The personal introspective and the group spective are times for attendees to take stock, to reflect on where they started, the path traveled, and the journey yet to come. The personal introspective gives each attendee an opportunity to make this assessment personally, while the group spective, the last session of a peer conference, provides a time and place to make this assessment collectively.
The group spective is an exciting session because it holds great potential—it offers the possibility to determine and manifest an explicit future for the group, allowing the gathering to create something lasting, something more than an intense, one-time experience for attendees.
During the session attendees begin to explore their future together. They may decide to hold another peer conference, and/or they may decide to plan meetings or activities that are targeted to specific needs and interests. Every group spective I’ve facilitated has led to future collective activity by conference attendees.
The group spective is designed as a consensus-building session. I define “consensus” in this context as an understanding or agreement that allows the group to move forward; a consensus does not mean that everyone agrees one hundred percent, or will be involved in a specific initiative. Consensus is not determined by win-lose voting, or by selling a course of action to reluctant attendees. Rather, reaching consensus requires a collective process involving the development of group understanding, and the discovery of the necessary energy and commitment for future action.
There is a temptation for personal agendas to emerge early in a group spective. Some attendees may see the gathering as a way to further their own ideas of what participants should be doing. Careful facilitation can help avoid the proceedings being biased by the strong opinions of a few.
Every group responds to the challenge of a group spective differently, and, as a result, I find it to be the most difficult session to facilitate. And yet, as a session defining the future of the group, a spective promises great rewards that are well worth the work and concentration invested in facilitating the process.
Why a group spective?
Influenced
by consultant Norman Kerth’s book, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews
Although that got me through the conference, I subsequently felt dissatisfied with the term “retrospective.” I wanted to give the session a name that didn’t contain a reference solely to the past, a way for attendees to examine and absorb the group lessons that the conference had provided, in order to foster group and individual understanding that informed attendees in their discussion and planning for the future.
While searching for a better word, I discovered that Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale, written around 1395, employs the wonderful noun prospective to describe a glass or mirror that can allow one to see objects or events not immediately present. Wanting a word that combined both looking back and looking forward I finally decided to throw away both prefixes and simply call the group session a spective.
Describing the group spective as a process that encompasses the past, present, and future, a process that creates a coherent view of where we have come from, where we are now, and our choices and plans for the future, helps me and attendees understand the role the group spective fills.
Choices
The goal of a spective is to provide a place and time for people to productively reflect, share, discuss, and perhaps decide on future projects and activities. The peer conference up to this point has already developed an environment where attendees are open for such work. What makes facilitating a spective difficult is that it’s hard to predict how people want to use their time together. Clues appear—sometimes rapidly, sometimes subtly—during the session. This means that a facilitator has to pay especially close attention to what is going on and continually provide structure and guidance that’s appropriate to the changing needs of the group.
Facilitating a group is challenging work that grows increasingly difficult as the group gets larger, and I don’t know of any substitute for experience. Often, the group itself will have plenty of ideas about what should happen, and the facilitator’s job involves hanging on for the ride and providing what direction and support she can. Luckily, there are a number of established methods for facilitating healthy group process, and the ones I use—informal discussion, go-around, affinity grouping, and fishbowl—are described in my upcoming book.
Group
spective outcomes
Ultimately, the group spective exposes attendees’ responses to the currents and themes evoked by the conference. Their reactions, in turn, generate energy and ideas about the group’s future. Thus the spective provides an arena for group reflection and action, once attendees have connected over the course of the conference. A good group spective’s energy and ideas honestly represent the outcomes of the group’s time together. While a peer conference concentrates on and supports each attendee’s individual journey, that journey would go nowhere without the contributions from the other people present. This is the paradox and beauty of the peer conference process, the blending of individual and group work into a single, complex, and fascinating event.