Facilitate Proceedings » Business Collaboration

Lessons in engagement from a collaborative conference

Julia Young — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 23:56:17 +0000

Exploring Innovation in Community Development Finance may seem like a dry topic but the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank’s recent conference was anything but. From planned spontaneous conversations and plenary dialogue processes, to the rule of two feet and building collective priorities for action, there are several lessons that we can draw from the design of this conference…

Are meetings still relevant?

Nancy Settle-Murphy — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 21:06:20 +0000

In a webinar earlier this year sponsored by NewWOW (New Ways of Working), David Coleman posed a provocative question: “In the world of enterprise social collaboration, has the social construct of “meetings” become anachronistic? In other words, are meetings obsolete?”

I’ve had a few weeks to ruminate his question. My initial reply: Of course! To have a real conversation, people really have to be talking together, at the same time, in pretty much the same way. Otherwise, we’re just pushing out (or pulling in) a bunch of potentially disconnected thoughts that often cross paths somewhere in the clouds. That’s not the stuff authentic conversations are made of, IMHO.

Brainstorming or brainsteering? Or a happy middle ground?

Danuta McCall — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 19:49:26 +0000

You’re asked to participate in a chaotic exercise billed as a brainstorming session. The moderator instructs you to “think outside the box”, tells you that the activity is penalty free (“no idea is a bad idea”) and then waits expectantly. But without design or instruction, some participants sit there apathetically, others contribute sporadically, and a few loudly dominate the session with their pet ideas.

In 7 Steps to Better Brainstorming, the authors propose a modified brainstorming technique they call “brainsteering”. But does it lead creative thinkers down too narrow a path?

iPads Add Sizzle and Creativity to Meetings

Danuta McCall — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 16:47:29 +0000

A recent post on a site called iPad CTO caught my eye because its title : Increase Productivity with iPad-driven Business Meetings. Yes indeed! I thought – having just returned from an engagement where we used iPads to create a sense of intimate conversation amongst 400 people. The author of this post went on to posit: “The legacy of business meetings – boring, counter-productive, and a constant interruption of real work – shows that little progress has been made over the last century ……There’s a chance iPad’s involvement and deep integration into the way meetings are organized and implemented can move the needle just enough to improve your meetings in significant ways.”

Why BP and Virtual Teams Need Clear Operating Principles

Nancy Settle-Murphy — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 01:46:09 +0000

We may never know what sequence of events set off the greatest environmental catastrophe of our time. What we do know is that there seemed to be a difference of opinion among decision-makers when it came to making a crucial trade-off between safety and profit. Add to that, it seemed unclear as to who, precisely, had the authority to make the decision to stop the drilling when a concerned staffer alerted management of the impending danger.

Having agreed-upon operating principles up front might have helped the drilling team avert this unnecessary disaster, just as they can help any kind of team make well-informed decisions quickly.

This is the Brain on iPads

Danuta McCall — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 05:52:21 +0000

In last Saturday’s New York Times, an article entitled Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price paints a startling picture. The main character is your typical 30-something small business owner, who falls asleep every night with a laptop or iPhone on his chest, and goes online as soon as he wakes up. Seems his family has noticed that he gets downright “crotchety until he gets his fix”.

Interaction: The Key To Successful Webinars

Julia Young — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 21:38:42 +0000

Designing Interactive Webinars & Virtual Meetings
How to Keep People Engaged

We received such enthusiastic feedback for our fall 2009 series that we are offering a new series of complimentary webinars where you, the participants, help build the agenda. Please join us Wednesday, February 10th or Thursday February 18th as we demonstrate eight principles for designing interactive webinars by engaging you as participants!

Are you spending too much time in ineffective virtual meetings and boring webinars?The one-way nature of most webinars and web conferences misses an opportunity to engage an audience and draw on the wisdom of the group.

The opportunity presented by a more interactive and collaborative approach to webinars and virtual meetings is to reclaim the many learning methods used in face-to-face workshops and adapt them for a virtual environment. The promise of interactive webinars is to increase learning, shorten meetings, promote greater participation with less multi-tasking and foster on-going collaboration. Ready to enroll? Click here.

Which Venue Works Best For Dispersed Meetings?

Donna McAlister Kizzier — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:38:20 +0000

In my last Research Brief for FacilitateProceedings, I shared the quantitative results to date of my study on the effectiveness of six different meeting venues on the bottom line of organizations. This month I thought I’d share some of the qualitative results.

I noticed the questions I received from my first blog posting asked my opinion about why we were seeing some of the results. In the larger, long-term study, I analyze the data using not only statistical techniques, but also by using “qualititative methods of inquiry,” a newer research method that helps researchers and practitioners understand not just “what” they are seeing in the research results, but “why.”

As a reminder, each Research Brief refers readers to the full published article. The research I summarize for you in this blog has already been reviewed and deemed credible by top scholars in my field. The ultimate result of this research is to design meeting models and processes that will help practioners choose the most effective methods to conduct meetings globally, across time and space, using the latest technology.

Matching Technology Tools to Collaboration Style

Danuta McCall — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 23:21:16 +0000

I just read an interesting article published by eminent consulting firm McKinsey & Company entitled “Using technology to improve workforce collaboration” (authors James Manyika, Kara Sprague and Lareina Yee).

A new class of worker: the Collaboration Worker

The authors recast the workforce sector known as Knowledge Workers (a venerable term coined by Peter Drucker in the mid 20th century) in terms of what most non-production or transaction workers do: collaborate to solve problems, nurture ideas, serve customers and engage with partners. Their research reveals that “the performance gap between top and bottom companies in collaboration-intense sectors is nine times that of production- or transaction-intense sectors”. It follows then that productivity improvements in this sector of the workforce could have a significant impact on the bottom line. As we have a plethora of collaboration tools available to us today, we’ve got ourselves a real opportunity to nail this one. Right? Yes (the article describes how Cisco saved more than $100 million in travel and business expenses and increased productivity by 78 percent), and it’s not quite that simple.

Join us for an Interactive Webinar Experience!

Danuta McCall — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:22:20 +0000

Designing Interactive Webinars – How to Keep People Engaged

Please join us Thursday November 5th as we demonstrate eight principles for designing interactive webinars by engaging you as participants!

Be honest: How many of the webinars that you attend (or deliver) are boring? The one-way nature of most webinars and web conferences misses an opportunity to engage an audience and draw on the wisdom of the group.

The opportunity presented by a more interactive and collaborative approach to webinars is to reclaim the many learning methods used in face-to-face workshops and adapt them for a virtual environment. The promise of interactive webinars is to increase learning, shorten meetings, promote greater participation with less multi-tasking and foster on-going collaboration. Ready to enroll? Click here.