From focus groups to co-creation (part two)
In his first post Roy talked about his disillusionment with traditional focus group methods. In the second part of this series he expands on his unique intellectual journey, focusing on how his experiences with experimental psychology led him to pursue new avenues. At Promise we’ve always believed that co-creation is rooted in a richer (human) heritage than our social media obsessed world might have you believe today. Those who identify the internet as trasformatory are undoubtedly correct, but in the pursuit of a contemporary typology many overlook the wider narrative. In this post Roy contextualises our view of technology as the facilitator rather than the driver of co-creation, which is itself a manifestation of something far more timeless: our collective need to establish relationships.
‘Fish cannot see the water they’re swimming in,’ is an ancient proverb of eastern origin.
And so it was for me in 1990. Although I could see only too well the limitations of surveys and focus groups, I couldn’t see outside the box. I had spent too long inside!
As is often the case, help came from the least expected quarter. For a decade, throughout the 80’s, I had been trying to enrich and update the qualitative research canon. We had imported projective techniques from psychiatry, Parent/Adult/Child from Transactional Analysis, archetypes from Jungian psychology and various other models and tools.
In the 80’s Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) became very fashionable. As with any new technique extraordinary claims were made for it, but it was at heart and remains a modeling procedure – a way of studying processes that work in order to break them down into teachable and repeatable elements. Among those modeled by the founders of NLP were Milton Ericsson the revered hypnotherapist, Virginia Satir, the founder of family therapy and Fritz Perls the founder of Gestalt therapy.
For my own application of NLP to the qualitative inquiry process, I asked myself a similar question to that mentioned in Part One, but put to myself as a personal challenge:
Where do people open up about themselves most? What are the circumstances and principles that make this most likely and how could we remodel them for commercial/business tasks?
For the next three years I literally scoured the world for events and programs where people genuinely revealed themselves and seemed pleased to have done so. You won’t be surprised to hear that I landed in California, at that time the home of a so-called New Age, and two things there made a strong impression on me:
The first was a four-day programme devised by Werner Erhard called EST (Erhard Seminar Training). In it, several hundred people were guided by a facilitator through a set of processes that varied from the sublime to the ridiculous – at least to an outsider’s eyes. The training exists today in a modernized form under the name of the Forum and under the control of an employee owned holding company, Landmark Education.
Over one million people have taken part in Landmark Education’s introductory program, the Landmark Forum, since 1991. These were some insights that provoked my thinking about our own methods:
- These sessions overturned the idea that powerful, intimate, personal speaking could only occur in small private environments. The levels of self-disclosure in EST were astounding.
- You can use very strong boundaries both to limit and confront people’s tendency to undermine their own commitment to extraordinary results.
- Magnified resistance is created by working for very long sessions and there is a corresponding relief as resistance was revealed as the false friend it so often is and people broke through it and their ideas bloomed.
- There is flexibility for processes and styles of work offered by a very large group working for an extended period.
- I witnessed the vitality of both the formal and informal cultures that sprung up and the aliveness of both to innovation and different ways of thinking.
- If the task was inspiring enough there was sheer pleasure in taking time for yourself and doing your best in a challenging environment.
- Reinvented according to our own needs, these insights led to a set of principles that underpin Big Talk and all our work with large groups to this very day:
- The use of large groups (50+ if possible)
- An inspiring invitation to a task well worth tackling that most people have some doubts they could accomplish at the outset.
- The utilization of an extended period of time (two full days)
- The working through resistance and using it as a source of breakthroughs/new thinking.
- The encouragement of formal and informal cultures within the work group.
One of Promise’s key principles was learned by watching the power of a ‘holding’ guide or facilitator as people stretched out to new experiences. That principle became one that is very much in evidence in our programs today:
Relationships are the source of results. Much more than what you know!
Looking back from 2009, even though California was surprising and exciting it was not until I came back to the UK that the keystone of the Big Talk and Breakthrough Programme fell into place…
Tags: Co-creation, Psychology, Qualitative research
This entry was posted on Tuesday, 3 Feb 2009 at 9:21 am and is filed under Co-creation, Psychology, Qualitative research.
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