THE ROLE OF FACILITATION IN MANAGING INDIVIDUAL BIASES/TENDENCIES AND THE DYNAMICS WITHIN A GROUP
The facilitator, as a process consultant and not a person directly involved in the talking, is able to step back and observe how the discussion proceed among the participants. The facilitator puts himself in the position of an onlooker, and from this position he is able to maintain an objective detachment.
Observing the process the facilitator can monitor each individual present in the meeting, and see the tendencies and biases that the individual is bringing to the discussion. His main role will be observe participants and listen when they speak. The facilitator has to appear as someone who is directing the discussion, not an external, therefore it’s important at the beginning of the meeting to clarify why he is assisting there and lay down the ground rules of the process. His presence must be felt by the participants as helpful and not threatening, and he must appear to be confident and have a clear direction. The facilitator will be regarded as a guide therefore it is clear the reason why he has to have all these qualities. A lack of one of these aspects could disrupt the meeting.
In normal people, there are many sources of biases and mistakes when judging situations. Especially when reasoning using statistics, people commits many mistakes. People are not very good in making statistical guesses and frequently discard or downplay the cases that contradict their thesis. If a person believes that he is right, he will probably downplay the objections that other people are bringing against his point.
Another common bias is people’s selective perception: people filters reality through their experience, therefore people will perceive things differently. A person who is specialized in finance will see a problem or opportunity in financial terms, whereas a marketing manager will see it as marketing-related.
In addition to this aspect, the way information is presented influence the perception, just think to how important is HOW people tell things. The mode of representation is very influential, along with well-known effects such as primacy/recency effect: the first and the last thing a person say is more likely to impress than the rest of the information.
An important tendency to take into account is “wishful thinking”: personal preferences for a certain outcome are likely to influence judgements of events. If a person prefers option A instead of B, his judgement is likely to be subjective, even though the method require objective evaluation.
A very common effect is the so-called gambler’s fallacy, it happens when a person has to evaluate the probability of an event. If an event A happened five times in a row, the person could wrongly think that the event B now is more probable. This is not true because probabilities do not change over time, if the same set of initial conditions are still valid.
All these biases/tendencies heavily influence the decision process of individuals, therefore it is important that the facilitator is aware of these effects and take them into account when guiding the group through the decision.
When the decision is done by a group instead of an individual, the increased size will increase the number of sources of ideas, and if the group made of different expertise, this is likely to increase the quality of decision, because it will be a decision that takes into account more factors, coming from different disciplines. The bigger the better is not valid in this case, the disadvantage of having many individuals is that the decision process will be slower, therefore the optimal number of members is between 4 and 7.
Another advantage of group decisions is that every member is more likely to commit to a decision if he or she has taken part in the decision process, instead of seeing the decision as something imposed, without any possibility of discussion.
The main problem about groups is that they have to be organized, the process needs structure, and people needs to be guided through each step of the decision process. Structuring the problem is the first step, and there are several models that can be used to give a structure to the problem. Soft system methodology, SMART, heuristic models, etc… each one with advantages and disadvantages. What models do is to divide the problem in steps, each one with a particular purpose, and this helps to build a good picture of the situation and of the possibilities, leading to a clearer definition of the problem and consequently a better decision.
To sum up, the aim of the facilitator is to facilitate the group, guiding them through several stages, taking into account their personalities and the pitfalls of groups, ensuring that everybody is working as in a team. Nothing has to be forced, the facilitator has not the power to force individuals to cooperate, but he has the knowledge and the experience to make them work together effectively and make the discussion flow naturally to the decision.
Federico Marani's Blog 