Collaboration and Technolgy

Eliminating Static from Collaborative Strategic Planning The senior leadership meeting had already lasted an entire day when the CEO...

From Push to Pull: The Rationale for Interactive Meetings & Webinars As facilitators and trainers working primarily in the virtual world...

Julia Young, Facilitate.com ​ What is a “Virtual” Meeting? A virtual meeting is an event or series of events where participants join in...

We’ve all been in meetings where some people hold forth with gusto and others listen carefully, but say nothing. We suspect that the quiet ones have a lot to contribute, and we wish that the enthusiastic meeting orators would give them some space to speak up. Researchers estimate that fully a third to a half of the individuals in your team, department or organization are likely to be introverts.

We’ve been living with information overload from our computers and smartphones for long enough that studies are beginning to draw conclusions that are a bit worrisome. The most benign of these conclusions is that multi-tasking doesn’t increase productivity for the most part, in fact you lose about 20-30% efficiency going back and forth between tasks.

The creative process mystifies us. It draws on the subconscious, experience, connections, imagination. We believe it’s a profoundly individual experience. And yet we often find ourselves solving problems and innovating as a group. How do we integrate all these individual creative processes into a whole? That is a particularly challenging aspect of teamwork.