BMA eBook - Manual / Resource - Page 60
Intervention and Leadership
3. Observation: Diagnosing Group Life
Paying attention to what is happening in a group or organisational system,
using a diagnostic mindset to notice the patterns of interaction, is a critical first
step in designing effective interventions. The core question is how the human,
political and leadership dimensions being exhibited in the group now and in
the context of the history of the groups’ efforts to respond to the identified
problem. “What is the reality of the situation we are facing?” The latter is an
important element because all groups whether large (organisational) or small (a
work team) develop stable and, to some extent, predictable patterns of
behaviour that characterize their mode of operation. Many of these patterns
become “defaults”; ways of behaving that are familiar and reinforce the manner
in which problems are solved and familiar outcomes are achieved. As the
saying goes “if you always do what you have always done, you will always get
what you have always got!”
When a group faces an adaptive issue some of these behaviours and ways of
thinking will be productive but others will not and will help keep the system in
place by diverting attention away from the harder, likely conflictual work, that
needs to be done.
In order to intervene, with a purpose in mind, it is necessary to be able to see
what is occurring in a group of people, especially if you are part of it. This
requires some understanding of the functioning of groups as human systems
and the ability to diagnose the system. It requires the ability to “get on the
balcony” (Heifetz and Linsky 2002) in order to identify the patterns that enable
Copyright Vantage Point Consulting Pty Ltd 2010
Not to be reproduced without the author’s permission
Page 7
