You are talking to a highly-educated member of the Latin American professional or executive classes about the difference between meetings and conferences in his country and those in the English-speaking world. You have been surprised at the lack of any two-way communication, the total absence of the use of flip charts and simple facilitation skills, for example.You lament the lost opportunities for dialogue or mutual learning. You say that 'at home' there are Flip-Charts in most offices, training centres, in team-rooms, in business, in government, in schools, police-stations, universities, in the city, in the country. Even if they are used only as a rough note-pad, for a daily “To-Do” list for an office, or messages, or reminders, or to record an idea, they are useful tools.
You have been checking out the presence or absence of flip charts as you go around the city: and there are none to be seen. Yet, used with the minimum of facilitation skills, on a planned basis, they enhance the quality of team-dialogues and thus team-efficiency, improve group problem-solving, planning, decision-making, dilemma-resolution, idea-generation, information-sharing and leadership potential.
You become aware that your companion does not really understanding a word of what you are saying. “What is a 'flip-chart?'', s/he asks. You then have the kind of conversation that Bob Newhart immortalised in his classic skit in which you hear a jovially sceptical Elizabethan merchant becoming ever more incredulous as the newly-returned Walter Raleigh tries to phone-sell him the idea that smoking tobacco could become a popular pastime.
I first saw flip-charts used as an aid to new product development and generating ideas for marketing and advertising in the early 1970s. Then, I began working with specialists in Organization Development, Management Training, and Public Participation and flip-charts became a regular feature of our work. It was obvious that the use of flip-charts vastly enhanced the quality of the thinking, the use of its time and the commitment to the agreed outcomes for groups of every size from a mere handful to well over a hundred people.
Meetings and conferences in Latin America are immensely noisy affairs. There is a deafening use of microphones and badly-prepared Power-Point presentations. After half an hour or so, the speakers seem usually to finish their presentations by shouting at the top of their voice, then the audience applauds politely and awaits the next harangue.
For anyone who has experienced the use of some flip charts in a well-designed group-dynamics process, and a modest level of facilitation skills, these events in Latin America are a sad waste of everyone's time, brain-power and energy. If people in Latin America could be helped to use flip charts as they have been for decades in the English-speaking world, they would find that instead of being bored and apathetic the audiences at their conferences and meetings could become much more knowledgeable, energised, engaged and productive.
But first, how do you describe a Flip-chat to people from a totally different culture who have never seen one being used by a skilled facilitator? Are there any pictures out there of groups using flip-charts to show to the skeptics?
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Roy introduces Gaian Democracies: Redefining Globalisation and People Power
