Innovation by SIT

Roni’s story in his latest post reminded me of what was probably the most dramatic moment in my 15+ years of facilitating innovation. I’ve told this to people a few times (not many, because I am pretty ashamed of my role in the event), and they often don’t believe me, but I swear that this happened exactly as it is told here.

It was a pro-bono session in a city in the US MidWest, and the objective was to find innovative ways to improve communications and understanding in the local community, which had been stressed to the point of intermittent violence. The organizers had attempted to statistically represent, within the 16 participants, all segments of the local population according to race, religion, gender, sexual orientation and what not, and had done an excellent job. It was the heterogeneous-est group you could imagine, all of them good intentioned active citizens.

The first day went well, and on the morning of the second day, we opened with an exercise: the group sat on chairs in a circle, except for one person who stood in the middle. This person was asked by me to mention something he remembered from the first day, then pick another participant, ask them to stand up, and sit in their place, and so on.

Each person, in their turn, looked around after they spoke, searched for someone who had not spoken before, and sat in their place, relieved, until one of them stood up, turned to me, and said “That’s it, everyone’s spoken” (meaning, for him, that the exercise was over). Nobody spoke, so I started to give the group my innovation facilitator’s “line” (with one of the insights they were supposed to take from the exercise): “Who says you can’t call on one of the participants for the second time?”. But as soon as I had said that, one of the participants, C., an African American (I guess that’s the PC way to say it these days) said (and I quote verbatim, because I will never forget the moment): “Hey, nobody’s picked any of the black folks yet.”

We all looked at each other. I could literally not close my wide open mouth while I looked around the sixteen faces. The lady was right! There were six black people in the group and not even one of them had been called to get up and talk. And what’s worse, when the last non-black declared there was no one left to call, none of us, including the experienced attentive facilitator, had noticed.

Even now, as I write, I am ashamed to admit it. But there it was, and none of the explanations that were quickly offered by the participants could change the basic fact. In some important sense of the word, we were not seeing some of the people in the group. Literally.

It was, of course, the most important moment of our two days. The incident opened a two-and-a-half-hour unplanned discussion, way more meaningful than anything that my facilitation had been able to elicit, or was about to. Much came up, not easy for all of us (sincerely) well-intentioned participants to hear.

I guess there are quite a number of learnings one can derive from this, and I hope that at least we, those who were there, used the opportunity to grow in some way. In the summary notes the expression “discussing the un-discussable” appears prominently as a major benefit of the entire meeting.

But in addition to (or behind, or below) all the human, racial and political aspects, one of the things I took for my professional life was a frightening consciousness of the huge blinding power and deadly combination of groupthink and preconceptions.

Amnon Levav is SIT’s Managing Director. Amnon works with companies to create and deploy programs for enhancing innovation throughout the organization.

Amnon and the rest of us at SIT would be happy to talk to you about innovation.

Click here to contact us