Employing Differences, Episode 188: Why use small groups?

"When I started using dyads and triads and groups of four or five within larger facilitated sessions, it was a game changer for me. I saw the quality of participation, the quality of the ideas, and the decisions the groups were making change pretty dramatically."

Paul  & Karen talk about the advantages of using small groups inside large meetings.

Transcript

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[00:00:00] Paul: Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.  

[00:00:12] Karen: I'm Karen Gimnig.  

[00:00:14] Paul: And I'm Paul Tevis.  

[00:00:16] Karen: Each episode, we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, "Why use small groups?"  

[00:00:24] Paul: So on last week's episode, we talked about using the smallest of groups in group facilitation, which is to say doing solo work and individual work when we're working together in a group. 

[00:00:34] Paul: One of the things we talked about in that is the idea of sort of multiple frames within a meeting. And when you're facilitating saying, "Hey, we're not just going to have the entire group work together the entire time." That it's really useful to break into smaller groups to have groups do things and then come back together. 

[00:00:52] Paul: And Karen and I realized, well, that's kind of, I don't know, almost an article of faith for the two of us. Maybe we needed to unpack that a little bit better. Because I know for me as a facilitator, when I started using diads and triads and, you know, groups of four or five within larger facilitated sessions.  

[00:01:10] Paul: It was a game changer for me that I saw the quality of participation. I saw the quality of the ideas and the decisions the groups were making change pretty dramatically. When I started going from, "We're always just going to be in one big group together to working in smaller groups and then coming back together, within the same meeting."  

[00:01:28] Paul: And so we wanted to dig through some of that, some of our experiences with it, and why we think that works so well. And why we would like to see more groups use those as options. 

[00:01:40] Karen: Yeah, I think one of my epiphany moments about how powerful small groups could be was a day that I'd had a little bit of a hint that I was wanted to help with this meeting. But I was surprised when I was introduced as the facilitator for a four hour day. And so I just sort of pulled the thing out of my hat that I had, which was to send people off in pairs and do what I call a mirrored pair exercise where they listen to each other and it's a deep listening practice. 

[00:02:09] Karen: But this was a group that was together for the very first time. And really what was wanting to happen that day was for the group to gel as a group. And so it was kind of counterintuitive to say right off the bat, we're all going to separate into pairs. And do a one on one exercise in pairs. But I had them talk about why they were there and why that group mattered to them and what was important to them and to appreciate each other in that space. 

[00:02:32] Karen: And what happened when they came back was that the whole group was way more cohesive, way more connected. The sense of safety in the room had increased dramatically. And when I thought about it, I thought, "Well, that actually makes a lot of sense".  

[00:02:48] Karen: Because what happened in that pair exercise was that each person got really listened to, and had a sense of feeling of connection with that other partner and the mirror- and I will say, helps with that. 

[00:03:01] Karen: But I think even just the one on one and the sense that we let our defenses down a little bit and we have more time to talk to each other. It's helpful in lots of reasons and the most surprising one to me is it actually makes the whole group more cohesive.  

[00:03:15] Karen: So I wanted to start with that because at the beginning of a group, it's a really good idea to actually pair people off. 

[00:03:22] Paul: Yeah, it's actually a thing that I do pretty often for a couple of different reasons. You've told me that story before and I love it. And I don't think I'd really had the insight the first time that I'd heard from you about this, but really the idea that like, if I've been in an exercise where I've been listened to deeply by one other person, I now know when I come back to the whole group, I've got at least one connection point into the group.  

[00:03:47] Paul: Someone is going to listen to me.  

[00:03:49] Paul: Which when we first come into a group, we've never worked with before in a meeting, we don't necessarily know that. We don't have that guarantee. 

[00:03:58] Paul: And so I love the idea that just even having one or two other anchor points into a group brings us in, helps create the whole group, more cohesive. That we're knitted together even though we've just been doing stuff in pairs. And that, I've seen that borne out in a lot of other cases as well. 

[00:04:17] Paul: One of the reasons I often start a workshops or meetings or things like that with paralyzed exercises, is partly just to get people engaged. To get people going to normalize participation early on when you work in a group of two.  

[00:04:32] Paul: In theory, 50 percent of that time is available for you to say something, as opposed to when you're in a group of 20, where in theory, if we're taking turns, 5 percent of that time is available. 

[00:04:43] Paul: And so it allows me to very quickly get through, getting everybody engaged in the topic in some way and getting everyone saying something. Or writing something, or working in some way, it's one of those things where people are now in from the get go. And I find that that works way faster than doing around the room of everybody who is there. 

[00:05:04] Paul: We might follow with something like that, but I really like to get people going right away. And so that's another reason why I like to start large group things with small group activities.  

[00:05:16] Karen: Yeah, and I'll give one other application of that is if you're going to have a series of meetings, and you're wanting people to get more and more deeply connected across a series of meetings. 

[00:05:26] Karen: Very often what people do is they do that what you're talking about one big round and everybody says one thing about themselves and they learn one, you know, I learned one thing about everybody else. And then a week later, I learned one more thing about everybody else.  

[00:05:40] Karen: But if instead we spend that same 10 or 15, 20 minutes, often depending on the size of the group paired off, what's happened is "one other person and I know each other deeply". And a week later, "another person and I know each other deeply".  

[00:05:58] Karen: So it may take longer to know things about everybody, but I actually know deeply more and more people each week. As opposed to getting that same sort of little bit of surface level idea of everybody. That doesn't actually add up to very much week to week to week. 

[00:06:16] Karen: So again, you get depth.  

[00:06:18] Karen: And that's another thing I want to think about is that people will say things in small groups. They will do vulnerability in small groups. They will go deeper in small groups.  

[00:06:27] Karen: I say pairs, cause that's what I like to use a lot, but it also is true in trios and quads. You know, I think the more people you get, the more you dilute the effect, but it's still way more intimate in a four, than it is in a 20 or a 30 or a 40. 

[00:06:41] Karen: So that overtime benefit of getting to know each other also is, I think, really well served by pair work as opposed to whole group rounds,  

[00:06:51] Paul: And it sometimes feels weird not to do whole group stuff like that, where it's like, well, we do want to get to know each other. But it's like my observation about a large group going out to dinner. 

[00:07:00] Paul: Like once we get beyond six, it doesn't really matter if we're split up between multiple tables or not, I'm only going to be able to talk to the three people on either side of me anyway. And so like, we might as well embrace that, and have six simultaneous conversations at this group of 20. Rather than going, "Well, no, we all have to talk to each other." so yeah, I agree with you that like that it allows you to get to that depth much quicker.  

[00:07:24] Paul: I think what you're also pointing to is that in a smaller group. It's safer in a lot of ways to say things.  

[00:07:32] Paul: And also just like recognizing that different people have different comfort levels with speaking in groups of different sizes. 

[00:07:41] Paul: Like, this has been relatively well studied, right? You know, in a group of 20, how many people in that group are comfortable speaking in front of the entire group? It's like two or three. And it's usually the same two or three all the time.  

[00:07:53] Paul: Which means that if we're doing a relatively unstructured discussion, then we're only going to hear from a few people. And even when we do hear from the people who might not normally speak, we're not going to hear as much from them. We're probably not going to hear as deep or as vulnerable or things like that.  

[00:08:09] Paul: Whereas if we go into a small group and like many, many, many more people are comfortable speaking in a group of two, or in a group of three. 

[00:08:16] Paul: And so there's an ease there where it's actually easier for them to access the ideas that they want to bring forth to the group, that they want to put out there.  

[00:08:24] Paul: So people will say things in trios that they'd never bring up in front of the whole group. And so for me, there is a, an accessibility piece of that as well. That's important.  

[00:08:36] Karen: Yeah. And I'll go one more step. Paul and I both confessed in the last episode that we are people who think best while we're talking.  

[00:08:43] Karen: The things that come out of our mouths are often the thing that tells us what we think. And while it's fabulous to have other ways to figure out what you think. 

[00:08:51] Karen: The fact is there are an awful lot of people that think well when they're talking. And if they have to do their thinking while being listened to by 19 other people, it's going to take a lot of time to get all those ideas out.  

[00:09:05] Karen: But if we pair off, they can do all of their thinking. And with the lengthy conversation that they may need to do that, and then come back to the whole group. 

[00:09:15] Karen: And when they're ready to report out, they can say what they're thinking in one sentence or two sentences, much more concisely because they've already done their sort of verbal wandering.  

[00:09:25] Karen: And I say that with absolute respect that verbal wandering can be useful, but it can be way more efficient if fewer people have to listen to it. 

[00:09:32] Paul: Yeah. I'm fond of that technique as well, of "You're going to pair up. This is your chance to practice this with your partner. And then when we're going to come back, you're going to have 15, 30 seconds, to share your one idea with the whole group."  

[00:09:45] Paul: And it helps people feel like "I've worked through it and I've said what I needed to say. And now I can actually use the whole group's time efficiently."  

[00:09:52] Paul: So this gets to a topic, when we were talking a little before the show, about this idea of "Great, we have groups that go and do things and now, now they're coming back, what do they do? How do they bring back the things that they've talked about and that they've done in these small groups so that the group has access to them?" And Karen, I know you have an opinion about this that I wanna let you share. 

[00:10:16] Karen: I do. So I, this might be in Karen's pet peeves, or Karen's list of most common, least effective facilitation methods. The standard go-to that. I see. And what groups actually ask for and kind of resist if I won't do it, is each group has an assigned reporter or moderator or note taker or whatever the person is. 

[00:10:40] Karen: And so everybody's gone off into their five separate groups or something, five groups of four for 20 people. And you come back, and the reporting person reports to the large group, what the small group did.  

[00:10:54] Karen: And in my experience, most of the small groups, there's usually a lot of overlap and what the small groups do. And we actually, most of the time, that's a good thing, that that's expected.  

[00:11:04] Karen: But what it means is that each person who reports says the same thing.  

[00:11:10] Karen: So a lot of ideas get said in, in the case of five groups, a lot of the ideas get said five times. And I tend to totally zone out. Because I just expect that the next report is going to be a lot like the last one, and the one before that, and the one before that, and kind of stop listening. 

[00:11:26] Karen: The other thing that happens is despite excellent intentions, the reporting person almost never captures all the ideas that were shared in the group.  

[00:11:35] Karen: And so you run a really high risk that somebody is sitting there thinking the really important thing that I heard, or the thing that was really important that I said, didn't get shared. And I don't have an opportunity to say that.  

[00:11:49] Karen: So the net result of this, in my view, is that the same things get said way more times than they need to be said. And things are not said that needed to be.  

[00:11:59] Karen: So I'm always looking for some other way to come back together, and capture as a whole group what was happening in the small groups. And I'll let Paul share his idea and I have a way I use and there are probably others.  

[00:12:13] Paul: One of the things that I will commonly do is actually in the group, ask them to create some sort of artifact. You know, so a flip chart, a set of sticky notes, a thing. And then what I'll have the groups do then is do what we call a gallery walk, right? 

[00:12:27] Paul: Which is where each small group now goes and they look at the artifacts that the other groups created. So there isn't actually a report out. We're going to go look at what the other groups wrote down, or what they captured in their discussion.  

[00:12:38] Paul: And then we can have as a small group, a conversation about that and go, "Oh yeah, they came up with that thing too." 

[00:12:43] Paul: And then we may do a large group debrief on patterns that we noticed, same, different on the one hand, on the other hand, sorts of things.  

[00:12:52] Paul: And I find that useful as a way of sort of catching." |Yeah. Yeah. Every group came up with this one idea. Okay. That's good to know that they all came up with it." but we only need to say that once. And we can start to see some of the differences there.  

[00:13:06] Paul: So gallery walks are a common way that I will do to bring to the attention, of the whole group, what each of the individual groups did. I know you have another idea for this.  

[00:13:18] Karen: Yeah. And I use something called a spiral round and honestly, it doesn't always take a lot of spiraling. But what I like to do is everybody's had their group experience, their small group experience. 

[00:13:28] Karen: They come back and we do a round of the whole group. And again, as we talked about in the last episode, I often will start with, "Okay, so everybody stop and think, what is the one thing, or what are the things that you feel like were really important to share back with the whole group?"  

[00:13:44] Karen: Or I may have some other criteria. But something that guides them to what's the piece and then pick one piece that you're going to share. 

[00:13:52] Karen: And if your piece has already been shared, or if the pieces that you're thinking of have already been shared, you can just pass.  

[00:13:58] Karen: But you go around and each person shares one thing, it may get recorded on a shared document or a whiteboard or something, depending.  

[00:14:05] Karen: But each person shares one thing. And if after we've done the whole round, "Is there anything else that's still missing? We may do another round."  

[00:14:13] Karen: And that's the spiral round concept, is you keep going until everybody passes and you have a very short round. Typically what happens is I do the first round. And it feels pretty complete.  

[00:14:24] Karen: And I'll just say, "Is there anything else we're missing?" And I may just call on a couple of people. But everybody had a chance to say the thing that felt important to them. So you don't miss anything.  

[00:14:34] Karen: And realistically in a large group, you get a little repetition because people just do, but you get a lot less petition. And you can train participants to get better and better at, "Oh, that thing's already been said. I don't need to say it."  

[00:14:47] Karen: But I find it's way more efficient and you don't leave people feeling like, "Well, my thing didn't get said." 

[00:14:57] Paul: I want to touch very briefly on this idea of the thing that didn't get said, and you've talked before about how oftentimes when we hear report outs, right?  

[00:15:04] Paul: The other thing about working as a large group, when we're doing everything all as one group, is that there are things that don't get said. 

[00:15:13] Paul: There are things, and particularly differences in the group, are less likely to come out in a large group than they are in small groups. And so particularly when I'm working with a group where it's like, "I'm worried that we're just getting the same stuff. We're saying the things that I'm comfortable saying in front of everybody." Or, "I've been influenced by what I'm hearing by everybody else." And so we're all starting to fall into group think or things like that.  

[00:15:38] Paul: Small groups can be a really good way to bring out the differences in a group when that is really useful. And there's a couple of different ways that I know of that we can do that. 

[00:15:50] Paul: One is that I've started playing with a little more recently is I will actually deliberately form groups, to minimize the differences within the groups, so that there are more differences across the groups.  

[00:16:02] Paul: I was working with a board recently and they were going to do some strategic work in small groups. And so I said, "I want you to get into groups of three or four where the people you're with are likely to have the same ideas that you do." And they sort of self selected into this.  

[00:16:16] Paul: And as soon as I looked at it, I was like, "Oh, there's the chair. And the managing director and the other person who has been on the board for the longest."  

[00:16:25] Paul: And over in another group are the people who have brand new to the board. They're in their first year, they come from very different backgrounds.  

[00:16:31] Paul: And I went "Great!" Because what that meant was the ideas that came out from the groups were likely to be different from each other. Rather than being sort of homogenized, sort of thing.  

[00:16:42] Paul: It also meant that then when an idea came up from all of the groups, when we'd maximized those differences, that meant, "Yeah, this really is a common thing" as opposed to "This patch just happened to be a loud voice in each of the groups", that sort of thing.  

[00:16:55] Paul: So that's one way that we can actually use small groups. To bring out more of those differences. And then I followed that with that gallery walk, right? So that people could start to go, "Oh, we didn't come up with that. Why didn't we come up with that?" And it started to reveal where we had been falling into group thing around certain things. 

[00:17:13] Karen: And this is one of those cases where I think being clear about what your objectives are is really important. So I like that when we're trying to bring out differences that can be super useful.  

[00:17:22] Karen: I also want to point out that we sometimes want the exact opposite. Where we're trying to get people to converge on a decision, where we've got different ideas around. 

[00:17:29] Karen: And so I've done the exact opposite thing for the exact opposite purpose, which is, "Okay, we're going to get into pairs or small groups. And I want you to try to put yourself with someone who disagrees with you." And obviously there's not a hundred percent success with that, but people will generally do it. 

[00:17:45] Karen: And then they have the experience of really hearing the opposite perspective. And I may even pair that with a, you know, "And when you come back, share something that you learned or that you heard that surprised you". Or, "So instead of making your own case, you're sharing the thing that was different or new in the opposite perspective." 

[00:18:07] Karen: So I love the way we can either highlight differences or try to converge the differences into a common direction, depending on how we structure groups.  

[00:18:17] Paul: Well, I think it's pretty clear that Karen and I both have a great love for using small groups in facilitation. But we've covered quite a bit of ground here today. 

[00:18:25] Paul: You know, we've talked about, you know, why use small groups? And there's a couple of different reasons that we've tried to emphasize here.  

[00:18:31] Paul: You know, one is that surprisingly, it can create more cohesion in the larger group when we start together in small groups and pairs or in triads. Because we start to have more safety when we're talking with just one other person, or two other people. 

[00:18:47] Paul: And then that becomes an anchor point for someone that we can connect to the rest of the larger group with. So we really like to start oftentimes with a small groups.  

[00:18:57] Paul: Also, in part, because it gets people normalized that notion of "I'm going to be participating in this meeting, I'm going to be saying things". You get to go deeper than you would if you were just trying to hear one little bit from everybody in an opening go around sort of thing. So it can actually create a greater sense of connection and cohesion in a group. Which seems the opposite of what it would do. 

[00:19:18] Paul: Also, just noting that it creates more opportunities for participation. That people who might not be willing or comfortable speaking in front of the whole group, will be more comfortable sharing their ideas in small groups. And so we're creating an opportunity for more ideas to get out there for more people to feel heard, to be heard, to participate.  

[00:19:37] Paul: That we need to be careful about how we bring back those ideas from the small groups to the large groups so that we aren't just hearing the same thing over and over again. That we are actually tapping into the wisdom of the group, the things that are happening into those small groups.  

[00:19:53] Paul: And so we presented a couple of different options for how you might be able to do that. 

[00:19:57] Paul: And then just recognizing that the way that you form the groups is going to have an influence on the sorts of things that get talked about.  

[00:20:04] Paul: And to be clear about what is it we're really trying to do here? Are we trying to bring people into contact with ideas that they might not agree with, or be familiar with?  

[00:20:13] Paul: Are we really trying to create more of a space for that dialogue to happen later, so we'd like the ideas to crystallize a little more now?  

[00:20:22] Paul: We've got a lot of different options when it comes to playing with how we can take large groups and work in small groups. To make them effective when they come back together so that ultimately, we're able to make better decisions. We're able to make better use of our time.  

[00:20:35] Paul: And there's absolutely an efficiency component to this as well. And that we're able to move forward without just saying, "All right, we're going to get everybody together and we're going to all hear what everybody has to say." 

[00:20:48] Karen: And that's going to do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Karen Gimnig.  

[00:20:52] Paul: And I'm Paul Tevis. And this has been Employing Differences.