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Remote teams are a workplace reality. In a recent survey, over 75% of respondents said that they meet remotely at least twice a month. While convenient and cost effective, these virtual meetings can easily go off-track.

You've got a very short time to come up with some great new ideas to turn the business around. Fortunately, you have access to some of the most creative minds in your company from dozens of locations around the world.

Health research and service provision are two of the most important and costly components of modern life. But they are fraught with profound ethical and priority setting issues which complicate decisions about what research and services are in the overall public good. It is critical that citizens be allowed to participate in these decisions.

Most facilitators and team leaders see the value of assigning some sort of pre-work before a virtual meeting and bemoan the fact that only a small fraction of the participants take this request seriously and complete their assignments.

Objectives and Context:
1. To hear different perspectives from a panel of experts
2. To engage conference participants in lively discussion of issues and approaches
3. To leave with a sense of community - that together we are grappling with the important issues and seeing possible solutions to our most difficult challenges
4. To capture the ideas emerging from the group as part of the conference documentation

Strategic planning is the process that organizations use to establish their visions of the future and develop the strategies to secure those visions. The basic steps of the process are to:
1) Understand the current environment
2) Establish the vision of the future
3) Identify paths, or strategies, to get there

As facilitators and trainers working primarily in the virtual world with tools like Microsoft® Teams, Webex, and Zoom, we have noticed that the one-way nature of most meetings, webinars and web conferences misses an opportunity to engage an audience and draw on the wisdom of the group as well as the knowledge of the presenter, guest speaker, or trainer.

Large and small scale military “discovery” experiments and wargames conducted by several branches of the Department of Defense are bringing together key decision makers and subject matter experts from around the globe to develop the concepts, doctrine, and training that will form the U.S. Military of the 21st century and beyond. Looking for new ways to structure an experiment that fosters innovation as well as critical thinking, these military organizations selected FacilitatePro to enable large scale collaboration and concept development.

In labor-management negotiations throughout the country, laptop computers linked to powerful servers allow negotiators to instantly capture ideas on FacilitatePro's virtual flipcharts, build on those ideas and rank – using the group’s own criteria– various options to achieve real consensus. “For collective bargaining, dispute mediation and conflict resolution," says FMCS Director Peter J. Hurtgen, "technology tools are the wave of the future.

Combining a state of the art facility, FacilitatePro software and skilled facilitators, Luther College’s Round Table Services provides group facilitation services to assist in strategic planning, problem solving, assessment, policy-making, and consensus building. Its mission is to provide a collaborative environment for the college as well as the business and not for profit community.