Abstract: An important aspect of your role on a team is facilitating large and often very different groups of people. We may be generating ideas, gathering information, processing ideas, or collecting feedback. Each person has something important to contribute and the success of the project is likely related to how successfully these interactions are facilitated.
In this intense workshop, you will use variations on simple techniques that will help you extract the maximum knowledge of your participants in a democratic way that will make sure everyone feels like they had a voice in the outcome. You will work through a number of different kinds of problems with a small team. You'll brainstorm using open-ended affinity mapping, and experiment with structured mapping to answer specific questions. You'll reorganize and prioritize. In short order, you'll have a clear consensus among the group that you can act on.
Whether you are an experienced facilitator or just starting to find yourself responsible for corralling a team of stakeholders, you will benefit from this workshop. Newer practitioners will learn a new tool that you can add to your practice and experienced practitioners will get some variations and polishing techniques to improve the use of this tool in your practice.
By the end of this session, you'll have the ability to identify which combinations of techniques will be useful for whatever problems your team is facing and have the confidence to lead them through the exercise. Once you are familiar with these techniques, you will find that they are very easy to deploy with little or no advanced preparation. All you need is a surface and a pad of sticky notes.
Learning Outcomes: - Understanding of the value of broad engagement for certain decisions
- Understand the difference between collaborative idea generation and individual idea generation and when to use each
- Understand the difference between structured and unstructured organization and when to use each
- Experience with multiple combinations of each variant
- Ability to lead the exercise themselves with their own teams
