The Ten Chairs
Introduction (gallery)
The ten chair routine is for exploring aspects of a group or a team. It is essentially a vehicle to facilitate good conversations about the constituent parts of a team or group that you might belong to, lead or work within. Though you may initially be doing this by yourself – keep in mind that the final stage is a chat, preferably with a colleague or friend.
As the title suggests, chairs, or more accurately, images of chairs provide the visual substance for this totemic routine. There are ten chairs and these are to be worked with to explore something of your individual experience and mindset over teamworking and how this colours your approach.
Teamworking is a familiar aspect of life irrespective of what you currently do: a great deal of life is lived in and as part of a group, family life, education, and sport being the most common. At work, most activity is centred around a team or group of some description. Most of what happens to create, maintain and sustain and even damage our world occurs as a collective. Even if you work autonomously on your own, you will still, in order to operate effectively, be a part of and rely upon a network of others.
The skills learnt to be a good team member are mostly acquired through active participation in teams and groups. Though some theoretical understanding of how team dynamics operate might mean we are more savvy, it will not necessarily lead us automatically to reflect on our own contribution. Our implicit and more tacit knowledge plays a significant role in shaping our perceptions: it has to be remembered that we don’t all understand the same things even when we have encountered a bit of new knowledge at the same time and in the same form.
Our past experience and expertise, a familiarity with a set of circumstances or culture, the unique aspects of personality that make us an individual – all these are constants in any teamworking circumstance. So it is that these largely intangible aspects of teams profoundly influence and affect the more obvious understandings that there will be about the nature of any team. Any notion of true objectivity is actually really rather mythic!
To think about some examples.
When you join a group, some members might make you feel rather rapidly at home, so your understanding about the group will be coloured by who these individuals are and whereabouts they sit in any hierarchy and what they actually do.
Some individuals in a team may be just hard to communicate with – the specific tasks you are responsible for might mean that you don’t easily come into contact, and after a bit you might stop trying to get to know them – or it might be that they only operate virtually. However, your overall perspective might be less well rounded which might affect your assumptions and as a consequence your own contribution.
When you find yourself with the responsibility of selecting new team members, you could be initially drawn to those individuals who share some similarities with you. Feeling an affinity with an individual is merely to be human but in a work context not necessarily does it make for an optimum decision. Regularly the role of headhunters is to avoid this – they look not only for expertise but for a well rounded fit within a team.
A seasoned chairman should know that board members need to bring diverse perspectives: board discussions should be constructive but not always harmonious. A chairman’s role is to orchestrate this to good effect. Total homogeneity across any group who work together will have unseen weaknesses.
How to do the Ten Chair Routine.
Basics
There are three stages to working with the visual images in any Totemic Routine. They are not exactly totally discrete from one another but there is a sequence that must be followed if the final conversation aspects are to be fully realised.
First, the images serve you as triggers in a kind of counterpoint conversation held internally in your head to familiarise yourself with the theme.
Second, they serve you as you refine your thoughts and perspectives and use them as markers and handyhooks in a kind of thought plot.
Third, the finalising of an assembly of images or plot serves you as a start point to kick off a conversation and illustrate the way you explored the theme and where it led in terms of thoughts, directions and conclusions.
Particularly at this third stage the metaphoric nature of the routine makes it possible to hold a conversation where simultaneously there can be great clarity and yet still great plasticity. Almost the ability to be in two places at the same time! Here is where new insights arise and where preferences and prejudices emerge and can also merge, conflicting opinion can surface minus confrontation. Using a totemic routine is just gentler.
To use this routine with members of an existing team, each individual completes Stages One and Two by themselves, perhaps pairing up with a team mate toward the end of Stage Two. Stage Three sees the team reconvene. If the team is small, good conversations can be managed by the group themselves, though it is advisable to agree a broad process and allow about an hour or so. With a larger team an experienced facilitator is a good idea.
The Theme – Ten Chair Routine – The Workings of a Team
The task is to select a small core working team where you will be a member. You will be using the chair images as metaphors as you select for the broad characteristics and capabilities that will be required. Don’t get too hung up over detailed expertise – keep it broad brush. You must remember to include your own characteristics and capabilities and you could be at any level – you may well be the leader but not necessarily. What is important though is that you are familiar with, and have knowledge of, the team’s purpose.
Doing the Routine
The total time required for Stages One and Two of the routine is about forty five minutes to an hour.
Stage One
Look at the images of the ten chairs – spend enough time looking so that you have broad recall of what they look like and could briefly describe most of them.
Notice the chairs that you are naturally drawn to or, if you look away, that you have greater recall of. Notice too those chairs that you have instinctively dismissed.
Next, in an anecdotal and quite lighthearted fashion think about these ten chairs as having human type characteristics – the big idea types, the attention to detail types, the awkward question types, the inclusive good listener types and so on. The chairs are now beginning to do their job, serving as metaphor – being totemic.
Now, make a first pass on your preferences for team capability characteristics by selecting three chair images and note down what types they are metaphorically serving as. Ask yourself whether you are already in this selection.
Rather rapidly, look for a further two chairs, thinking all the while as to whether you have rounded out your team.
Once you have five chairs make a note as to what each of them is serving as, remembering that the chairs are standing as a metaphoric representation of the characteristics and capabilities of a team member – then make a quick note as to how these fit together as team dynamics. Then stop and take a break for at least 15 minutes.
Stage Two
As you return, remember that this stage is also an opportunity to glean something of yourself when it comes to teams. Has your initial selection allowed you to catch a glimpse of your own strengths and weaknesses? Anyway, this is the moment to mull and try out differing options and swaps in the spirit of “what if”.
Look at your selected five chairs and look at the five you didn’t select: try a couple of variations -don’t agonise or overthink and be prepared to trust a hunch or intuition. Can you see yourself in the characteristics you assigned to one chair, or can you see yourself in more than one
Could a chair you utterly dismissed provide a characteristic or capability that feels rather foreign to you, not easy to manage or get along with. And while you are still reflecting, select a chair that is outside your comfort zone and try it out alongside your five.
You will know when pretty much have your selection – this is when the chairs sit well together and feel just about right. Now make a little diagram or plot of the roles that the chairs are serving as, to include where you are, where the leadership is, and an indication of the process that creates output.
If it would be appropriate, this is when you might first search out a friend or colleague to act as a sounding board and chat about how you see things. Then reflect again and make your absolute selection of five chairs. At this point, you can if it helps add a sixth chair, serving as a kind of occasional team member.
Stage Three
This is the time to seek out conversation with colleagues, teammates and friends.
Remember: Theodore Zeldin says of conversation
“when minds meet they don’t just exchange facts: they transform them”.