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(The following story will appear in my upcoming book, “The
Human Side of Agile Management”.)
Many business meetings are meant to make decisions or
generate options for further study. The most popular
technique for gaining input from all participants seems
to be brainstorming. And in my experience, the results
are dismal.
The thrust of brainstorming is to first collect a lot
of ideas, and only then to critique them. But most
brainstorming meetings I've attended looked nothing
like that. A few ideas would be raised, and then
critiquing would start. Several people would keep quiet
throughout, and a couple of others would promote their
own ideas, especially the manager.
I like to help teams get more collaborative than
that: to give every idea air time and to truly have
everybody participate (with an equal voice). A basic
strategy is to facilitate the meeting: lead the
meeting's process, set and enforce ground rules, handle
dysfunction. A more advanced one is to use ... silence.
Last week I facilitated a whole-day meeting. My
client Chris, head of product development in charge of
hundreds of people, wanted to examine the progress of
their Agile rollout. The deliverables: key insights,
and a backlog of rollout activities for the next six
months. The participants: seven of his senior staff.
When 5:00 rolled around, we had achieved our goals.
All day, the managers had been engaged, and produced
several high quality insights and decisions.
Would you like to replicate this success? Read on.
You'll meet basic techniques, which you
can readily apply to your own meetings.
1. We welcomed the participants, and described the
purpose and rough agenda.
2. Ground rules: Participants suggested rules and we
got to consensus on four of them. (Many groups have
trouble respecting one of our rules: Turn off ALL
electronics. This group abided by it all day.)
3. Data collection: The managers took turns describing
their units' rollout experience. I captured their
points and the ensuing discussions on a total of 12
flipcharts, which I hung on two walls. I put a star
next to statements that were identified as pains or
insights.
4. Insights: Based on the data captured on the
flipcharts, everyone wrote down their insights, one per
sticky, in total silence. When done, they posted all
the stickies on the whiteboard, and proceeded to read
them all in silence. Without talking, they moved the
notes around to cluster related insights. Then, anyone
who felt strongly about a particular group read it out
loud. Our scribe captured each group as a key insight
with details.
5. Top insights: Everyone received a printout of the
ten key insights. Silently, each chose the four they
considered most important. I tallied their choices, and
three of the ten insights were clear winners, receiving
twice as many votes as the next few insights. (This
procedure is known as multi-voting or dot-voting).
6. Suggest next-phase activities for the top three
insights: I reviewed the description of each insight,
and every participant wrote (again in silence, one
activity per sticky) what they would do about it in the
next iteration of the rollout. Again the stickies went
on the board and folks clustered them. Each cluster
became an activity in the rollout backlog, and the
ensuing discussion around it provided that activity's
details.
On first glance, having silent periods in a meeting
might seem strange. One benefit you can see in the
previous description is that everybody gets to share
their smarts without having their ideas critiqued. The
other benefit is that they stay engaged and awake: You
won't see anyone nodding off when you use these
techniques.
The next time you're convening a meeting and want to
have everybody contribute ... try to have them work in
silence.
Copyright © 2011, 3P Vantage, Inc. All rights reserved.
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