Facilitate Proceedings » Collaboration and innovation

7 Ways To Coax People Out of the Box in a Virtual World

Nancy Settle-Murphy — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:25:08 +0000

Before the latest economic downturn, many of my clients would bring together people from all over the world, put them into a conference room with pots of coffee and carbo-loaded snacks, and kept them there until they emerged with a raft of creative new ideas. Now, with organizations imposing travel bans for most internal meetings, the question becomes: How can we translate this type of high-energy, face-to-face brainstorming experience into a virtual session where we wring innovative ideas out of each person, using a phone and a computer?

Facilitation by getting out of the way – Lessons from Open Space Technology

Julia Young — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 01:13:40 +0000

Open Space Technology is a meeting methodology that enables self-organizing groups of all sizes to deal with complex issues in a very short period of time. A quick description of this method of meeting preparation might be “the art of facilitation by getting out of the way.” Beyond its specific purpose and approach it offers useful lessons that apply to many kinds of meetings including virtual meetings and webinars. Here are five facilitation reminders drawn from Open Space.

Engage Event Participants to Generate Bottom-line Results

Ron Springer — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 02:33:51 +0000

It’s time for a new approach to meeting design.

Unfortunately, many companies assume that a well-polished PowerPoint presentation delivered from a beautifully-lit stage is all that’s required to get their message across. This once exciting medium, which is now 20 years old, has sucked the life and excitement out of many meetings.

Companies today are typically speaking to a new generation of tech-savvy participants who demand a different approach. Attendees today want to be engaged participants, not passive recipients of information. Adept at using social networking sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, meeting attendees are accustomed to receiving information real-time, and to engaging in continuing dialogue. Here’s an example of what I mean.

Extending Meaningful Conversation: Virtual World Cafes

Julia Young — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 05:15:53 +0000

The World Café, a process and set of design principles for having meaningful conversations about topics that matter, has been around since 1995. I have recently had two very interesting conversations about way the possibility and practice of taking the World Café dialogue process online. The energy and enthusiasm in both exchanges, with Kathryn Alexander, an OD consultant in Arizona, and with Amy Lenzo from The World Café, was infectious. This is just one of many examples where we as facilitators can extend the reach of what we know how to do well – bringing groups of people together around a focused set of topics for a purposeful conversation – with the use of online collaboration tools.

Kathryn and Amy used very different technologies – Kathryn used the FacilitatePro group decision support tools and teleconferencing services while Amy used Second Life and Skype. Their methodologies were also somewhat different, adapting the traditional World Café format to the group and the questions at hand. Here is a brief synopsis of Kathryn’s approach (in my own words) and some of the lessons that I took away from the conversation.

The Magic Number That Helps Teams Flourish

Danuta McCall — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:21:58 +0000

I was patrolling my corner of the blogosphere when I came upon a post that referenced research by psychologists Marcial Losada and Barbara Fredrickson about how positivity impacts team performance. Experiments have shown that positive affect (positive sentiments, attitudes and emotions) makes individuals, teams and organizations flourish – that is function optimally. People and teams who flourish are more flexible, resilient, creative and intuitive. On the opposite side, languishing teams exhibit narrow thinking, boredom, cynicism.

The Magic Number
Now, Losada and Fredrickson hypothesized that people or teams with a positivity ratio (ratio of pleasant feelings to unpleasant feelings) that meets or exceeds a specific threshold would be also characterized as flourishing. Losada studied a large group of business teams during their annual strategy meetings, tracking statements made in the meetings as positive, negative or neutral. He then measured the performance of these teams and determined that there is indeed a positivity ratio, and it’s (drum roll, please)…