Blog

Becoming a good facilitator is a valuable tool in any modern business person’s skill set.  Fortunately, like most skills, it’s something that can be learned and practised over time given the right facilitation training.  If you’re looking to improve your skills in this area, then the following tips should help: Research the problem.  It’s vital [...]

Meetings can be a huge source of waste for an organisation.  Waiting for everyone to arrive, get settled and finish chatting wastes countless hours each working day, and is a real drain on productivity.  While the opportunities for communication and collaboration that meetings provide can be a good thing – and essential to innovation – [...]

When your organisation holds meetings, do they drag on and often fail to reach a clear decision? Are  participants unclear about their roles and responsibilities? Is there confusion about objectives and expectations for meetings? Do your meetings display communication problems, negative attitudes and apathy? In the Mind Map® below we’ve detailed some of the challenges [...]

People have an amazing capacity to collaborate and generate creative solutions. Yet so much gets in the way of this natural human ability. This article sets out the seven principles of RapidConsensus™ (a programme that we offer) that allows you to mine the collective intelligence and knowledge of a group. These principles have been distilled [...]

Mind Map and pointers as to when better facilitation would be beneficial

x x x Facilitation can save time, help generate better ideas and bring a group of people together. Here are some underlying principles and a guide to best practice: x x x Be objective – you (the facilitator) need to be neutral. Take a step back from your own feelings and the detailed content, to [...]

We all know in business that decision-making can sometimes be very slow and that sometimes the decisions made don’t make much sense to those who are asked to carry them out. So in order to address this issue we have RapidConsensus™ – an approach that helps people in teams to make good decisions and take [...]

Just take one minute to think how much of your working week is spent in meetings… You may even be attending back-to-back or day-long meetings… You might even be instigating them… Do you always get the results you want? If you arrange or attend meetings, you’ll want them to be productive, efficient and effective – reaching [...]

…if two brains are better than one then the wisdom of many is better still. It’s easy enough to see where the problems lie. Some managers put too much emphasis on the task and not nearly enough on how something gets delivered. But teams need more guidance than this; indeed without such leadership, team members [...]

You’ve just overheard snippets of a conversation in the corridor. Some people are discussing a meeting that’s just finished. “Time flew”… “I didn’t expect we’d achieve so much”… “that was a fantastic debate”… “amazing that we all managed to agree”… “really energised”… “can’t wait to get on with it”… You are intrigued. It’s a bit [...]

Wasting too much time in meetings? Need your meeting to reach agreement about ways of working? Need to get a fast decision on strategy or tactics? Many people hate meetings. Why? Because they frequently take up so much time and achieve so little. So what would team leaders, project managers and departmental heads give for [...]

Collective intelligence has been called the process of enhancing the group IQ and, as such, it is an extremely attractive proposition for managers and leaders. But how do you mine this intelligence? In principle we know that we can achieve more when we work together with others – but in practice how can we make [...]

Does reaching consensus have to be so difficult? Anthony Landale reports on a new approach that might just help teams to reach decisions fast and harmoniously. Intolerant attitudes. Lack of respect for others. The ‘me first’ society. You can take your pick as to why people find it so hard to rub along together. But [...]

I heard a story the other day (it may be apocryphal) about an irate BBC manager who walked into his office one morning and noticed that every single member of his staff was reading The Guardian. He flew into a rage. His exasperation, however, wasn’t caused by his disapproval of that particular publication but by [...]