Unpacking a Workshop Activity: "Last Man Standing," Communication Styles, and Resistance

On Friday, I participated in a Professional Development workshop conducted by the "soft skills" side of our department.  I belong to the technology side.  My side teaches tech skills; the "soft skills" people teach people and personal skills.  The workshop title was "Interpersonal Communication."

I decided to take this workshop for a couple of basic reasons.  Once a week (or less often, if we're lucky), we have "Huddles"--meetings with the whole group, which includes both groups of trainers, people who design online training, administrative support, and directors.  Unfortunately, because our main director is on the "soft skills" side of things, the emphasis tends to be on things that really don't concern the tech trainers, which is irritating, and frequently, there are unexplained references to things taught by the soft skills people.  So, for example, different members of the department were being referred to as "dove" or "peacock" in order to explain certain traits that the exhibited.  Eventually, I learned that the birds were representative of communication styles as taught in the "Interpersonal Communication" class, so I signed up for the 3-hour class (which our director has since made mandatory).

On the other hand, communication is sort of what I do.  For years, I taught composition and rhetoric, until I had a pretty good command of key rhetorical concepts like "appeal" and "resistance."  Audience has been an interest of mine since long before graduate school--specifically, the ways in which fiction authors place their readers in certain roles using narrative clues like direct address.  One of the things I want to return to is audience engagement by way of open-ended questions or lack of resolution in fictional narratives.  I am pretty adept at written communication.  So on the one hand, a class on "Interpersonal Communication" simply provides a new vocabulary to discuss something that already interests me.

Finally, I am painfully introspective and enjoy considering categories.  So personality types and communication types are a lot of fun--as long as they don't result in typing and stereotyping.  I can "own" the INFP label that Meyers-Briggs assigns, but if people are given advice on how to circumvent my most "peacock" tendencies, or if I stand to be brushed aside in meetings because I'm a "peacock" (thing "persuader"--not my term--rather than flashy and arrogant, though that implication is impossible to avoid), then I have a problem with the categories.  But figuring that I could learn something useful, I signed up.

I see immediate applications for personality types and communication styles in undergraduate education, as I do believe that raising--and shaping--self-awareness in students is a valuable part of humanities education, but more on that later.  Right now, I want to focus on one particular activity, which we learned as a group when an outside trainer came last July to teach us how to be better facilitators (not really something that was useful for tech trainers, who simply show-and-tell).  It is called "Last Man Standing"--though shouldn't it be "Last Person Standing," or "Last Group Standing"?

In the context of the particular class, we were asked about barriers to communication.  Each table (a group of 3 or 4) was asked to brainstorm as many possible barriers to communication as they could, writing each one on a post-it note.  When the time (about 4-6 minutes) was up, we were asked to arrange our post-its into groups.  Then, each group picked a representative to go to the front of the class and take turns placing a post-it on the board.  Duplicates were not permitted, so if one team had "technology," another team could not get credit for having "technology" as well--or a term that was judged as too close to "technology," eg. "technophobia" or "technological innovation."  As the game progressed, team after team will run out of unique contributions, and the game is over when one team is left standing with additional unique ideas.

It wasn't particularly well-executed in this workshop for a number of reasons.  First, our instructor (and my co-worker), who tends to be a bit too self-conscious in spite of the fact that he is basically as competent as anyone else, called in another trainer, who designed the course, to be the "judge" and determine whether the particular post-it term was permissible or whether it had already been used.  As she is a very "inside the box," more-restrictive-than-literal-interpretation kind of person, she wound up overturning more possibilities than she should have, closing down rather than opening up the discussion in a number of ways.  For example, the facilitator could not see how "politics" could be a barrier to communication, and interpreted "having an accent" as being indistinguishable from "culture."  Although he didn't think about it--and possibly others didn't either--he rather compromised his own credibility as an instructor by bringing her in as an "expert" rather than facilitating the exercise himself.  By facilitating the exercise himself, he would have made certain that the kind of classroom dynamic he was working to create was preserved.

In a work environment, people are already more deflated and defeated, and more easily accept when their ideas are shot down.  Not so in an undergraduate classroom--or really, in any environment in which inquiry and free-exchange of thought is supposed to be valued.  Closing off possibility breeds resistance because people feel their ideas are not understood or valued.  I can tell you that that is where I was during parts of the activity, and though I have been accused by students (education majors, who had their own reasons for resistance to my children's literature course) of "needing to learn that mine was not the only valid opinion," I am very careful to let literature and composition students give their interpretations, and to respond to them in some way.

The other major flaw in how the activity was facilitated is that although participants were instructed to put terms into groups according to which were similar, the grouping was not exploited at all.  It's a related problem, really.  Instead of shutting people down, the broader categories could be used to shape the game board.  So instead of saying that "having an accent" was the same barrier to communication as "culture," "culture" should have been the broad category (placed at the top of the board) under which "having an accent" or "language" or "respect for elders," etc. would fall.  So "texting" might be a subset of "communication" rather than being thrown out altogether.  The discussion becomes not only more satisfying for all participants, but more comprehensive.

Aside from the problems with its execution, this exercise has great potential as an entry point for discussions of rhetoric, particularly appeal and resistance.  The initial question might be the same: what are barriers to communication?

The game might start with the following instructions:  "Think of a time when you were reading an article/surfing the internet/browsing Facebook/listening to a speech or a commentary, and something made you want to stop listening.  You might have started thinking about counter-arguments rather than focusing on what was being said.  Think about how you felt and why.  This is resistance.  Now, with your group, brainstorm all of the reasons why you or someone else might feel resistant to a particular message, how it was being delivered, or a speaker."

This approach narrows the "barriers to communication" somewhat, rooting it in a particular experience.  This might be good because it creates immediacy.  But it might be bad because it asks students to remember being irritated, and this might not be the best way to get started.  It would depend on the class dynamic and how comfortable the teacher felt with the students.

An alternate scenario might be, "Think of a time when you were having a conversation with someone.  After a while, you realized that you were no longer listening to what they were saying.  What makes someone stop listening or paying attention in conversation?"

I think I might simply leave it at "barriers to communication" to see what would happen.

The rest of the exercise would remain the same:  write each one on a post-it note; group like terms; designate a group leader, and take terms placing the post-it notes on the board.  I would recommend to the groups that they look for broad categories first and place them at the top of the board.  As more specific barriers to communication were mentioned, they could be categorized.  Then, discuss.

As a follow-up, rather than simply reiterating the barriers, we would address how writers anticipate and overcome barriers to communication by considering the rhetorical situation and appeals.  When a writer anticipates a barrier, ignoring the barrier is an option, but not the best strategy, especially for a writer without authority (and all writers start out lacking authority).  So strategies for overcoming a perceived barrier to communication (which we're going to call resistance) include neutralizing the resistance in some way--by citing authorities that the resistant audience will accept, perhaps--or addressing the barriers directly, using the perceived communication barrier ("I may sound like your mom, but..."), explaining it ("Our views are different because they are shaped by our experience. Let me tell you where I'm coming from so that you can relate to my perspective, and realize why you are different."), or proposing common ground ("We have differences, but the similarities are what matter.")  I would likely want to assign a reading that did address difference directly--something like "Serving the Purpose of Education" by Leona Okakok (Harvard Educational Review 1989).

Another possibility would be to prepare a series of mini-prompts with scenarios:  "You are explaining X to someone who thinks Y."  "You are explaining your reasons for wanting to break curfew to a parent."  "You are explaining why a friend who hates fantasy should read Harry Potter."  Etc. Then, have the students either 1) brainstorm ways to convince that particular resistant audience, or 2) write a short paragraph that attempts to overcome resistance.  The prompts might be more or less political or socially relevant, but "Explaining to an white Evangelical Protestant male from Texas why he should support Gay Marriage" just opens up potential for stereotypes, so the situations would have to be extremely well-fleshed out in order to avoid bigotry. I would stick to scenarios that were more or less neutral, like the Harry Potter example, or universals, like parent-child dynamics.  Another good one might be "Convince a die-hard Windows user of the superiority of Mac OS," but that could also get heated...

Anyway, the point of the exercise is twofold--to demystify, and to get the conversation started.  Also, there may not be enough "fun" competition in the undergraduate classroom.  Group activities often feel stale and forced, or devolve into opportunities to socialize.  I think the "Last Group Standing" activity has the added potential to increase students' comfort level with each other, and with the active role that they play in the course.