Words We Use: Groups, Meetings, Facilitation, Collaboration

Wow! I wish the Google Books Ngram Viewer was around when I wrote my essay, Group Facilitation’s “Golden Age”, in which I tracked a few measures of growth and development in the world of group facilitation. Here are a few simple examples of readily available Ngram analyses.

Note: Apparently the Ngram Viewer graphs are not visible in Internet Explorer. Try Firefox or Chrome.

The following graph shows that, in Google's corpus of English books published between 1800 and 2008, the term "group effectiveness" first appeared in 1898; its frequency peaked in 1974. "Meeting management" and "group facilitation" first appeared in 1920 and 1921 respectively and seem to have recently plateaued. "Group facilitator" first appeared in 1947, "workshop facilitator" in 1969, and "meeting facilitator" in 1976, all still increasing in use. "Group process," which first appeared in 1894, is in such greater usage that I decided to show it on a separate graph.

The terms that appear in the title of this blog occur much more frequently. All were already in use in 1800. I find it interesting that use of "communication" dropped between 1860 and 1930 while use of the terms "consensus" and "collaboration" grew. Also interesting is that of the latter two terms, "consensus" was more widely used except between 1914 and 1972, when "collaboration" was more widely used. Most noticeable is the bump in use of "collaboration" from 1938 to 1948 when, I suppose, it was used in the context of "collaboration with the enemy."

For more information about the underlying data and how to perform this analysis visit the Google Books Ngram Viewer. Please let me know if you find some interesting results.