It’s human nature to get drawn into the content of what another person says. It’s important. It’s the essence of what they are trying to convey to you. But often, when groups come together, there is such an emphasis on the content of someone’s words and the style in which they are delivered that it keeps us from seeing what really leads groups into difficulties.

Structure, not content, is key.

‘Structural Dynamics’ is a broad term for a body of research that Dr David Kantor began in the 1960s and which has become the lens through which teams, individuals and systems can notice ongoing patterns emerging in their face-to-face communication.

These patterns are universal and can be picked out in a boardroom, a playground, over dinner with friends; in fact in any environment where people are in conversation with one another.

David describes it as the unconscious structure which sits behind all human exchange and – whether acknowledged or not – it affects the outcome of the conversation. In fact he goes as far as to say that ‘these structures are the most significant predicators of the outcome of any verbal interaction’.

As a practitioner of Structural Dynamics (SD), I recently found myself, quite unusually, in a board meeting of a leadership team who spoke Spanish. I don’t speak a word of Spanish and I was without a translator. My colleague, a native Spanish-speaker, who is also an SD practitioner, was observing what was happening within the group who were wrestling with the important issue of a breakdown in support for their strategic direction as an organisation. It was their hope that he might be able to help them understand their group dynamics and why they were finding working together so challenging.

I found myself watching and listening to the patterns of communication – who spoke, for how long, their tone of voice, the person who spoke immediately after they did, the people who chose not to speak at all. I watched the leader’s interaction with the group, their response to him and their response to one another. I found myself starting to take notes about the patterns I noticed.

Structural Dynamics is partially based upon being able to hear the words spoken to inform a diagnosis of the patterns emerging, but even without knowing what the words meant, a startling thing happened.

As we left the meeting, my colleague asked me if I had been able to discern any of what had been happening. I read out the notes I took; the patterns in Structural Dynamics terms that I suspected had been present and what might need to happen in order to change those patterns.

Amazingly, everything that I had written, he had also observed. There was nothing in my summary that he disagreed with and it formed the majority of what he had also written. It’s true that he had noticed some additional structures by virtue of understanding the content of the conversation but these points were small in number and were not at the heart of the dysfunction that the team were experiencing.

The issue was structural and universal in nature and the way to unstick it was equally as obvious to me as it was to him, even without hearing the content.

At its most basic level, Structural Dynamics examines the following four ‘action stances’:

• A move: initiates action or suggestions a direction
• A follow: validates and completes an action
• An oppose: challenges and corrects the action
• A bystand: provides perspective on the interaction and tends to reconcile competing views.

In the most effective dialogues, each of the action stances are present in some way. Teams tend to value one over the other and many conversations take place without one of them present entirely.

At your next meeting consider what combinations of these exist in your team. Are any of them missing or overused? What patterns do you see played over again and again?