Fish Bowl
(adopted from Peter Senge)

I love fish bowl. It is a problem solver, particular for strong opposing views. Although people do not always see instantly the benefit of it - there is often a moment of awareness that comes sometimes even days after people had been exposed to Fish Bowl. It is the task of the trainer to emphasise this moment of awareness. In my experience as a facilitator, I learned that you need to introduce this tool carefully and to explain the objectives an the benefit.

Fish Bowl can be a part of leadership training. I would love to see it more often used in practice, because it works wonderfully. It originates from the theory and practice of dialogue and is described in the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook of Peter Senge.

The objective of the tool is to find common ground for a controversial issue, to learn how structures determine outcome, and to learn giving and receiving feed back.

Step 1:

Announce that there will be a dialogue on a controversial issue.

Ask each participant of your group to look around for another person they want to be coached by. So, you end up in pairs. If your number of participants is odd, nominate one as an independent observer of discussion culture.

In real life, you would start a fish bowl when an issue is controversially discussed among the team members and no agreement is in sight. In a training workshop you would select a topic from which you expect that the participants would hold strong and opposing views.


Step 2:

The pairs retreat for 10 minutes. They prepare for the first round for the following dialogue in which one of the participants will take part actively, the other will be the observer and coach. In the preparation phase the coaches ask their partners about their views on the chosen topic, on their intended discussion strategy. Are they prepared to change their view? What are their expectation for a good outcome of the dialogue?


Step 3:

Form two concentric circles of chairs. The team members who have been chosen to participate in the first round of the dialogue take a seat in the inner circle, opposite to their coaches who will sit in the outer circle, facing their partner. Give the start signal for the dialogue. Do not intervene for the next 20 minutes and then stop the dialogue.


Step 4:

The partners retreat again. The coaches give their feed-back about what they had observed during the dialogue - with emphasis on the communication culture of their coachee.


Step 5:

Depending on the time and the outcome achieved so far, you have two choices: Either the same round meets again and continues their dialogue for another 20 minutes - then you would look for changes in communication styles; or, the roles change and the coach will be coached and then sit in the inner circle. Or, you do both steps subsequently.


Step 6:

Debrief. In a training course, focus on the meta level and discuss the change in communication culture. In a real life situation, the way you continue the process depends on the outcome of the fish bowl.