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Becky and Susan (written by Becky - Susan anything to add?) 

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Becky and Susan (written by Becky - Susan anything to add?) 

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We spent the session brainstorming a few options that either could have worked better with RSD (events that have already happened) or options coming up. For example, one scenario that Becky brought up was the redistricting of our local public schools. There were about 10 sessions where administration could gather feedback from parents. And it was OUT OF CONTROL. RSD could have helped create space for mutual understanding which is what parents wanted and helped Administration get the feedback they desired about all of the viewpoints of the change.

One question that came up for Becky was: How do we talk to people about the goal being mutual understanding when there is so much pressure for action? Or do we let them know that action will come in later sessions?

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Rita (Group with Dana P. and Melika)  CONTINUED from Dana P.'s Post)

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Rita (Group with Dana P. and Melika)  CONTINUED from Dana P.'s Post)

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Plan and Promote
We also needed to know more about the current office space,  equipment, support and administrative functions and staff, client requirements and commitments, and policies concerning flexible work arrangements, etc.) We were also aware that work life balance involved a range of issues -  family support, wellness, medical concerns, child care etc.).

Design -We really did not go into this deeply and assumed that the RSD session would be virtual.

We moved on to the questions and found it was easy to come up with bad questions. The one we chose was "What do moms with two children want to continue working?"
The two good questions were:
.- What do you like to do with your non-work time? (We thought this was important, since work life balance issues involve more than child care and we wanted to develop a question that raised an interest/concern that everyone shared.)
-Describe a time when your organization helped you meet your family obligations..

The issue of post-COVID workplaces is one that is receiving a great deal of attention at the moment. For the consulting company, tackling the issue would be an opportunity to model practices for its clients. The opportunity to model practices is something that many organizations should consider.

One thing that the planning process did not include was evaluation. This is something that interests me, since it is often overlooked. How do you work evaluation into the design of this intervention? What are the outcomes you want to achieve? How do you know if you are successful?

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I used the scenario where an educational center was considering a name change.
Purpose: RSD could be useful in helping stakeholders to understand conflicting perspectives.
People: While alumni and students would have opportunity for their voices to be heard in focus groups, the two most confrontation groups are faculty and administration. Therefore, the RSD process would be directed there.
Promote/Prevent: want to prevent confusion and conflicting needs; therefore, we would hold discussion groups by each individual college to understand their perspective versus a mixture of faculty from all areas. The equitable timing element of RSD will help keep the area focused.
Plan: input collected through May with each department in each of the 8 colleges which estimate the max number in RSD process. We have two RSD facilitators from this program now.
Prepare: must sell this into management and faculty leadership. Extract from the string of communication outlining the pros and cons in order to set up guidelines for the discussion.

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We discussed how the RSD framework might support ongoing organizational culture work Maddie is leading at T-Mobile. While the current issues of focus aren't quite polarizing, the framework could still be helpful as new issues surface.

The people involved would be members of a subset of T-Mobile's Product & Tech organization. This group already exists and has been having conversations about co-creating organizational culture for 6 months.

I'd want to promote feelings of trust and safety around dialogue, as this is currently missing from the culture work. Participants feel safe responding through anonymous online polling tools, but not through spoken conversation in large groups. I'm left considering the voices that are currently heard in our organization and how RSD might be one way to promote more equity here.

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The scenario and purpose we developed was a consulting organization that wanted to hold a dialogue with their employees (all levels) on the topic of: understanding needs and interests for a hybrid work arrangement post-COVID.
We discussed that participation in the dialogue would be voluntary. The planning team would consist of representatives from the management team, HR, Admin, IT, and consultants. As for Promote and Prevent, we discussed the need to collect information related to the topic (e.g., what were past pre-COVID work arrangements).

This is where my notes end. Melika and Rita, please feel free to add your remembrances of our convo.

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To tag on to what Holly shared.... We had both identified several sticky issues that we thought could benefit from RSD. Mine were quite UK (and potentially institutionally) specific. I initially typed in a whole explanation of each issue, but just deleted the whole thing.

While I recognise that the issues are worthy of RSD, I also recognise that the people who are most impacted by these issues are precarious members of staff (on probation, early career researchers, immigrants) who have good reason to fear speaking up and that, while I have power as a senior professor, that power is not positioned adequately to engage those who hold positional power to choose to engage. The issues do not affect them personally, so they see nothing to dialogue about; it is what it is.

I am reminded of Cervero & Wilson's work around power in program planning.... Perhaps I should have selected a different purpose topic around which I could have gone more meaningfully through the 6Ps!

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The idea is to use RSD for a discussion with college's faculty and staff.  The purpose is to collaborate with ideas to develop a college-wide anti-bullying policy.  The Dean would promote the meeting (or perhaps even a retreat) and its purpose.  Pre-planning would include reading relevant research articles and researching the anit-bullying policy statements of other educational institutions.  To prepare the attendees, this research would be shared in advance for them to review and reflect.  We are not sure of the number of dialogue sessions that would be necessary; however, each one should last about 60 - 90 minutes, allowing time for all participants (broken up into small groups, each with a facilitator) to eventually (when the group is ready) to discuss the following 2 dialogue questions:

1.  Describe the circumstances of a time when you felt undervalued and how that made you feel.

2.  Describe the circumstances of a time when you felt pressured to do something that you were uncomfortable doing and how that made you feel.

3. What makes you feel valued in the workplace?

This would then lead to the group's development of an accepted definition of bullying in the workplace.  The next step would be to develop the college's statement of its anti-bullying policy.  (We ran out of time here, so of course, this would take more planning and more dialogue questions to involve everyone.)

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we talked about a few different scenarios to use this technique in our universities and in the community

1. in classroom taking about privilege
2. to replace existing forums to discuss Black staff and/or faculty issues. These usually devolve into gripe sessions (warranted, but not as productive).
3. community meetings around social justice issues

Our takeaways were that we needed to be strategic about the planning of the dialogues.  We can see that this might be a multi year effort to include, for example, the president and provost in these conversations with faculty and staff.

Also, bringing in other qualified RSD facilitators (like the ones in this cohort) would allow for safety for the main facilitator as well as provide security in knowing that the facilitation within the smaller breakouts was performed correctly (as opposed to training someone in the organization).

We also thought this method would be the basis of an excellent grant application!

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We reviewed the purpose of desired topics - was it just important to us and/or more people - i.e. a shared concern.

Topics to apply RSD - faculty review of annual performance process, task force interaction with larger faculty on "belongingness", and faculty discussion about value of undergraduate dissertation work.

A sticking point was where to find RSD trained facilitators. Holly's question about this was that her team participants that are in this training would need/want to serve as participants, so having external facilitators (at least external to her dept) would be needed.

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I asked for us three to work together as they are my colleagues on the AHRD Antiracism Committee. We began the planning process for the AHRD RSD dialogues on Racism: It's Time to Talk. I hope you will join us to get more experience facilitating the RSD process. We got through most of the steps and came up with a good question.
I don't know that we encountered sticky issues so much as thinking about how to sustain this work and how many future dialogues will we hold. We plan to share the communication agreements in advance and ask people to commit to them.