Have you ever really focused on what happens when people come together in a group? Imagine there’s a complex, knotty issue under discussion. How much of the energy is given to wrestling with the facts and solving the issue in a linear efficient mode, how much to the less visible knots and how much to the group’s process of working to come to understanding?
If the issue or topic is worth gathering people together to take to its next level, then it’s probably worth doing well.
This means asking new and different questions and holding space in a way that brings in new perspectives. The questions most likely will need to be more systemic in nature. Questions that explore the interdependencies between the information and understanding the group is working with.
Inquiries need to be about deeper blockages, obstacles and opportunities to move differently. These may be mental models, emotional attachments, physical factors, old beliefs and thoughtforms all of which could be at the individual, group or systemic level.
Our tendency towards linearity can mean that we rely heavily on past experience to signpost the solutions needed for now. When we are facing important and challenging projects it is increasingly vital that the group be skilled to operate at all, and new, levels of the inquiry.
This takes time until, like in all things, we become unconsciously competent. To get underway we must be prepared to see our group work in a new way. To see it as a research project where we are opening to the largest and most diverse levels of ‘information’ we can muster.
That information, which the system is holding in anticipation of the right questions, is rich and creative. If all members of the group can bring their whole selves to the process and move in a flexible, fluid and, this is essential, patient way, then genuinely new insights, solutions and outcomes are possible.
This approach to group working is deployed by all great creatives consciously or otherwise. They are in relationship with their project on a multilevel basis. We need to deploy this wisdom to group work in business and organisations if we are to truly transform our contribution to the human experience.