Addressing a Culture of Conflict within an Organization

Posted on November 6, 2025 by jofacilitator

This post was originally posted as “Organizational Transformation through Facilitation” in June, 2015. I think it may be informative in 2025, so I am reposting it.

Once I had a client whose understanding of their mandate and mission was to fight the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed in the inner city. This was a foundational understanding for the group, based on their understanding of Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

The staff of this organization was in chaos. They had had 5 executive directors in 4 years. Several had left out of frustration, and their work was diminished because of all the infighting within the organization.

So the acting executive director asked if I would come in and facilitate a ToP Strategic Planning process to try to create some consensus on the directions they needed to move.

The Vision workshop was pretty easy – they had a common vision of where they wanted to go. Some of the rifts became smaller.

Then came the Obstacles workshop. Having a solitary brainstorm and time in pairs to write obstacles on cards allowed them to be pretty honest about what was going on. The cards clustered intuitively relatively easily. Then it was time to name the Underlying Contradictions. As I read the cards in the first column out loud, I could see a pattern, but left it to the group to struggle with the insight. It took a very long time. Suddenly, one person in the group said, “It’s, it’s that ‘us and them’ mentality that comes from the oppressor/oppressed thinking! We’ve turned it inward and it’s destroying us!” There was a gasp of recognition from the group, and then they quickly tried to escape the power of the insight. Eventually they named it and went on to create strategies.

A year later they asked a colleague of mine to come in to facilitate a review and re-planning session – they told her that that insight had been a turning point for the organization. They didn’t like the messenger, but the message had gotten through. After that they had the same director for a number of years – the organization stabilized and was able again to serve the community.

My learning from this experience was that a group can, with appropriate process, face and name its own underlying contradictions, which then open the door to transformation. Very often the basic values a group holds dear can be the contradiction that holds them back when they need to change.

This kind of facilitation is not just about getting a rational result or a product, although that is part of it. It is about providing the opportunity for a group to become conscious of its own behaviours and beliefs, and make the profound change it needs. It is about caring for the whole person, and the whole group – its experience and growth as well as its rational products. It requires integrity on the part of the facilitator to honour the group’s unspoken needs without imposing the facilitator’s own values and perspectives.

My work has always been through the Institute of Cultural Affairs and from 1999, through its partner company in Canada, ICA Associates, Inc. http://ica-associates.ca

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One Story of Integrity as a Facilitator

Posted on October 29, 2025 by jofacilitator

The memory of this story was catalyzed by a LinkedIn Post by a colleague who talked about her experience of the power of personal integrity as a facilitator in choosing work.

Many years ago, after a successful facilitation with a business leaders’ organization, I was asked by a VP of a major national company to facilitate a retreat for their sales managers, a big opportunity for me.  About 30 sales managers were brought from all over the country to the day-long event, which would include an evaluation of the past year and planning for the next year.

I was warned by the VP that the CEO of the company was unpredictable, so I suggested that he just give an opening welcome and then when he left the room I would do a focused conversation on his talk with the group before we moved on to the evaluation and planning.

The CEO began his “welcome” with a tirade about how the year was a disaster, that each of them was a disaster, and that they would have a new senior manager the next week, “which would not be any of you, because you do not deserve it”.  Then he did not leave the room. 

Clearly my planned conversation was not going to work, so I called a quick break.  The VP came up to me and asked, “Would you like me to talk with Charlie to make him be more positive when he comes back at the end of the day?” I asked, “Can you do that?”  He said, “It’s part of my job description, to manage him.”  I said “Yes, please do!” He and Charlie left the room at that point.

So we started the participatory evaluation of the year, using the Journey Wall/Historical Scan process. The events and accomplishments on the wall showed that they had sold more products that year than ever before, and that income for the company was higher than ever before. However, at the end of the Journey Wall, when they named the year, they named it “Disaster”.  I was astounded, and took off my facilitator hat to ask why after all the documented success, they named it a disaster.  The answer: “Well, Charlie said it was a disaster, so it was.”

I took a deep breath and started the next step of the strategic thinking/planning process.  This amazing group articulated a vision, discerned underlying obstacles, and came up with creative strategies, all before 4 in the afternoon – a process that usually takes at least a day and a half. 

Charlie came back in the room at the end of the day and his idea of being positive was to say to the group, “Well, this strategy might work, this one’s maybe ok, but this one will never work!”

After finishing and cleaning up, I was leaving and found myself alone in the elevator with Charlie and the VP.  I had been coming down with a serious flu during the day, and by this time I had a high fever and had lost much of my inhibition. I said to Charlie, “I have learned that what you tell people about them they will do their best to live up to. If you tell them they are a disaster, they will do their best to be a disaster for you.  If you tell them honestly what they do well, they will work even harder to do those things well for you.”  

As I walked out of the elevator, I knew that I would never do any more work for that company. Partly because I had told off the CEO and that of course is taboo, but mostly because I will not work for or support anyone or any organization who does not respect people.

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“No Time for Planning a Meeting”

Posted on October 23, 2025 by jofacilitator

I have heard this more and more often. Huge demands for productivity in meetings, but less and less time allotted to them. Here is a story of a team’s discovery about the impact of taking time to prepare a meeting.

A company department with strict productivity rules had sent a whole team to be trained in facilitation, one day per week for 2 weeks.  It came up during the first day of the course that they had very long, unproductive team meetings. 

At the end of the first day of the course, during the discussion on how to implement the focused conversation method they had just learned, they expressed dismay that it took time to prepare for a productive meeting.  They mentioned that there was not time in their job descriptions to prepare for meetings, and there was strict accountabilility for their time.  So I asked when their next meeting was scheduled – it was in a few days, before our next session. I suggested that one of them sneak in an hour to prepare a conversation for the meeting, and then facilitate it. 

The next week when we met, they were ecstatic!  “Our meetings of 10 people usually last 2 hours and rarely have any good results.  This time we used the conversation that was prepared, the meeting took only 1 hour, and we had very good results and decisions for moving forward.  We saved 10 person hours of time with 1 person hour of preparation!  We can make a business case for adding meeting preparation to our job descriptions, because we have demonstrated productivity!”

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Addressing Distrust in a Public Consultation with a Focused Conversation

Posted on October 16, 2025 by jofacilitator

A school district needed to address the fact that some schools were very old and needed very expensive renovation, and that there were new neighbourhoods in the city that needed new schools.  The budget was limited and not everything could be done.

I had trained people in participatory methods, and they tried to create a plan with some community consultation.  When the senior staff had a plan in place, they decided to go to all the communities and get feedback on the plan.  They asked me to design a process for them to use with all the communities, which consisted of sharing the plan and then doing a focused conversation on it.  They then asked me to facilitate several of the more challenging sessions.

One high school to be closed was an arts focused school, that drew students from all over the city.  It had passionate parent and community supporters, about a hundred of which showed up for the feedback session, seated in the theatre in tiered seats facing the stage. There was a lot of confusion and anger, led by one particularly vocal person.

 The plan was that the director would present the plan to the large group, answer questions of clarity, and then there would be smaller breakout groups that did a focused conversation on the presentation, each facilitated by a trained staff member.  But the group refused to go to the breakout groups. 

So we changed the process to address the issue.  I called for flipcharts, and put up all the questions of the conversation on separate flipchart pages, leaving room for answers under the questions.  

First the presentation was made.   Then I asked for questions of clarification, which came in attack questions such as “Why the hell are you closing our school?!!!”.  Thankfully, the director stayed cool, and I rephrased the questions as questions of clarification, such as “What was the thinking behind the plan of closing our school?  And “What values were you holding to make this decision?”  The director answered these questions.

Then we went through the rest of the focused conversation in order, capturing the answers on the flipcharts. Reflective level questions were something like “What upsets you the most about this plan?” And What are you OK with?” At the interpretive level the questions were something like “What might be the impacts of this plan on our community? (positive or negative)” and What might be the impacts of this plan on the whole city? (positive or negative)”.  At about this stage, I realized that the most vocal and angry person had not said anything for a while, so I asked her directly if she had anything to add.  She said she had nothing more — it had all been said.  The decisional question was something like “What recommendations do we have that will strengthen the positive impacts for this community and the city, and address the negative impacts?”  A few creative suggestions came forth and were recorded.

The feedback was valuable and the group felt heard.  The documentation went directly to the school administration.   

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History of Developing the ToP Action Planning Process for Strategic Planning

Posted on October 7, 2025 by jofacilitator

In 1988, non-profit organizations were required to have a strategic plan in order to get their funding from the province for the next year.  Wayne and I facilitated ToP strategic planning for each of 12 regional non-profit organizations that were connected by a provincial organization in 12 weekends between January and the end of March.  

We facilitated Vision, Obstacles, and Strategies, then asked people to work on an action plan for each strategy.  We started with the simple 3-page Task Force Action Planning workbook that had been developed by ICA earlier (see the overview above or https://ica-associates.ca/news/top-task-force-action-planning/ ) for each strategy.  We discovered that although the process was very grounded, simple and step-by-step, people could find all kinds of ways to escape doing concrete action planning that would get results.

So we adapted the workbook each week as we encountered new ways people were escaping.  First we discovered that people would name a vague “committed to” on the bottom of the first page.  So we changed the words to “measurable accomplishment by ‘date’”    Then we discovered that people would turn to the second page and brainstorm anything they wanted to do, whether or not the actions were related to the accomplishment they had decided on the first page.  So we added a line at the top of the second page to copy the accomplishment where it was visible next to the brainstorm space. On the third page we changed “victory complete” to “measureable accomplishment”, and the “who” to “implementing team” and added “money” and “time” to the “cost” at the bottom of the 3rd page. 

This story explains why the Action Planning Workbook in the Transformational Strategy course is complex – it is designed so that it makes it very difficult to avoid making grounded, achievable plans with practical actions that the whole team is committed to carrying out.

There are even more complex adaptations that evolved later on with other clients with specific needs: such as adding 3-, 2- and 1-year accomplishments and 6-month milestones; and a table that names each measurable accomplishment, indicators of success for that accomplishment, and its relationship to vision and strategies.

For more on the action planning process to use with strategic planning, ICA Associates has a training course called Transformational Strategy that includes participatory strategic planning and the more detailed action planning. https://ica-associates.ca/courses/transformational-strategy/

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Listening to Polarized Viewpoints and Creating Consensus

Posted on October 4, 2025 by jofacilitator

Currently we are more and more aware of social issues facing our society – such as addictions as in alcohol, gambling, and illegal drug use; as well as unemployment and job loss, housing, etc.  Many social issues trigger emotional responses and a feeling of helplessness leading to difficulties and strong polarization in conversing individually (family), locally, and nationally around these social issues.  Here is an example of a process for dialogue leading to overcoming or minimizing polarization (and a feeling of helplessness and isolation) around just one such social issue.  It happens to be a real live process in dealing with gambling–but it has roots and tentacles that could be used for almost any social issue.  

A number of years ago, a government body decided to do a public consultation on gambling.  A team was put together to facilitate it. My role was that I had trained the facilitators in the methods, and helped design the process, but I was not there personally.  It was one of those rare events where a wide spectrum of people was invited to contribute their perspectives. Participants included people who were absolutely against any gambling, and others who were absolutely for it, as well as people whose views were somewhere in the middle.

To accommodate a lot of participants, there were several large breakout groups, each of which used the same consensus workshop processes in a series of consensus workshops.  These results were brought together at the end.  

For one of the consensus workshops, the focus question was something like “What are all the impacts of gambling?”  Participants were asked to brainstorm all impacts, both positive and negative, and put a plus or minus on their cards when they wrote them. Brainstorming in this way to this neutral focus questions allowed radically opposed ideas to be articulated.  Questions of clarification when necessary were answered by the small group who wrote the cards. The clustering then was by “similar impact”, not whether it was positive or negative. Most cluster columns then included both positive and negative cards about the impact and the cluster was named neutrally as a larger impact, acknowledging that it had both positive and negative aspects. 

The results on the cards including the larger impacts on the cluster names were captured verbatim in simultaneous documentation by a person on the facilitation team at the back of the room, (this was before digital cameras were common, and way before cellphone cameras).  The documentation was printed and distributed to the participants at the end of the event.

The conversation in the plenary session came up with several recommendations for action.  

Two amazing outcomes:

Experiential outcome:

At the very end of the session, two people, one known to be strongly against gambling, and the other known to be strongly for it, were overheard saying something like this in front of a third person, “We are shaking hands, and we will continue to talk and listen to each other.  Before this session, we never would have spoken to each other.”

Rational outcome:

A couple of days later, a sponsor of the session called the lead of the facilitation team and asked them to keep all the results private until the results could be massaged for the report.  The reply was that it was too late – that all the participants had already gone home with the verbatim results that had been documented as the work was going on. The sponsor was in this way held accountable to hear and reflect the outcomes of the group.  Within a year all but a few of the recommendations had been approved by the sponsor and a process of implementation begun.

Keys to the success of this session: 

1) 1) The Working Assumptions shared at the beginning of the process made it clear that every response would be respected and heard. (See Working Assumptions post from 2015.)

2) Making sure (through the brainstorming and clustering process) that the whole spectrum of responses was heard and held in the results, allowing people to experience that they were heard, and that everyone heard other perspectives. (For a concise description of the basic process, see https://ica-uk.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Consensus-Workshop-Overview.pdf )

3) Making sure that the words that people said were documented and shared with participants at the end of the session so that the actual results became the foundation of the decisions by the sponsor afterward and that nothing was ignored.

4) Design of the process allowed safety in speaking, promoted listening and hearing to what was actually said. The process/listening allowed people to not focus on rants or positions but on the thinking and observations on what was really happening to people.

5) A focus question was open enough to allow all perspectives to be held and to be clustered to see larger patterns.

6) Clustering of the ideas was done by similar topic, allowing both positive and negative responses in the same cluster, therefore acknowledging the different perspectives while emphasizing the similar areas of concern.

7) There were tangible and documented results that demonstrated that people were heard, and that their ideas were part of the solution.

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Another Story about the Organization Journey Map

Posted on September 27, 2025 by jofacilitator

Another Story of the Use of the Organizational Journey Map:  (see the original post for the map)

The chief of a police force in a small city was eager to get participation of all officers in decision-making.  He had scheduled participatory meetings across the force.  His “command staff”, who were committed to the traditional hierarchy of a police force, were commanding those who reported to them not to show up at the participatory meetings. 

So the chief asked for facilitation of a meeting of himself and the command staff to examine the issue and bring the discussion out in the open.

So we did an Organizational Journey Map exercise with the command staff – about a dozen people, including the chief.  Each officer marked each of the 8 sections on his own copy of the map where he thought the organization was and where he wanted it to be in the future. Then they talked in pairs, not to change each others’ answers, but to clarify their understanding of what was described on the map, and check to make sure they had a shared understanding.  Then they all went to the wall map and anonymously added a dot in each of the 8 sectors to show where they thought the organization was.  The focused conversation on this map brought some clarity on where the organization was.  No surprises here:  there was a lot of consensus that they were at Level 1 (Hierarchical) or 2 (Institutional) in most of the sectors, typical of most police forces.   

Then they all anonymously added another colour of dot where they wanted the organization to be.

When they looked at this pattern, they were really surprised by the number of dots that showed up on Level 3, the Collaborative Organization.  For example, there were more dots than they expected in the Skills sector that they wanted “managing group conflict” and in the Mission Context sector, they wanted “Quality impact of the organization on society and communities”.  With the focused conversation, they noted this pattern and realized that as a group they wanted a collaborative organization more than they had realized. The irony in this was that immediately the command staff started to command those who reported to them (Level 1 behaviour) to attend the participatory meetings (Level 3 behaviour), but that was a first step in positive change for the organization.     

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Using the Organizational Journey Map

Posted on September 23, 2025 by jofacilitator

This Map is copyrighted: Copyright Canadian Institute of Cultural Affairs, 1998

Usually the best way to use the Organizational Journey Map is to work with a group in the same room that represents all the levels of the organization, or to start with the lowest level of the hierarchy.  This builds a strong understanding of the consensus from the bottom up.

Individuals look at an individual copy of the map and analyze the organization; putting one mark in one of 4 levels in each of the 8 areas for what they see in the organization now, and another mark in a level in each area for how they would like it to be. Then each individual anonymously puts their marks on a shared copy of the map using different colours of dots for now and the future.  The exercise ends with a focused conversation on the resulting group map, both what it is like now and another focused conversation on what people want to see. This can provide some deep insights about the organization and provide information for strategy toward a desired future.

You can find more detail on the process from ICA Associates, Inc. https://ica-associates.ca/courses/organizational-transformation/

Starting at the Top of the Organization

One client, struggling with a need for change but little consensus on what change was needed, requested that I start with the executive team. So I facilitated the Organizational Journey Map process with them first. They then wanted to know what others in the organization thought.  I did the same exercise with each of the next lower levels of hierarchy one at a time, without sharing the earlier results with any of them. 

At the end, I shared with the whole organization what each group had done and they compared them. There was great consensus on what they wanted the organization to be like.  This surprised everyone. It led to some major changes in their culture.

Bringing Together Board and Staff

A non-profit client identified some large gaps between their volunteer board and their staff.  They did two iterations of the exercise separately with the Organizational Journey Map, one with the board and one with the staff.  Then they made copies on transparencies and laid one over the top of the other.  The conversations focused on the similarities and differences between the two different groups, and created common understanding on where they were in alignment as well as where they had different perspectives and needed to work together to bring the whole organization into alignment.

A New Board of a Professional Organization

A new board had just been elected of a global professional organization, and were having their first meeting.  It was clear that different members had very different opinions about the organization. They decided to use the Organizational Journey Map to understand each other and determine a focus for the development of the organization in the next year.

They discovered that some people wanted the organization to be a fairly traditional institutional organization – most of their dots about the future they wanted were on the second “ring” or level all the way around the map.  One person discovered that her yearning for the organization to be way out on the fourth level was very different from the rest of the board.  In the conversation on the results, the group realized that they needed to strengthen the structure of the organization at the lower levels in several areas in order to move the organization to the next level.  For example, the organization had not mastered “efficient bureaucracy” in the structural area, and therefore trying to work as “interdependent networks of individual networks and teams” was not successful because there was no structure for accountability and therefore led to cross purposes and chaos.    The conversation gave the board a solid starting focus for its work together over the next year.

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From SWOT to SWTO

Posted on September 16, 2025 by jofacilitator

Most people remember the acronym SWOT for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats.

One time I had a client ask to do a SWOT before they renewed their strategic plan.  It was a difficult time right after a provincial election that was creating chaos in their funding.

They first did a brainstorm of their Strengths and Weaknesses in their own teams.    

I then had a day to facilitate workshops on their Opportunities and Threats. I decided to do it the other way around, to focus on the negative of threats first, and then challenge them to think of opportunities.  The threats were an easy brainstorm, but it was hard to keep them moving.  Clustering by underlying threats was a challenge, to come up with the contradictions language for naming them that was beyond blame and despair.  I left the workshop results on the wall but moved them to the side.

After a break, we came back to articulate the Opportunities.  I asked the question “What are opportunities at this current time to do things in a new way?” The brainstorm took a long time, but it started gaining momentum in the small groups.  Then we clustered the opportunities, and the naming came up with some really big and creative opportunities.

The mood of the group shifted, and when we did the strategic plan renewal after a week or so, it was filled with creative new directions that made a huge difference in the organization’s impact.   

I now try to use the acronym as SWTO, although it is more difficult to say as a word!

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Addressing a Request for Strategic Planning in a Half Day

Posted on September 4, 2025 by jofacilitator

I was contacted by a person working for a small non-profit who knew something of ToP methods.  She said they needed a strategic plan, but they only had a half-day available to do it. On the face of it, this is an impossible request.

So I started asking questions about what had brought them to this point.  Her answers revealed that there were two of them, and that they were often stepping on each other’s role and plans, which created paralyzing discord and was sapping their ability to serve their clients.

They did not need a whole strategic plan.  What they really needed was a way to clarify their roles, and concrete action plans for each to carry out their roles. 

This meant that we could do a conversation on their roles, starting with each listing what they understood their responsibilities to be, followed by a simple Task Force Action Plan by each of them about their next steps.  Since the Action Planning format embodies vision, obstacles, strategies, and actions in its process, the whole process took a half-day and satisfied their need. 

This emphasizes the need to do a significant consultation with a prospective client before committing to work with them, in order to understand what their real needs are.

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