Co-Creative Power

Good News for Facilitators

2011-12-20T15:07:00.001-08:00

Is this you? You already know how to prepare and facilitate short, productive and focused meetings. What you're keen to do now is expand your current skills to facilitate meetings of longer duration, with diverse participants to achieve more involved and complex outcomes.

Good news!You don't have to start every meeting agenda from scratch. For most broad meeting purposes (issue resolution, problem solving, action planning, process improvement), it is very helpful to follow a step by step, systematic framework to design your facilitation process and select the right facilitation methods for the work. Just like architects need blueprints to successfully build a house, facilitators need well-thought out designs for their meetings.

And even better! With a carefully designed meeting, almost 98% of all problems and interpersonal dynamics can be pro-actively handled before your participants even show up in the room. At the end of this course, you will be able to custom-design meetings for problem-solving, issue resolution, and action planning meetings to build common ground and group consensus. And you will have a deeper understanding of how to prevent dysfunction and dynamics before the meeting begins.

Register now for The Agile Facilitator: Building Consensus Around Issues and Problems.

Check out Our 2012 Course Roster

Still Time to Register

2011-10-18T10:04:00.001-07:00

Greetings!

Bring life to your in-person meetings with graphics, and to your virtual meetings with interactivity. Discover why our approach consistently earns rave participant reviews!

We Deliver Empowering - Engaging - Energizing Programs!

The use of graphics and visuals is at the leading edge of methods to enhance participant engagement, focus, understanding and retention. Enhance your facilitation competencies with simple yet powerful ways to incorporate visuals in your next facilitation.

You have to hurry though! There are only 4 spaces left.

Register below now.

The Artful Visual Facilitator

Bringing Meeting Results to Life with Graphics!

THE ARTFUL FACILITATOR is a fun, easy, hands-on introductory program on using basic visuals, graphics and images in your facilitation. In this highly interactive two-day course led by graphic recorder Avril Orloff, you will learn the basics of graphic language and its potential to enhance your facilitation effectiveness. Designed to build confidence in incorporating graphics and visuals into the meetings you facilitate, the session is chockful of opportunities to put your knowledge into practice.

Register Securely Online

When: November 3-4, 2011

Program Leader: Contact Avril Orloff: (604) 876-8418 or a.orloff@shaw.ca.

Where: The Granville Island Hotel, Vancouver, BC

"Loved Avril's style - the course was fun, informative and skill-building, and very realistic!"

The Virtual Facilitator

Leading Interactive TeleCalls and Webinars

Do you also lead Virtual Meetings, Classes or Webinars? Join our next online/tele-class series and gain tremendous value and insights into effective virtual meetings.

THE VIRTUAL FACILITATOR is an eLearning / TeleClass program on how to get great results from virtual meetings, whether TeleCalls or Webinars, through effective design, facilitation of engaging process, and right use of technology. This series of three 1.5 hour interactive teleclasses on consecutive weeks offers a practical foundation in the secrets to facilitating Great Virtual Meetings.

Register Securely Online

When: November 10, 17, & December 2nd (Note: Change in date to avoid US Thanksgiving on Nov. 24th)

Webinars from 8:00 am to 9:30 am, Pacific Time

Where: Virtual Teleconference and Webinar Learning Program (access coordinates provided upon paid registration)

Program Leaders: Brenda Chaddock and Myriam Laberge

Call Brenda Chaddock, (604.929.4290) for information or email Myriam Laberge M.A., IAF Certified Professional Facilitator.

"Outstanding experience - well organized, well executed, and great value! Modelled excellent facilitation and the teamwork that makes virtual interactions engaging." -- MH

Research indicates that as much as 50% of time spent in meetings is often unproductive, lacking focused outcomes or respectful interactions. Whether you or your staff facilitates meetings at work, in the community, or in multi-stakeholder settings, solid facilitation skills are the antidote to wasted meetings.

Hope to see you at one of our upcoming programs!

Great Virtual Meetings

2011-10-06T11:00:00.002-07:00

It Takes More Than Technology!

Spending more time in virtual meetings? Hosting more webinars and web conferences? Striving to transform your in-person instruction to virtual classes? Technology alone won't guarantee great meetings or classes. The secret to Great Virtual Meetings/Classes depends on Right Technology + Solid Preparation + Interactive Process.

Tip for designing any interactive virtual meeting, think SIT:

Short - Virtual participants/audiences can't stay attentive and energized for more than 1 to 1.5 hours.

Interactive - Send out appropriate information before and after the meeting. During the live portion of the virtual meeting, keep participants actively engaged through interactive exercises rather than just lecturing or pushing information. (e.g., input, brainstorming, feedback, discussion, interactive panel, creative problem-solving, etc.)

Tight Focus - Chunk your agenda down into smaller segments. As needed, schedule a series of shorter virtual meetings to ensure participants stay focused and engaged.

Take our upcoming class, The Virtual Facilitator to build your virtual meeting facilitation and virtual class instruction competencies. At the end of your time with us, you will be able to design and facilitate engaging, productive and focused web meetings and virtual classes.

How to Facilitate Virtually

2011-09-29T09:17:00.001-07:00

A New Competency for the New Economy

More and more organizations are turning to TeleCalls, Virtual Classes, Web Conferencing, live Virtual Meetings and Video Conferencing to achieve their goals. The compelling reasons behind this push are:

Easy Attendance: Wherever you are, if there is a telephone/computer, you can attend a TeleClass or Webinar.
Save Time & Money. The cost of airfare, hotels, restaurant meals, travel time and incidentals are eliminated.
Hassle-Free: No commuting hassles...no rush hour traffic to deal with...no parking problems. A one-hour meeting is just 1 hour. No commuting or parking time (or costs!).
Better Quality of Life. You can work from home (or somewhere more exotic!), and conduct your business meetings in cyberspace.
Broad and Diverse Participation. Aligned with the new global economy, geography is not a barrier to meeting attendance of partners, suppliers, consumers and employees from anywhere in the world.

What's not to like?

Quite a lot, actually. Virtual meetings are not suitable for all meeting purposes or groups, and there are many downsides to working in the virtual medium. Learn more about pros/cons....

Take our upcoming class, The Virtual Facilitator to build your virtual meeting facilitation and virtual class instruction competencies. At the end of your time with us, you will be able to strategically determine when a virtual meeting is right for the work, how to ensure each is productive, plus gain proven strategies, helpful tips and many techniques to lead focused, interactive meetings and effective virtual classes.

Bringing Life! to Meetings with Visuals

2011-09-22T08:43:00.008-07:00

Did you know that 50-60% of meeting participants are 'visual' learners?

Enhance focus, understanding and retention - just by adding a few simple drawings, symbols and colour to flipcharts as you facilitate.

Using Graphics to Bring Life to Meetings

Most of us already think in pictures. It's no accident that many of the expressions we use to denote understanding are visual: "Do you see what I'm saying?", and "I see your point!"

The fact is most ideas can be made clearer with a picture. Plus, let's face it: meetings with visuals are just way more fun!

So add some visual techniques to your facilitation palette, and watch your meetings go from good to great!

If you are a meeting facilitator interested in enhancing your overall skill and effectiveness, register for our next two-day class, The Artful Visual Facilitator. You will leave with a repertoire of useful images, lettering conventions, visual metaphors, concepts for graphic templates and much more! Anyone wishing to learn the essentials of graphic recording is also welcome to attend; but hurry - there are just a few spots left!

Planning A Meeting? What Bugs You?

2011-07-23T07:51:00.004-07:00

Meetings: Who needs them? We all do!

Whether you are an executive, a manager, supervisor or project team leader, chances are that meetings are a significant part of your day. However, poor meetings may be the norm you are settling for rather than "Great Meetings".

According to a recent survey of 300 senior Canadian managers, their number one pet peeve with meetings is either that they either start late or finish past the indicated time. Managers also begrudge being brought together when their presence and participation is not key to the meeting outcomes. The use of PDAs and laptops for non-meeting related activities, along with people interupting one another follow closely in the list of of meeting issues. Accountemps identifies five signs that your meeting could be a time waster, and offers suggestions for how to correct it. (see Accountemps Survey - Identifies Managers' Biggest Meeting Pet Peeves).

Despite highly developed technical, professional and specialized skills, most managers do not have the necessary meeting facilitation competencies to design and lead focused and effective meetings. If this is true for you or your staff, have a look at our 2011 Masterful Facilitation Institute fall course schedule. Our public and in-house facilitation skill building programs are guaranteed to enhance the productivity of your virtual and face-to-face meetings.

Mastering Great Meetings

2011-03-04T08:58:00.000-08:00

Follow the Masterful Facilitation Institute’s Great Meetings Formula to confidently ensure your meeting success ...

    = Great Outcomes (time-effective, focused, productive, broad buy-in) are the result of

   + Great Process (engaged, focused, creative, good pace/energizing) + that fosters

   + Great Interactions (safe, respectful, positive, builds common ground and learning)

... and attend to these six keys to masterful facilitation:

Masterful Agenda
Answer Questions on Their Mind
Strategies for Functional Behaviour
Transform Conflict into Creativity
End with Clarity/on Time
Report for Follow-Up

Read more about keys to masterful facilitation....

Special Offer: Grow your virtual and in-person facilitation competencies. Participate for 50% off in The Virtual Facilitator with your registration in any one of our other upcoming Spring/Summer 2011 programs. Find out more.....

Making a Quantum Leap

2011-03-01T15:23:00.003-08:00

I love this image! Right now, this little fish jumping to a much bigger 'pond' feels like me, as I prepare to make a quantum leap. Here are some really neat tips reproduced from Stephen Mills Sept. 2009 blog, "Is It Time for a Quantum Leap?"

Stop trying harder and look for something simple. A simple and elegant solution is a perfect way to make a quantum leap.

You aren’t building on previous steps. You are making a fundamental change. You are making a breakthrough leap. Back off the struggle and let something fresh come into view.

Forget “common sense”. You can’t do what makes sense or what is usual. If you do what is common and usual you will get common and usual results.

The how of the quantum leap isn’t obvious or you would have done it already. Let go of your limiting beliefs. You need new boundaries, ones you can’t even imagine right now.

Break out of your routines. Find something new, something completely different. Your routines will keep you where you are at. What’s working now is what keeps you on your current plane. If you want to make a quantum leap you have to do something different, something improbable.

Quantum leaps are risky. There is a significant risk that it won’t work out, but who cares? You just make another leap until you find one that does work.

You are going to be uncomfortable. If you are comfortable, you didn’t take a quantum leap. No matter what happens you will learn a great deal. You may discover something wonderful and new about yourself.

Let the answer come to you. Get out of your own way and it will happen.

You can’t figure it all out ahead of time. You have to take a leap and make adjustments as you go. It’s going to be ambiguous and chaotic. It’s going to be wild, fun, and scary all at the same time. I’m a big believer in just doing and then figuring it out as you go.

Leap!

Enhance Meeting Productivity

2011-02-07T09:42:00.000-08:00

Of the 60+ meetings per month attended by professionals, research indicates that over 50 percent of this meeting time is wasted. That translates to 4 days of lost productivity per professional every month if each meeting is one hour long! Can you afford not to invest in more effective meetings? Do the math for yourself. How much could you save with even a 25% improvement in the productivity of your virtual and in-person meetings?

Nearly all organizational leaders, professionals, and managers can greatly benefit from developing competence in facilitating effective meetings, and understanding when to seek facilitation assistance. Click here to learn more about proven meeting competencies to improve your organization’s overall productivity now.

Interested in learning how? Attend The Confident Facilitator: Essential Skills for Guiding Groups, or The Virtual Facilitator: Leading Interactive TeleCalls and Webinars, or ask us about how we can customize our programs for your unique organizational needs.

Prevent Conflict Before the Meeting

2011-01-10T14:25:00.001-08:00

Here’s some really good news! "Almost all meeting conflict can be prevented by good preparation, clarity about roles, responsibilities, ground rules, expected outcomes, and decision-making methods." -- Facilitator’s Fieldbook

Everyone hates wasting time in meetings. Whether you are facilitating the meeting, attending as a participant, or making arrangements for a client, ensure you are clear about, and agree to, the OARRS. Doing so will go a long way toward creating Great Meetings!

Outcomes: Why are we meeting?
Agenda: What topics will we address, when, & how?
Roles: What will be expected of me?
Rules: How will we work together?
Scope: What are empowered to do?

Resolve to enhance your/your staff’s facilitation skills in 2011 and lead focused, positive and productive meetings: Read more about OARRS. Save @ Early Bird - register now, The Confident Facilitator

Christmas Food Court Flash Mob, Hallelujah Chorus

2010-12-05T18:18:00.001-08:00

During the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, I was part of a flash mob on Robson Street, and totally loved the experience of some 2,000+ folks converging to dance - just for the fun of it! Turn up your speakers and enjoy this joyful celebration of the spirit of Christmas.

Making Room for Strategic Reflection & Dialogue

2010-11-24T11:45:00.002-08:00

Thanks to Ken Homer for flagging this article: Making Room for Reflection is a Strategic Imperative.

The key message: "...21st century advantage is about doing meaningful stuff that matters the most,...so doing more of the same won't get you there.... We'll have to invest not just in action, but in deep, sustained, prolonged reflection."

The implication for facilitators is that we can add significant value to senior management groups, Executive teams, Boards, and project teams by introducing and helping instill a practice of ongoing reflective dialogue. Download slide presentation on Dialogue: Power of Conversation

Strategies for Lively Discussion

2010-11-02T09:41:00.001-07:00

Going Beyond "Whole Group" Conversation. Interaction is essential for understanding, alignment and meeting engagement. Many meeting discussions can benefit from a variety of strategies that go beyond whole room conversation to keep participants energized and fully engaged. TIP: To facilitate more lively conversations and productive meetings, you might adopt one of these four facilitation strategies:

SUBGROUPS: Count off subgroups, and assign them the task of fleshing out initial thinking on different aspects of a focus question for presentation back to the whole, e.g., customer, employees, suppliers.

PARTNERS: Invite pairs/trios to discuss the focus question together for 3-5 minutes. Get highlights and record the top notes during report out, using the 'me too!" principle to avoid unnecessary repetition.

GO-AROUNDS: Once key information has been shared, ensure the conversation is not dominated by the boss or subject matter expert. Invite a timed go-round so that everyone has an equal chance to input, e.g., "let's take no more than 2 minutes each to...."

POLLING: After the discussion has gone on for a while, invite a straw poll through a show of hands, e.g., " on a scale of 1 to 5, how much do you agree with _____?", then discuss the reasons that folks voted as they did.

Read more about facilitating lively discussion....

Register for The Confident Facilitator (attend Virtual at 50% off if register for both at the same time.)

Collaboration Beats Smarts

2010-10-11T14:17:00.004-07:00

Thanks to Tree Breesen for flagging this important story:

As facilitators, our job is often to assist teams of people to work together to address complex issues and to solve problems. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that collaborative groups with equal participation among all of the group members (rather than having a few subject matter experts dominating), resulted in a higher collective level of group intelligence. To produce better results, they concluded, a group needed to consider multiple perspectives; the individual intelligence of group members was unrelated to the outcome.

Implications for Facilitation: When designing meetings/work sessions, ensure that targeted session norms stress equal participation. Adopt facilitation methods and processes that enable every participant to contribute their unique perspective.

Another surprising finding was that the more females, the higher the group intelligence! They attributed this not so much to gender, as to a quality of social sensitivity that women on average have more of than men.

Implication for Facilitation: As possible, help clients to bring together diverse teams representative of multiple perspectives, including gender. If that is not possible, design processes that will ensure the issue / problem is considered from a diversity of perspectives (e.g., assign different 'hats' to different people or tables; then look for a balanced and integrated solution).

Read/listen to the full story....

Staying on Topic: It's Easy to Stray!

2010-09-29T20:25:00.002-07:00

Do you distinguish between different meeting purposes?

If not, you may find that your "quick', regular information/status meetings are getting hijacked into problem-solving meetings. How can you stay true to the meeting purpose as emergent issues arise and not get detoured from your purpose?

Whether your team holds regular progress meetings through 15-minute standing check-ins, online/web meetings, or regular in-person huddles, you likely have struggled with the meeting digressing from status reporting to issue resolution. Resist dealing with an issue as it surfaces! Otherwise, you will waste the time of those for whom the issue is not relevant, and erode the time available for others to give their progress reports.

TIP: Here's how to stay on topic. Park any issues as they are flagged. At the end of the scheduled status meeting, quickly establish who needs to discuss each issue on the Parking Lot. Either task who will schedule the appropriate next meeting(s), or, after you've adjourned the original progress report meeting, continue with relevant participants.

Download strategies for staying on topic

Four F-Strategies for Setting Group Norms

2010-09-19T17:02:00.004-07:00

"How do we want to work together as a group for greatest success?"

Groups that agree on their meeting code of conduct, or session norms, are more productive and achieve better results.

TIP: To facilitate the task of gaining agreement on meeting agreements, you might try one of these four facilitation strategies:

1. FAST: Offer a starting list of possible ground rules, and refine as needed.

2. FULLY OWNED:Help a group develop their own norms by asking, "Think of the characteristics of effective meetings. What can we do to support each other in achieving this?"

3. FULL PARTICIPATION: Create a level playing field between participants of different ranks by targeting norms that encourage everyone to leave their ranks at the door.

4. FUN: A team that will work together over time to playfully list the behaviours they don't want to see ☺!

Read more about session norms..... And to learn more tips: register for The Confident Facilitator, October 25-27, 2010 (Vancouver)

Listen Actively - A Skill for Work and Life

2010-08-17T22:47:00.001-07:00

Good facilitators are good listeners. Cultivating your capacity to listen actively will serve you well at work, and in every other aspect of your life.

TIP: Here's are 9 ways to enhance your listening skills when facilitating:

Listen like you mean it - show genuine interest and curiosity.
Suspend your assumptions, listening to understand what is really being spoken.
Listen with all your senses - eyes, body language, tone of voice.
Listen for what is not being said as well as the words being spoken.
Move towards the speaker to be more closely connected.
Scan the whole room to sense how others are reacting and responding to what is being said.
Write it down, and check out what you've written to ensure the speaker does feel heard.
As culturally appropriate, use eye contact to acknowledge people, and to encourage quiet folks to take part.
Assist those with differing ability to articulate; paraphrase what you believe they are trying to say.

Download PDF of article...

Learn more secrets: register for The Confident Facilitator....

Life Is Like A Musical Composition

2010-07-06T10:33:00.001-07:00

Along the line of my last blog on motivation - "the dangling carrot", here is another good reminder - Sing and Dance While the Music Is Being Played - brought to my attention by Dane Brown, from my friend/associate Ben Kadel's community site at Emotus Operandi.

The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

2010-06-30T13:41:00.003-07:00

Just caught this fascinating talk by Dan Pink on the hidden truths behind personal motivation, The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Except for straightforward tasks, it's not the age-old motivators of money and power that drive us, but rather, our desire for autonomy, mastery, and purpose. In fact, research has shown time and again that using money as an incentive for activities dependent on our cognitive skills is a sure-fire way to reduce performance! The implications are powerful for all organizations, teams and groups seeking insights into how to boost innovation and performance.

Bonus: The graphic recording of Daniel Pink's speech is truly dazzling and worth taking the time to watch! (Thanks to Rosemary Cairns who first posted this to the IAF Group listserve so that I can now share it here.)

Great Facilitation. Staying Neutral Is Tough and Essential!

2010-06-03T23:57:00.001-07:00

Can you be effective as a facilitator if you are not neutral? I.e., if you have expertise in the content and/or have a stake in the outcomes generated by the group, can you still facilitate effectively? Your job as Facilitator is to focus on group and meeting process. As tempting as it may be, great facilitation requires that you avoid controlling content or influencing the outcomes. Can you wear more than one hat and stay neutral? Variety of roles:

Pure Presenter: You are a content/subject matter expert (process and outcome neutral).

Instructional Facilitator: You deliver learning content in a facilitative manner (outcome neutral).

Pure Facilitator: You are a group process expert who does not contribute to meeting content (content and outcome neutral).

Facilitator/Expert – You give advice from your subject matter expertise (content); but have no stake in group’s work (process neutral) and decisions (outcome neutral).

Group Leader/Member As Facilitator – You want to contribute to discussions (content), control the group discussions and how they arrive at their decisions (process), and you have a stake in the decisions themselves (outcome). Tough role!

Understanding Participation: A Literature Review

2010-05-16T16:54:00.003-07:00

This new resource just brought to my attention by Sandy Heierbacher on NCDD's listserve is worth sharing … a 50-page Understanding Participation: A Literature Review covers a wide range of participatory activities that are often viewed in isolation. Download it here.

"The review brings together different bodies of literature on participation, including literature on community development, volunteering, public participation, social movements, everyday politics and ethical consumption."

(From a major national research project called “Pathways through Participation: What creates and sustains active citizenship?” led by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) in partnership with the Institute for Volunteering Research (IVR) and Involve.)

Power of Collaboration & Facilitation

2010-04-24T10:02:00.003-07:00

Rosemary Cairns on the IAF listserve brought this fascinating TED video to my attention: Build a tower/Build a team

Tom Wujec presents some surprisingly deep research into the "marshmallow problem" -- a simple team-building exercise that involves dry spaghetti, one yard of tape and a marshmallow. Who can build the tallest tower with these ingredients? And why does a surprising group always beat the average?

It is well worth watching, especially for its findings about the value of facilitation in solving the problem when a collaborative task is required. For the actual exercise, see: The Marshmallow Challenge website.

Bring LIFE to Meetings

2010-03-08T18:59:00.013-08:00

Life is too short to waste time in meetings. We all need to learn how to cut through the confusion, reduce the stress, and transform bad meeting habits into productive, focused and positive results. Meetings with LIFE are characterized by:

LIVELY MEETING PROCESS

Somehow when most of us went through our schooling, whatever system we were in just assumed that either: 1) we already knew how to design and facilitate great meetings, or 2) we would pick it up by osmosis through the keen observation of our bosses and peers. Not!

Great meetings depend upon designing a variety of activities to time-efficiently and productively achieve the meeting goals, and facilitating each exercise in such a way that participants feel alive, enthused, and energized. A good meeting design is actually a plan of what will happen, when, and in what way to ensure everyone contributes for maximum results.

INTERACTIONS FOR AUTHENTICIY AND HEALTH

Every meeting is an opportunity to foster authentic and respectful exchanges that build relationships. Why is this important? Human beings are nested in webs of relationships through many networks. The existence and strength of those relationships is an important contributor to enabling the success of meeting results after people leave. Whether the meetings you facilitate are within organizations (e.g., intact or project team, management groups or Boards) or span a diversity of community groups (e.g., citizen or parent meetings, multi-stakeholder groups, global advocacy networks), learn how to build trust, mutual understanding, and shared values during the meeting through healthy and learning-focused participant interactions.

FOCUSED MEETING OUTCOMES & VISIBLE RECORDS

As the saying goes: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any path will lead you there”. Clarity of purpose, goals and outcomes are critical to solid meeting results. Too many meetings waste people’s time because of insufficient upfront work in clarifying the key questions of ‘why, what, who’. Confusion can also arise from poor records of the key points, ideas, actions and agreements . Visible work records (with graphics and visuals if possible!) help enlist both head for understanding and heart for alignment.

ENGAGEMENT OF PEOPLE

“None of us is as smart as all of us. …the problems we face are too complex to be solved by any one person or any one discipline. Our only chance is to bring people together from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines who can refract a problem through the prism of complementary minds allied in common purpose.” (The Secrets of Great Groups --Warren Bennis)

Long gone are the days when management alone, elected officials alone, technical and economic experts alone, can find the right answers. Almost every issue and topic today is vast and complex. Collaboration and wise action requires engaging the right people appropriately at the right time through the right processes, in right timing around the right questions. If you believe that participation, involvement and engagement of people are needed for better outcomes, then you must also be committed to learning how to design and facilitate great meetings.

Enroll in one of our Masterful Facilitation Institute courses and learn how to bring LIFE to meetings.

Better Quality Brainstorming Results

2010-02-24T14:28:00.006-08:00

Here’s an interesting finding just brought to my attention by fellow IAF-CPF Cameron Fraser through the IAF list- serve: electronic brainstorming on wicked and difficult problems yields higher quality results than verbal brainstorming (either in-person or on an synchronous virtual meeting).

A synopsis of the research findings extracted from the publication: Improving Human Effectiveness for Extreme-Scale Problem Solving was a single year effort by Sandia National Laboratories to investigate tools and methods for bringing very large groups of people together to solve difficult problems. In particular, this research explored how computer mediated collaborations might attack “wickedly difficult” problems, which are characterized by a lack of agreement about the very nature of the problem itself. The experiment compared the effectiveness of individual versus group electronic brainstorming on a number of quality ratings including originality, feasibility and effectiveness. Two interesting findings emerged:

Individuals in the study produced an equivalent number (quantity) of ideas whether brainstorming took place in electronic group sessions (EBS), or individually through a nominal group process, regardless of how long the period of time devoted to the activity.
More interesting, though, is that the quality of the ideas in the nominal condition was significantly better across all three quality ratings in electronic group brainstorming (EBS) than in verbal brainstorming.

The reasons seem to stem from a combination of factors:

Production blocking – the inability to simultaneously present ones ideas, while others are verbally brainstorming (e.g., session rule may be that only one person can speak at a time). Several members can contribute at the same time through EBS, eliminating this tendency to edit/withhold.
Evaluation apprehension - the tendency for people to hold back their ideas for fear that others will negatively evaluate them. In EBS, ideas and responses are submitted in an anonymous fashion, eliminating this social concern in live groups.
Social loafing - individuals have been shown to invest less effort in group projects than they do in equivalent individual work. EBS has mixed results here, though some research suggest that being assured that one’s ideas are logged and counted, and viewing others’ ideas, may work to mitigate this tendency.

The implications of these findings demonstrate that employees may effectively use computer-mediated nominal brainstorming as a cost effective means to work on wickedly difficult problems. This suggests a time- and cost-savings potential for companies, from shorter meetings, increased participation by remote team members, better documentation via electronic recording, improved access to the meeting records and, importantly, cash savings (Furnham, 2000). When quality is used to benchmark success, these data indicate that work-relevant challenges are better solved by aggregating electronic individual responses rather than by electronically convening a group. The downside of EBS includes: 1) a less rich communication experience for participants than a face-to-face session; and slower feedback on ideas.

Building Community in Meetings: Icebreakers/WarmUps and Connections

2010-01-08T15:30:00.021-08:00

A good participative start to meetings and learning programs gets people present, connected and focused as quickly as possible into the session content in a relevant way.

Building 'community' starts with attending to people’s need for social connection, whether or not they know each other. At the start of meetings, new people begin weaving the social bonds that create human networks capable of collaboration; intact teams re-establish the links that enable norming and high performing.

When is an IceBreaker most appropriate?
Icebreakers are opening activities that often have little to do with the course topic or reason for meeting; their purpose is to help strangers to ‘mingle and meet’ around safe, easy, and fun topics and exercises. Icebreakers are perfect for networking functions; at the start of conferences; and when folk who are new to each other have just arrived for an event. The activities provide a ready-made way to greet others and share information in a relaxed and informal way. Many Icebreakers/Warmups can also help energize a group quickly, have fun, and shift the energy in an otherwise lengthy or full session.
For most facilitated meetings or learning programs, while Icebreakers can help to break the ice socially, they may be seen as wasting valuable time. It is okay to skip Icebreakers in these settings, but NOT Connections Activities, which add to building the meeting/session community.

When Are Connections Activities most appropriate?

Connections Activities are intended to immediately provide participants with opportunities to contribute to the session/course content in a safe, easy, natural, ‘can’t fail’ exercise around the meeting purpose. They serve to 'ease' people into interaction with each other while simultaneously advancing the desired outcomes of the meeting in some way. Examples of Connections Activities that achieve this include:

Appreciative Inquiry Interviews around questions that matter to the meeting/course topic. Option: An appreciative start that does not involve pairs interviews would be to complete a 'go round' where participants share a 'best of...' experience or story.
Sharing individual hopes/concerns around desired meeting outcomes, and what participants are willing to contribrute to meeting success shared. This can be done in small groups (or the whole group) depending on number of people, and the time available. Invite high notes sharing from small groups into Plenary, or posting of key points to a chart for reference.
Inviting participants as they walk in to grab a marker and to complete a Gallery Walk around posters/charts with focused questions related to the content, e.g., "two things I already know about...."; "my burning question around..."; "my most important learning goal...". Quickly summarize some of the themes and patterns in the Opening, and then relate to the meeting agenda.

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