One of our clients recently conducted their own internal interviews to get a sense of what their employees thought about their current situation, future opportunities, and persistent challenges as an input into the strategic planning process. During the interviews, a standard theme from the participants was to share their comments EXACTLY as they stated them. Our client made the commitment to do so.
While that commitment translated into capturing and typing up exacting notes with their specific words, conveying what participants want to communicate during the strategic planning process is a little more complicated than that.
6 Keys for Conveying What Participants Want to Communicate
via ShutterStock
When it comes to conveying exactly what participants wants to communicate, there are multiple steps involved. These are some of the things we suggested to honor the team’s request for faithfully reporting their comments:
- Ask questions that allow individuals to express their own thinking instead of having to conform their language to how the strategic planner describes things.
- Make a concerted effort to capture the exact language participants used if they are not directly capturing their own language.
- If there is a gap between what they say and what they mean, don’t hesitate to fill in the white space so the final reporting is as representative as possible of their big messages.
- Do not hesitate to insert your own comments to focus reader attention on the most important messages.
- Develop a vocabulary list of common language the organization uses, and default to words and phrases from the list as you recap the interviews and work on subsequent deliverables.
- Identify themes among individual interviews and responses, featuring the most descriptive language people used to represent the significant issues the organization faces.
As with a lot of things in business and life, being faithful to what participants want to communicate during a strategic planning process can involve extra steps to adjust things and make sure it happens. We’ve taken these types of steps for years and have had clients consistently say, “That’s exactly what we meant, except you said it even better!” – Mike Brown
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming blog email updates.
