The Stages of Small Group Action

October 31st, 2007 Posted in Concepts, The People, Group, Cadre Functions, Small Group, Focused Group

For a short while I did group interviews for commercial firms trying to hone their advertising messages to consumers. I worked for two very bright psychologists, decent men making an independent living for themselves and their families. At the time I was very grateful for the work. Now I would advise everyone to avoid such work as much as possible since the results of the research are closely held by the client companies and corporations and are intended to assist them in manipulating the desires and behavior of publics. Value and advantage held by the commercial or governmental or political cadre is to the potential detriment of the people. Try as much as possible to work only projects whose results are completely open and available to everyone. Even those who are recruited as subjects and informants in this kind of research should have a care. Do not cooperate with any unidentified and secretive cadre. If results are not fully open to the people, the people should not contribute. At the same time I understand the need for work and wages as a powerful incentive and as an extenuating excuse. The usual guilty with an explanation.

The small group interview is a simple concept–a way of tapping into the people’s creative process. Eight or ten persons of known demographic and social identities are gathered together and questions and issues are proposed for discussion. It is a sharing with others in a fun learning experience and the sponsor pays a modest stipend on top.

The groups are dedicated to discussion. The action is mainly with the voice, focused talk. Members sit in an irregular circle with a moderator. Several observers representing the sponsor occupy the periphery. This is the social order (participants, moderator, observers) out of which the voice pattern emerges. The topics posed for discussion vary considerably–commercial, political, administrative, covering belief, experience, opinion or value. My work was concerned with such things as the use of keyboard door locks, or the attitudes of game hunters, or consumer attitudes toward different products. Each research project involved the same series of issues discussed by several different groups. The moderator would set the stage and broach the questions and through permissiveness and interest and encouragement urge the members on to a discussion. After about two hours he would close out, thank the group and all go home. The analysis required a review of the tape recordings of the verbal action to identify patterns of attitude, opinion and experience.

We produced talk and the states I discovered described the different states the group’s combined voices could take. There are five attributable to the members.

–Silence, meaning no voices.

–Babble, meaning two or more voices jabbering at once.

–Lecturer, meaning a single voice dominating, overbearing and persistent.

–Orderly, meaning one different voice at a time without accumulation of meaning.

–String, where the orderly sequence of different voices produces an accumulation of meaning toward an original and unexpected outcome.

Silence indicates a resistance to the task and the moderator. Or maybe it’s only a pregnant pause, a gearing up for the output to come. It can be a very stressful interlude, especially for the moderator who, unlike the classical psychotherapist, cannot wait it out. He must quickly intervene and hector and challenge the group onward and upward. The talk is the data.

With babble a general excitement–something unusual or unexpected happens and the members turn to each other privately to share or the group is bored and falls away from its unity. Some members may have little experience of the group face-to-face meeting against the intimate two-person confab and not have the patience to let the larger order develop. Some few people habitually do not have the willingness to hear the other out and immediately counter-talk, like counter-punch, over what the other has introduced. Babble may be appropriate at a social party where the several conversations at once provide the buzz, the background noise indicating energy and setting a covering ambience. But in a discussion group it brings the ongoing process to a halt. The moderator has to intervene and instruct. “One at a time please.”

The lecturer also suppresses the possibility of the whole. If we wanted his or her opinion alone, a direct one on one interview would be enough. If this lecturer actually is a specialist, say a professional deep-sea sailor in a group convened to discuss boats, once his bona fides are visible the rest of the group will defer and ask questions and listen raptly. But usually the lecturer is a windbag egocentric who has no interest in any other person’s vision and if permitted will hog the time and block the process. The moderator must use his authority to keep this disrupter in place.

With silence, babble and lecturer in check the group can move on to its assigned work. But this does not mean the group’s capacity for creative output will be achieved. Without focused interest from all, the orderly process will be stilted and non-cumulative. The experience is that of dragging, holding back, remaining conventional, talking cant, hovering within common sense It is only when the group’s attention, interest and energy is projected on the same issue that the string emerges, each voice articulated clearly, voice following voice, one idea leading to another. The group has a sensed unity: members in accepting each other are permissive and unselfconscious. And we come, as a work-worn woman in a William Carlos Williams’ poem, (“Kora in Hell, Improvisations”) through the dark and dreary on to an unexpected hilltop. We reach an new and unexpected idea, an insight that the group in itself has constructed. It can’t be forced, demanded. We can only strive for conditions that will allow it to emerge.

But the voice of the moderator is also part of the small group’s plural order (masked as the acts of an outside observer and therefor supposedly not counted). When he uses his position and voice to influence the group process at least two additional stages surface. They are stages of cadre function. (See our discussion of cadre in the three posts prior to this one.)

Moderation is a series of acts of control through definition. The stage is set, rules promulgated and policing occurs as necessary to suppress hijacking (the lecturer), to prevent dissolution (babble), and to overcome resistence (silence).

Question involves introduction of topics and the energy to encourage the group in its task.

So the discussion group can take at least seven stages. For completeness we must note the possibility of interventions by the observers, who more usually are the ghosts at the banquet. There is also the possibility of the group shifting to other, perhaps unexpected, orders of purpose, like the horse taking the bit in his teeth and galloping off. This would involve a change in the social order and in the locus of the cadre functions. A hint of this otherness sometimes turns up in the informal get-together after the formal session.

The social order, and the verbal product as stages, and the content in the ideas expressed, sum up any small group session as a plural experience. I have placed a high value on the string but objectively any state is as valid as any other.

In psychology there is free association where censorship of self is cast off and verbal productions, ideas of one individual, tumble out in an unselfconscious sequence and turn toward a symbolic expression of a bound and usually unconscious energetic. In the focused group’s string this free association is approximated and a symbolic combination previously unvoiced is expressed. It is transitory, but when it is reached it is exhilarating for all involved–an unusual moment.

This characterization of small group’s states can only be applied to the focused discussion group. Other types (classes) of small groups will have their own range of plural states depending upon specific social order and task. In a formal educational setting, for example, with the teacher as moderator, the disruptive student could represent the lecturer state. But more usually expect each type of the small group to have its own menu of plural states. An open research space.

Go for it.