As an Action Learning Coach how would you handle the following situation:
The team is involved in generating a number of alternative perceptions, ideas, opinions, facts, etc. The team focuses on only one (e.g., debating their merits or validity) and omits other items from explicit consideration.
A question that might help the group focus more broadly would be ‘How diverse are the perceptions, ideas, facts (etc) that we are examining?’. Followed up by (if necessary) ‘What’s the impact of this?’ and then ‘How do we want to handle it?’.
Here’s another possible intervention:
“What does the team know about good problem-solving processes?”
In this way, we tap on the embedded expertise of the team and leverage on this knowledge to help the team learn and take action to generate better solutions.
“What will the team do?”
The basic script questions/interventions could be helpful also. How do you feel we are doing as a group? What are we doing well? What could we do better?
I will do an intervention and ask the group — what is the problem/task for the group? Since this will remind the Team of what that objective of the session is. Then I will follow-on with how are we doing and what we can do better as a group.
As AL coach, I will intervene the group by asking them questions, like “What’s going on in our team?” “What’s the probable result if we do like this?” “How should we continue our group discussion?”
When group members are thinking and answering these questions, they would recall the two basic rules and they may learn from this
I will ask “How are we doing as a team so far on a scale of 1 – 10?” and “What could we do better?” If I sense that the team is still oblivious that they are overly focused after asking those questions, I may ask something like “Besides this idea of……what other possibilities can we explore?” to take them out of their wilderness.
I too would start with the standard 3 questions in hopes that the team would self identify the situation. (How are we doing as a team on a scale of 1 – 10? What are we doing well? What can we do better?)
If it didn’t come up, I would follow with –
I’ve observed that we seem to be focused on one of the possible paths we identified. Did anyone else notice that?
What’s the impact of this on our potential solution?
How do we want to handle it?
Happy Coaching
Bea
As an Action learning Coach, I would intervene as follows:
I will ask the group questions:
– How are we understanding PP’s problem?
– According to the group, what aspects have we not focused on clarifying to understand the true nature of the PP problem?
– As a group, what do we decide to do in the coming minutes to find out the true nature of the PP problem?