(This document is about 10 pages long. The reader may be best suited to print the document. Note that the document refers to the Leaders Circles and Authenticity Circles. Leaders Circles are Action Learning-based groups where group members are from nonprofits. Authenticity Circles are Action Learning-based groups where group members are from for-profit or government organizations or are individuals not affiliated with any particular organization. In this document, we use the term "Circles" to refer to either Leaders Circles or Authenticity Circles. See Leaders Circles or Authenticity Circles.)

This document contains the following sections:
Process to Meet Leaders' Unmet Needs in Training and Development Programs
Overall Goal and Premises of Circles
Principles for Transformative and Empowering Learning
Basic Values to Sustain Participant-Driven Process
Structures for Authenticity, Problems Solving and Continuous Learning
Action Learning Facilitation: Its Nature, Pitfalls and Bottom Line
Addressing Members' Complex Issues (Using Systems Thinking to Reframe Issues)
-Reframing Issues Through Ongoing Feedback, Inquiry and Reflection
-Senge's "Ladder of Inference" to Understand Mental Models
Self-Managed Teams of Self-Directed Learners
Bibliography

Process to Meet Leaders' Unmet Needs in Training and Development Programs
The various needs and recommendations explained in the above sections are all interrelated, and suggest integration of recommendations to produce an overall process to address the needs. The following paragraphs in this section present a rather concise description of this resulting process -- essentially the process incorporated by leaders in their Leaders Circles or Authenticity Circles.

Before leaders can effectively lead others, they first must effectively lead themselves, that is, they must effectively cope with the anxieties of leading, maintain a healthy balance in their lives, and be realistic about what they and their organizations can do. The most basic requirement is that they remain authentic in their dealings with themselves and others, including by being completely honest with themselves and others, assuming full responsibility to meet their needs, and fully engaging in processes to meet these needs. These requirements suggest self-development before, or at least concurrent to, other forms of leadership development.

Effective learning occurs around information and materials needed to address current priorities in leaders' lives or workplaces. Therefore, the goals, formats, and strategies of leadership development programs must be driven by the current needs of leaders themselves.

Centering a program around leaders' needs must start with each leader's courageous and honest expression of their own needs. Understanding and expressing their own needs requires a safe, supportive environment that sustains trust and confidentiality. This type of environment is cultivated by each leader's feeling ongoing acceptance, affirmation, and help from others over time. Support and expression further leads to each leaders' full and responsible (authentic) participation and actions in their own problem solving and development (their self-directed learning). Authentic participation includes leaders overcoming their own passivity in their self-development -- passivity so often cultivated by today's instructor-students classroom environments.

One of the best sources of relevant and practical help for leaders is from peers who are experienced in actually leading major efforts themselves. Peers' ongoing help to each other in whatever form necessary leads to each leader's valuing their own wisdom and experiences. This, in turn, further enhances their own courage and authentic engagement in their own development. Ongoing actions, feedback, and reflection provides continuous problem solving and learning for leaders, which, in turn, enhances their effectiveness in their respective leadership roles.

The leverage point in this entire process, that is, the aspect of the process that most strongly affects other aspects, is each member's authentic engagement in their own development. Block, in his book, Flawless Consulting (1981, Pfeiffer and Company), suggests that the single most important requirement in effective consulting is authenticity. He goes so far as to assert that the authentic consultant is a flawless consultant. Terry (1993, p. 127) asserts that authenticity is a primary ingredient in life and leadership because it "contains within itself an impetus to change as it reveals what is denied, discounted, hidden, and misleading."

Overall Goal and Premises of Leaders Circles and Authenticity Circles
The primary goal of the Circles is to meet the ongoing needs of circle members. This requires members' authentic involvement in their circles to express their needs and how their circles can help them to meet these needs. Achieving this authentic involvement requires members' ongoing mutual support to engage wholeheartedly and take responsibility for their development in their circle. This full engagement and responsibility produce each member's highly individualized outcomes. Members' deep learning occurs as a by-product of their authentic involvement and in whatever form needed by each member.

Principles for Transformative and Empowering Learning
Contrary to popular view, "knowledge and understanding ... on their own ... may make little difference to how a person may act differently in the world (McGill and Beaty, 1995, p. 223; the above phrase, "transformative and empowering," is borrowed from their use of the phrase in this book). Senge et. al. (1994, p. 35) agrees: "Until people can make their `work space' a learning space, learning will always be a `nice idea' -- peripheral, but not central."

Revans (1983) explains that true learning spawns from real-world issues addressed by real-world people. After many years of reflection about learning, eminent psychologist, Carl Rogers, founder of self-directed therapy, asserted that "anything that can be taught to another is relatively inconsequential, and has little or no significant influence on behavior" (1961, p. 276). He adds, "The only learning which significantly influences behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning" (p. 276). Knowles (1990), eminent researcher and writer about adult education, explains that adults want to learn mostly what is useful to them and when they need to learn it.

Myles Horton and Paulo Freire strongly believed that it was not an educator's role to "instruct" others; rather, it was to facilitate development of others by (the following is paraphrased from Highlander's mission statement) "bringing people together to learn from each other by sharing experiences to face common problems and develop resources together ..." Both men intended to cultivate empowerment and social action in others. Both men were highly successful in reaching their goal. Horton's Highlander Folk School was responsible for educating 100,000 African Americans to read and write in the 1930s and 40s. Highlander taught them reading and writing, not just for the sake of reading and writing, but "based on the students' needs and desires to gain freedom (Bell, Gaventa, and Peters, 1990, p. xxv)." Paulo Freire is probably responsible for educating more people than anyone else in history using his literacy programs in Brazil. He strongly believed that education held the greatest promise to liberate people, and that education best occurred around information that directly helped people to liberate themselves.

Based on readings about Revans, Rogers, Horton, and Freire, a philosophy for learning was established to represent the philosophy of development for the Circles (with thanks to Highlander for principles 3 and 5):
1. Leadership development begins with the individual.
2. Fellow leaders and managers are true experts, in their own right.
3. If you know your overall goal, the learning will build its own structure and take its own form.
4. Courage occurs when people unite.
5. You make the road by walking -- knowledge leads to actions and experiences, and experiences leads to wisdom.

Basic Values to Sustain Participant-Driven Process
The Circles' primary goal is to meet participants' ongoing needs. Premises for the Circles depict the logic of how the Circles meets this goal. Principles for learning established a philosophy for true development of participants. However, the most critical ingredient for Circles' success is wholehearted participation of members themselves.

To ensure this nature of participation, specific operating values were established early on in the development of the model. These values were purposely established to be few and straightforward. They are itemized on each agenda for each meeting, and serve as a common point of reference around which members reflect on the quality of their Circle's process at the end of each meeting.

Values for members:
1. Participate fully in the circle.
2. Communicate your needs.
3. Tell circle members and the facilitator if your needs are being met or not.

Values for facilitators:
1. Help members clarify their needs.
2. Respect their needs.
3. Help members exchange feedback, inquiry, and resources to meet their needs.

Structures for Authenticity, Problems Solving and Continuous Learning
Senge (1990) reminds us that in a system, the structures determine behaviors which, in turn, determine events. The Circle's process is structured primarily to cultivate full engagement of each member to attain their outcomes and produce their continual learning from members' ongoing feedback, reflections, and inquiry.

To Increase Relevance of Feedback, Members Have Similar Levels of Responsibility or Interest
Similar levels of responsibility or interests ensures that members have common motivation toward similar nature of goals and hopefully common understanding of general concepts, terms, and methods. Consequently, the nature of members' feedback is more relevant and members have higher levels of commitment toward helping each other to reach their goals in their circles.

To Ensure Accessible Means to Development, Members Establish Scheduling and Manage Their Process
The meetings' dates, times, and agendas are controlled by the members themselves. The members can use a designated facilitator to help the circle's process along, or choose to self-facilitate. Members and their designated facilitator, if used, each use a guidebook to help them maximize their circle's process. To enhance trust and confidentiality, the same circle members stay together throughout the life of the circle and the facilitator, if used, stays with the same circle.

To Further Ensure Relevance of Feedback and Development, Use Facilitation and Ground Rules
Circle facilitation, whether conducted by a designated "outside" facilitator or self-facilitated circles, helps members sustain a highly focused process. Primary duties of facilitation are time management and supporting ground rules. Ground rules support trust, confidentiality, and a highly focused process.

To Further Ensure Relevance and Development, Members Promptly Work Toward Their Goals
The life of the circle begins with an approximate three-hour Preparatory Workshop (the first meeting of their circle) in which members are introduced to each other, hear an overview of the circle's process, hear suggestions about maximizing their experiences in their circle, review circle ground rules, begin sharing information about each of their goals from their circle, and set the date(s) and location(s) of their next meeting(s). The Workshop is followed by the meetings in which the circle's process is applied. The last meeting of the circle typically includes a process designed by the circle members and geared to accomplish a sense of closure for each member. The duration of a circle depends on the extent of time in which members are committed to helping each other.

To Ensure Support and Expression of Needs, Individualized Attention for Each Member
In each session, each member uses 20-30 minutes or more time if negotiated from other members, typically in a roundtable approach to work toward their goal. This individualized attention is one of the most critical aspects of the circle process because it assures each member (or presenter) an opportunity to express his or her needs to the circle, thereby taking responsibility for their own development. This individual attention also focuses ongoing acceptance, affirmation, and understanding to the presenter, thereby increasing the support, trust, and confidentiality felt by all members. To further encourage the presenter's engagement in resolving their issue, presenters are encouraged to explain their issue in the here-and-now, using "I" statements in their descriptions, if comfortable.

To Ensure True Learning, Goals and Associated Activities Remain Learner-Driven
Members' goals generally include a) resolving a current major issue in their organization, or b) networking with other members in the circle by reporting major activities in their organization. These two goals are not exclusive. For example, some networking activity is included in addressing major issues. Most members who come to the circle to network, later use the trust and confidentiality in the circle to share and address major issues in their workplace. Members who come to the circle to address a major issue, usually end up addressing their issue over the first few months of their circle membership. These members then take advantage of the established trust and confidentiality in their circle to help other members or share private thoughts about careers and family.

Members address issues ranging from personal to organizational, strategic to operational. It is up to each circle member to select their issue on which to work. However, the more complex the issue, usually the more results and learning accomplished by the circle member. Members choosing to resolve issues generally do so using the nature of the Action Learning process, which includes highly focused feedback and primarily questioning from other circle members. Unlike Action Learning, Circles includes members providing whatever other forms of assistance are deemed to be useful by the issue holder, including suggestions, counseling, information, materials, tools, etc.

For Problem Solving and Continuous Learning, Continued Actions from Members
Usually members choosing to use their circle to resolve a major issue are encouraged to take an action between sessions, however small, toward addressing their issue. Typically, actions are usually other than continued discussions, analysis, ruminating, dialoguing, etc. These types of "active" actions fill numerous roles in the process, including providing experiences around which members reflect and learn, ensuring ongoing engagement and momentum toward resolving problems, and reality testing of members' ideas and strategies. Actions ground theory with practice.

For Further Problem Solving and Continuous Learning, Ongoing Feedback and Reflections Among Members
Questioning plays a primary role in helping other members to address their complex issue; questioning provokes members' reflection and reframing of each of their issues. Members resort to discussion to clarify concepts, take a five- or ten-minute break from a particularly intense exchange, or to make group decisions. Networking, or basically the exchange of information, often occurs when members need specific materials or information. Counseling occurs throughout the process, particularly in regard to abstract and/or personal issues. Additional support takes the form of affirming comments, calls to a member who is struggling, and offers of further help if needed.

For Further Problem Solving and Continuous Learning, Relevant and Timely Resources to Meet Current Needs
Members exchange useful materials and other resources relevant to current issues and major activities underway by members in the circle. These materials and resources are briefly reviewed in the circle mostly to ensure that members are familiar with them enough to apply them later back in their workplaces. This review is brief to ensure sufficient time for each member to have 20-30 minutes, or more time if negotiated from other members, in the meeting.

Occasionally, members request focused information (training) around a certain topic that seems in common to several members' issues. The best format for these information-intensive meetings is to dedicate at most half the meeting to hear about this information (whether from a consultant or a member's presentation) and then use about a quarter of the meeting for members' questions to the information provider. Each meeting ends with a five- or ten-minute status report from each member. Each meeting closes with each member sharing their own reflections on the quality of the process in that meeting.

To Ensure High Quality Process and Further Continuous Learning, Extensive Reflection on Process
Shortly before the end of each meeting, each member openly reflects on the quality of the process in that meeting. This is one of the most critical components in the process and typically generates strong insights about what worked and what didn't. Many key suggestions for improving the circle's process arise during these periods of reflection.

To Further Ensure High Quality Process and Further Continuous Learning, Formal Evaluations About Process, Outcomes and Facilitation
In addition to the reflections at the end of each meeting, each member conducts evaluations of their circle's process, outcomes and facilitation. Evaluations use time-tested questionnaires from program documentation. Evaluations occur shortly after the first three and first six meetings.

Circles' Facilitation: Its Nature, Pitfalls and Bottom Line
Nature of Facilitation in Circles
Circles can choose to have a designated "outside" facilitator or self-facilitate. In Circles, there eventually is little difference between the roles of facilitator and members. The nature of their roles becomes very similar in modeling the circle's process, and providing members ongoing feedback and materials. Some designated facilitators even begin to bring their own complex issues to the circle (with members' permission) where they receive ongoing assistance from other members.

The specific duties of the facilitator role (whether carried out by a designated facilitator or by a self-facilitating circle) are conducting the Preparatory Workshop, time management during meetings, and intervening when ground rules appear to be broken. Casey (1991) suggests certain useful personal characteristics of a good Action Learning facilitator. These characteristics match those required of an effective Circle facilitator, as well, and are paraphrased below.

Preferred Characteristics:
1. Tolerance of ambiguity -- The facilitator must live in a world of uncertainty and must be prepared to allow the members to take control from him/her.
2. Openness and frankness -- An ability to recognize and express one's own feelings in the learning situation, as they arise, may be one of the best skills of a facilitator.
3. Patience -- Have endless patience.
4. An overwhelming desire to see other people learn -- The rewards of the facilitator must be in seeing incremental learning which sometimes takes place very slowly and very personally over long periods of time.
5. Empathy -- A facilitator must have the goal of operating through the heart and mind of a member.

Preferred Skills:
Casey (1991) also suggests some preferred and un-preferred skills among effective facilitators, as paraphrased below:
1. Good listener -- The source of wisdom comes from the Circle's process itself; the facilitator is in a privileged position to be able to observe that process only proportionate to his or her ability to listen, to sense.
2. Unobtrusive manner -- The frequency to which the facilitators directs the process is often the extent to which the circle members are robbed of a chance to learn.
3. Skills in asking good questions -- These are questions which make people think, but at the same time feel challenged and supported rather than criticized.
4. Skill in making statements truthfully.
5. Skill in saying nothing and being invisible.
6. Skills in timing intervention -- Too early and the intervention is not understood; too late and the opportunity has passed.

Skills Usually Not Preferred:
Casey (1991) warns that the following can impede the learning of members:
1. Training skills -- It is no longer necessary to structure the sequence of lessons, and the sequence of materials within a lesson, and sequence of lessons within a term; the curriculum is brought by the circle members in their issues that they work on or networking they do, and the lesson plans are how the circle members choose to pursue their goals in their circles.
2. Presentation Skills -- The more effective the facilitator is at these skills, the more likely that members may see the facilitator as the expert and the less likely that members will continue their roles as leaders in their own development.
3. Fluency -- The priority to use language in an oratorical sense will detract from the facilitator's need to express him/herself in authentic fashion; what he or she is seeing and feeling, even expressed in a stammer, is often far more useful to the circle.

Pitfalls in Facilitating Circles
There are various pitfalls in facilitating Circles, each of which can substantially detract from the responsibility and full participation required of self-directed learners. Each of the following pitfalls is encountered usually because the facilitator mistakes their own needs for those of the Circle members.
1. The Role of the "Expert" -- There is tremendous inertia among trainers to fall back on the "expert" role, which too often cultivates passivity among circle members and a false sense of confidence among facilitators. Usually, one becomes perceived as an expert during training about the circle's process, skills needed in the process, or some topic in regard to a members' issue. Therefore, extensive training by the facilitator or members should be kept to a minimum in circles.
2. The Rescuer Syndrome -- This occurs when a facilitator succumbs to the urge to "rescue" a member who is struggling with a particularly difficult issue. A facilitator might rescue a member by "throwing them" specific directions about what they must do to resolve their issue.
3. Mistaking the Means as the End -- It is very seductive to begin padding the circle's process with seemingly small and incremental "assignments" which, over time, insidiously mutate the circle's process into a traditional instructor-student training program. For example, it may seem highly practical to further support learning by "assigning" learner journals in which members must record what they've learned in each session. It is surprising how quickly members begin filling out these journals because they're "supposed to." They wonder if they're recorded the "right" information and in the "right" format. Introducing applications such as learning journals should be done only after presentation to members for their careful consideration and decision regarding useful application.
4. Self-Satisfaction and Complacency -- "If and when I begin to ... become expert, thinking `I'm getting competent/good/slick at this Action Learning set advising business' then I think it will be time for me to stop, for certainly my own learning will have stopped then" (Hughes, 1991, p. 101).

Paulo Freire, in Pedagogy in Process: The Letters to Guinea-Bissau, provides what might be the most accurate description of the most effective form of help provided by the facilitator role: "Authentic help means that all who are involved help each other mutually, growing together in the common effort to understand the reality which they seek to transform. Only through such praxis -- in which those who help and those who are being helped help each other simultaneously -- can the act of helping become free from the distortion in which the helper dominates the helped."

Bottom Line for Effective Facilitation
Perhaps the most meaningful characteristics to have as a facilitator (or circle member, for that matter) are those that Carl Rogers, humanistic and later existential psychologist, asserts are primary for supporting growth in others. Translating Rogers' advice to the circle's process results in guidelines that participants should: 1) be congruent, fully present in the here and now with no pretense of emotional distance, no professional facade; 2) communicate unconditional positive regard for the uniqueness of the other participants; and 3) express genuine empathic understanding for each other (Pauchant, 1995, p. 221).

Addressing Members' Complex Issues (Using Systems Thinking to Reframe Issues)
Reframing Issues Through Ongoing Feedback, Inquiry and Reflection
Senge et. al. (1994, p. 529) notes that "research directly contradicts" the "assumption that what managers lack most for effective decision making is adequate information." Most members' issues are the result of conflicting inter- or intrapersonal values, strong and threatening emotions, or incompatibly structured organizational systems. Ongoing support, actions, inquiry, and reflection in the circles help members discern these conflicting values, surface threatening emotions, and understand systems currently in place.

Senge et. al. (1994) notes that "reflection is "slowing down our thinking processes to become more aware of how we form our mental models" (p. 237). Inquiry is where we hold "conversations where we openly share views and develop knowledge about each other's assumptions" (p. 237).

Senge adds (p. 237), "The value of these skills is most apparent in their absence. Individuals who are undisciplined in reflective thinking have difficulty hearing what others actually say. Instead, they hear what they expect others to say. They have little tolerance for multiple interpretations of events because they often `see' only their own interpretation." "... people who have not mastered a threshold of inquiry skills will spend hours arguing their ideas. Eventually, in frustration and exhaustion, they end up with some kind of compromise, in which no one wins -- or they defer to the most senior person in the room, who wins through authority ..."

People who have learned to reflect, talk more openly, and make their assumptions explicit typically "have more penetrating conversations, in which talk of strategy always considers their mental models (for example) where the world is going, what customers want, what competitors will do, how the marketplace is evolving, and what technologies exist" (p. 238).

The "ladder of inference" on the following page depicts an order in which many people derive conclusions about the world from what they see and experience. Often, this framework of thinking is directly examined in the circles through members' ongoing feedback, inquiry, and reflections.

Senge's "Ladder of Inference" to Understand Mental Models
Senge et. al. (1994) notes that, "We live in a world of self-generating beliefs which remain largely untested. We adopt these beliefs because they are based on conclusions, which are inferred from what we observe, plus our past experiences. Our ability to achieve the results we truly desire is eroded by our feelings that a) our beliefs are the truth, b) the truth is obvious, c) our beliefs are based on real data, and d) the data we select are the real data" (p. 242). Misguided beliefs often occur somewhere in the "ladder of inference" portrayed below. Note that the ladder proceeds bottom up.

7. I take actions based on my beliefs

6. I adopt beliefs about the world
(our beliefs affect what data we select next time)

5. I draw conclusion(s)

4. I make assumptions based on the meanings I added

3. I add meanings (cultural and personal)

2. I select "data" from what I observe
(our beliefs affect what data we select)

1. I observe "data" from experiences (much as a videotape might capture data)

The ladder takes place in our heads and happens so quickly that we aren't aware of it. The only parts visible to anyone else are the directly observable data (at the bottom of the ladder) and our own decision to take action (at the top). The ladder of inference explains why most people usually don't remember from where their deepest attitudes come. The data is long since lost to memory, after years of inferential leaps.

Circles helps members solve problems and learn primarily through members ongoing feedback, reflection, inquiry, and actions. They:
1. Become more aware of their own thinking and reasoning
2. Make their thinking and reasoning more visible to others
3. Inquire into others' thinking and reasoning
4. Inquire into what is the observable data behind a statement
5. Inquire whether everyone agrees on what the data is

Characterization of Circles: Self-Managed Teams of Self-Directed Learners
Hicks and Bone (1990) explain that a self-managing team "is a work group that operates with varying degrees of autonomy and without a visible manager" and "control comes from within the group, rather than from outside it" (p. 2). Referencing Hackman (cited in Schwartz, 1994, p. 38), Circles qualify as self-managing because members monitor and change their own group processes, norms, and culture. The groups self-manage around common values and according to the nature of the current presenter's need in the meeting. When a member has what appears to other members to be a complex issue other members apply primarily the Action Learning process to help the member address their issue, including by using reflective-based questioning and helping the presenter to take and later reflect on actions. However, when a member does not appear to have a complex issue to address, other members apply techniques other than Action Learning, including questioning to get more information, general discussion, networking (exchanging information and/or materials), counseling (advice, suggestions, and relevant anecdotes), coaching, mentoring, and support.

Circles are highly process-based; the model assumes that if the circle's process is followed, then each member will be much more likely to achieve their own needed outcomes. The process focuses on continual reference around values that cultivate authentic participation; each member receiving individual attention; and the exchange of ongoing support, feedback, reflection, and inquiry between members.

Members' development in Circles is self-directed in nature. The model relies heavily on each member to work with other members to identify each of their own needs or learning objectives, and to work with other members to identify learning activities to meet these needs or objectives.

To find out more, see Leaders Circles or Authenticity Circles.