are not lost, and people
have the experience of being heard.
- Using this method, it is possible for people to leave and
return and quickly come up to speed with where the conversation
has gone in their absence.
By the end of the week, Jan, Jeff and Lansing had pulled together
an incredible amount of information -- and Jan booked her flight
to Austin to take the IBIS facilitator training herself.
On her return, Jan booked CCM classes for all of her direct
reports and thus began SCE's IBIS experience. Jan never intended
to turn her managers into facilitators, but wanted to provide
opportunities to develop personal communication skills of her
subordinates and her clients. She saw an immediate value of
the class for improving her managers' ability to collaborate
and make better cases.
The initial reaction of most of the mangers was that what they
learned was somehow freeing in that it gave them a different
relationship with the process surrounding decision making. They
also believe they would most certainly never use it as facilitators
themselves. Then Roxanne Cox-Drake and Glenn Collins took the
class. It didn't take them long to realize that they had a powerful
tool at their fingertips.
Glenn's experience went something like this. He immediately
scheduled a CCM class for his managers and some of the key clients
with whom they worked, as well as purchasing CMSI facilitation
services for some hot topics on his plate. He began to build
a foundation for collaboration which had never existed across
some of the independent department units.
Then a couple of months went by.
After a particularly exasperating meeting that went well into
the evening hours, Glenn jotted down some major issues on which
the group could not agree. The next day, when they met, out
of sheer exasperation, he began to use IBIS to tackle the issues
he'd written down. The entire tenor of the meeting changed,
and the group was able to make decisions on a number of issues
-- all the while marveling about the change that had come over
Glenn.
Roxanne's experience was different. Initially she purchased
CMSI services, and after a week's session, she switched to IBIS
facilitation available in-house from SCE. Over time she integrated
the IBIS skills and QuestMap into regular mode of communication
in her project area. QuestMap is used for documentation to maintain
an ongoing corporate memory of the very complex information
she pulled together. Today Roxanne continues to return to the
corporate memory of prior conversations moving forward as changing
times demand. She facilitates in IBIS and has sent many of her
direct reports to the CCM class, which has produced more IBIS
facilitators. When a major project surfaces touching all departments
with a very wicked issue on which SCE had no choice but to collaborate,
there is Roxanne, armed with IBIS, reducing complex problems,
fraught with turf and technicalities, to manageable chunks.
Each chunk was a conversation able to answer questions which,
once resolved, moved the project forward to the next level.
In amazement, others have followed suit.
What we've learned through our IBIS experience is that we can
communicate with each other to solve our problems without the
help of outside facilitators. Whether for Strategic Planning
and Staff Development as Jan uses it, or Conflict Management
as Glenn uses it, or Cross Departmental Collaboration as Roxanne
uses it, IBIS is easy and it works. We may continue to use the
services of CMSI, but as co-creators, not in a dependency relationship.
Lansing was right, we don't need him.
There is an illustration in Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline
which shows a casual loop diagram on the negative effect of
an organization continually relying on outside help for problem
solving. This type of behavior is cited as an example of a long
term erosive process which utlimately continues to bring corporations
to their knees. Organizations need to learn to solve their problems
themselves. An increaingly growing group of SCE's managers,
is doing just that -- in the role of manager as facilititor
using the IBIS method.
As an IS Specialist at SCE, I facilate and support IBIS/QuestMap
and am dedicated to nuturing a growning sense of community in
the office. IBIS is a strong tool for bringing SCE closer to
that end.
[*Note: Corporate Memory Systems, Inc. initially developed Questmap
and IBIS. Jeff Conklin, the principal developer of this software
and founder of CMSI, has since moved to Washington, DC, where
he has joined Group Decision Support Systems]
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