T-Group

Roy Williams

Story

As a student I was part of a 'T-group' organisational development workshop over three days (residential).

The ground rules were that we had to stay on site, and that we had to spend set times in the workshop, where the only rule was that we could only discuss the present, not the past and not the future.

The workshop started with no-one knowing how to proceed. After a long silence (10 minutes) someone started, and we proceeded, very uncertainly, to talk to each other.

The group was a group of people who had worked together on a committee for some months, but clearly had never really got to know each other.

During the three days we got into some very intense and often heated discussions and conversations, and developed an extraordinary degree of group cohesion and belonging-ness.  We also got to know each other extremely well, and came to know and accept each other: strengths and weaknesses.

Working together after the workshop was quite different.  Not everyone stayed on the committee, but those who did worked together well.

The facilitation was excellent, but we could have done with some post-workshop follow up.

Comments

This was a totally immersive experience, and it took at least a month, if not three months, to get back to 'normal'. 

How was the immersion created?

1.  Time.  Removing the past and future created an extraordinarily focused and intense interaction. 

2.  Silence.  The silence at the start was excruciating, and informed huge amounts of what happened subsequently.  It was one of the most discussed 'things' in the workshop, as it was the most startling 'thing' in the 'zone of the present' which we could discuss. 

3.  Disruption.  Dave Snowden uses what he calls 'disruptive' situations to deliberately get people out of their comfort zones, and into places zones where complexity (complex adaptive systems/ networks) will prevail (lots of opportunity for micro-agents to communicate, and for new properties to emerge, but no predictability).  In this case, stripping out most of what we use for context (past and present) is highly disruptive.

Application?

1.  Group dynamics: you need a very skilled facilitator ('dont try this at home without an expert'), but if you need people to get to know each other, and you need to establish a group identity and cohesion, this delivers. 

2.  Softer forms: many of the ice-breaker exercises that are used (in Appreciative Inquiry for instance) are variations on this, and work well, and with similar (although more moderate) dynamics: asking people to describe where they are, what they are wearing, or even better, to describe what they see in/of/ about other people in the room/workshop are all variants of this.  I.e. these exercises can narrow the focus to the present, and can require levels of disclosure that are unusual (e.g.  'Pair up with someone wearing the same colour underclothing') and disruptive.

3. Looking at some of the texts for this workshop, and looking at the details of how people like Snowden facilitate, it is clear that you have to be very careful to introduce 'just enough' disruption: the Goldilocks rule must be applied.

4. There are lots of other ways in which 'disruption into complexity' can be achieved.

Concepts

Disruption into complexity (not dissociation).  

      See also: 'disruptive technologies': Txt-ing is one of the best examples of a disruptive technolgy: it totally disrupts traditional structures of social space-time.

Structuring time

Context-stripping

Complex adaptive systems

Roy

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