Can a 2x2 Matrix Help You Facilitate Better?

Now that I've spent so much time with a 2x2 matrix in my last post, my mind keeps circling back to 2x2s.  In fact, several months ago I had a conversation with a colleague (I honestly cannot recollect who) about facilitation...

I've done my fair share of process design and workshop facilitation over the years, and have had the benefit of a number of formal facilitation trainings.  Then last year I read Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking and, being a introvert myself, found myself thinking much more explicitly about common facilitation issues that often concern me.

Most pertinent to this post is what I've always called the "fallacy of the facilitated workshop."  This fallacy deals with the often unreasonable expectations we set for facilitated meetings to generate, validate, and secure consensus on important strategic decisions.  All within a one-day session!

Now related to this is the issue of extreme time constraints for participant exercises.  It is not uncommon to find groups tasked with answering deep questions within the space of 40 minutes, or rushing through important critical thinking exercises in 20 minutes.  In most cases this simply is not enough time for an individual, to say nothing of a team of people, to adequately wrestle with truly strategic issues.

What can often happen in these situations, and indeed, in American workshops in general, is that extroverts gain an advantage in shaping the conversations, especially in workshops that are extremely time-constrained.  In order to counter this a workshop designer has to think very carefully about the kinds of exercises and timing they program.

One book that I haven't yet read is Thinking, Fast and Slow though it is on my list.  I was having a chat with a colleague about "fast" and "slow" thinking and I remembered my thoughts about facilitation and about extroverts in workshops.  I immediately thought of a 2x2 matrix (bringing us back to the present), which would look like the following:

And my thought was: what if you used this matrix to help you make sure that no one type of thinking or one type of personality had an overwhelming advantage in a workshop?  Put another way, could you use this to help design the right workshop?

My experience tells me that, at least in the US, most facilitated privilege the upper right quadrant, the realm of the extroverted and the fast thinking response.  And often the issues we are assembling people to deliberate on are strategic and complex.

It seems to me that using a framework like this should make it easier to design a session that draws on the strengths of the full spectrum of personalities and that plays with the interplay between Kahneman's system 1 and system 2 thinking.

We'll definitely be using this in 2014 for our client sessions and we'll post later on how it seems to work.