BMA eBook - Manual / Resource - Page 79
Intervention and Leadership
Diagnostically it would be foolish to raise a provocative question or
observation on a unhelpful pattern of behaviour with a group who were very
new, with little or no experience at being self reflective and who though their
purpose in being together was to solve a technical issue. Here, “warming” the
group up to their adaptive task, ripening the issue and preparing them to
consider harder questions would be more likely to yield results. Conversely a
“mature” group who already had explored difficult issues, had demonstrated
resilience in the face of conflict and where the senior authority supported the
adaptive work at had would need interventions commensurate with that
experience and capacity. In this sense interventions can be oriented to
facilitating the process and dynamics of the group, to ensuring their capacity
and readiness to address hard substantive issues are accepted and well
developed; and they can be focused on the content or substance of the issue;
that is the subject matter that has got peoples attention in the first place, be it an
internal issue of culture or organisational practice and/or an issue of core
business related to what an organisation does for its customers and
stakeholders. Often there is an intersection between the two.
For example, in recent work with the senior executive team in a public sector
setting, the presenting issue was framed as enormous work pressures arising
out of an ambitious reform agendas of the new government, the teams
“client”. However it became clear before these issues could be addressed a
series of questions needed to be asked about the teams’ own functioning and
their current capacity to consider some difficult questions. Therefore initial
interventions were designed to assess the teams willingness to engage with
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