Communication · Executive Insight Brief · 094
Map the authorities outside the meeting
Group performance often depends on permeable boundaries, overlapping memberships, and external mandates that meeting-level interventions cannot reach
Premise
A leadership team can improve its agenda, facilitation, and participation while the decision remains blocked. The reason may sit outside the meeting: competing departmental mandates, absent veto holders, informal advisers, regulatory obligations, or members representing several constituencies at once. Treating the visible participants as a sealed unit produces an incomplete diagnosis.
Linda Putnam and Cynthia Stohl’s Bona Fide Group Perspective changes the unit of analysis. Real groups have recognizable continuity, but their membership and information boundaries are permeable, and they remain interdependent with their environments. For executives, the model asks whether an apparently internal communication problem is being produced by the wider system in which the group operates.
What the model is: Bona Fide Group Perspective in Knowledge →
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- FamilyModel
- CategoryAnalytical Frameworks, Typologies & Heuristics
- DomainGroups & Decisions
What these mean
Editorial orientation · Family
Model
In this series, Model names the editorial family primarily used to understand and explain communication: theories, frameworks, effects, traditions, principles and other conceptual resources. It is an umbrella for a route into the field, not a claim that every included object is a predictive model.
Editorial orientation · Category
Analytical Frameworks, Typologies & Heuristics
Organizes dimensions, distinctions, types or questions so that a situation can be examined systematically. A framework supplies structure, a typology distinguishes forms, and a heuristic offers a usable way to orient judgment.
- KnowledgeBona Fide Group Perspective