Lead line: Facilitation through online scripting

Group Facilitation, Spring 2003 by Landau, Jennifer H, Chesley, Harry, Seban, Suzana, Cheng, Lili, Farnham, Shelly

ABSTRACT

As business interactions go online, so do facilitation and agenda design. Most electronic meeting system (EMS) applications replicate the contemporary meeting paradigm, including the presence of a facilitator. Addressing both online and selfmanaged work, the Microsoft Lead Line prototype uses standard browser technology and scripting to guide same-time interaction in a text chat environment. Facilitators design process scripts for groups of three to seven participants. Together these design elements make it possible to simultaneously facilitate an infinite number of small groups in a meaningful task. Lead Line offers ease of user access, balance of structure and creativity, and clarity of group goals and roles.

KEY WORDS

computer supported collaborative work, electronic meeting system, facilitation, online facilitation, process design, scripting, social interaction, text chat, virtual meetings

Introduction

Knowing how to facilitate and lead meetings is an essential skill for anyone in business. All groups need to share information, coordinate, collaborate, discuss, make decisions, and produce products.

-Duarte and Snyder

Lead Line is a simple yet innovative prototype developed by Microsoft Research in which the meeting agenda, process, and technology are fully integrated. Designed for use in business, entertainment and educational settings, Lead Line is a Webbased environment for real-time, small group interaction. As a form of electronic meeting systems (EMS)1, Lead Line's characteristic elements include the use of text chat, standard browser technology, and a user-created script that defines scenes and participant roles. Together these design elements make it possible to simultaneously facilitate an infinite number of small groups.

The purpose of Lead Line is to bring people together to accomplish a specific, shared goal that benefits from structured, scripted interaction. Rather than a tool for workflow management, structured decision making, or emergent dialogue, Lead Line focuses on the content and experience that flow from interaction. Ideal for online team building, role-playing, and creative thinking, Lead Line combines three distinct environments--scripted, facilitated and online-into one, as shown in the overlapping areas in Figure 1.

Facilitated Environments

Facilitation has grown in thirty years from an innovative way of managing meetings to a standard business practice. With over 25 million meetings held each day in the United States alone, the need for and uses of professional facilitation continue to expand (Kaner, Lind, Toldi, Fisk & Berger 1996). Collaborative technologies are making it feasible to meet online and to work in virtual teams.

At its most universal level, facilitation makes the work of a group easier by providing procedural guidance and creating a hospitable environment where individuals can do their best thinking. The most frequently cited benefits of facilitation include faster, higher quality decisions, satisfaction of participant expectations, and increased collaboration and creative thinking (Kaner, et al. 1996). By providing a safe and shared space for thinking and learning, facilitators catalyze change in work communities and organizational cultures. For these reasons, facilitation has become an established part of business interaction, and facilitative techniques have become a standard part of management and leadership.

Facilitation of Scripted Social Interaction

In a nutshell, facilitators are concerned with how a topic is addressed. the process by which people interact with individuals and information. The design and subsequent delivery of such a process is a cornerstone of contemporary facilitation. Inherently, then, scripted social interaction is at the core of facilitation.

Borrowed from theater, the sociological term scripting generically refers to the creation of concepts, structures, and rules that guide how people interact. Scripts can be explicit, such as Robert's Rules of Order, or implicit, like the way pedestrians flag a cab.2 Roles, power, authority, knowledge, verbal and nonverbal communication are key elements of scripts and the social interaction that they channel. Social interaction is far more than socializing. It is a core human process whereby people influence each other through an exchange of feelings, information, or physical action (Turner, 1988). Scripted social interaction shapes normative behavior and culture. Successful scripts replicate across social networks, persisting long after their authors and origins are forgotten. For example, though it is a widespread, standard part of decision making, few many people are aware that Alex Osborn codified "brainstorming" as a specific technique in the 1950's.3

Contemporary facilitation has arisen as an alternative to the tightly scripted interactions of 19th century meeting procedure, and as a response to the growing desire for participatory, open decision making and system-wide change (Kaner et al., 1996). Explorations of systems thinking, dialogue, and collaboration reinforce the significance of social interaction and thoughtful process design. Process scripts are utilized at many levels of an organization, including agendas for meetings, maps to align interaction within a core work process, and process architecture for system change. They vary in degree of participant interaction and facilitator intervention, and reflect group objectives and culture. "T-group" training sessions are examples of social interaction with virtually no scripting and facilitator intervention. At the other extreme is a strategic planning retreat utilizing the Interaction Method or computer-supported meeting software (Doyle & Straus, 1976; Mittleman et al., 2000). With collaborative and dialogic process, the facilitator's role emphasizes process design, rather than intervention. Yet scripting is still present, even with some of the more emergent and group-managed approaches. One well known example is Open Space Technology, a process that specifies the start and close of a meeting and enables participants to self-direct all interaction, including group content, membership and timeframes (Owen, 1997). By comparison, The World CafE, an emerging model for scalable, small group dialogue, follows a more structured script that calls for a particular pattern of rotating participants through small groups (Brown, 2001). Visual thinking scripts, such as Graphic Guides and Mind Mapping, can be quite structured, ordering the sequence of content and pacing the group through images, listening and visual language (Buz-an, 1996; Grove Consultants International, 1999; Horn, 1998; Landau, 2000).