Suppose you are organizing a big meeting. There will be many people working on your organization's vision or you're trying to learn what things your customers are looking for in your product or service. Either way, maximizing group collaboration and engagement is vital.
As you plan your event strategy, how do you decide which type of information sharing strategy will create the most beneficial group collaboration?
One often-used strategy is allowing one individual at a time to share his or her perspective with the group. If the group is large and the time is too short, the result is each person gets a very short time to speak. Or it may be that only a few people are selected to talk, and everyone else listens.
That strategy works if the speakers are more informed on the topic than all the other attendees or the time available from the presenters is very limited. You can't really claim the "one speaking to many" strategy creates effective group collaboration, however.
A different, typically overlooked strategy can genuinely lead to much stronger group collaboration. This strategy involves creating many small groups from among a larger audience. Provide each small group a dynamic structure and strategic thinking exercises with productive questions allowing everyone to successfully contribute personal knowledge, perspectives, and ideas. While this strategy increases group collaboration and strengthens an organization's understanding, it won't work in every situation. Most importantly, if you don't have a tested design and implementation approach for how to select the right types of strategic thinking exercises, capture input being generated by multiple groups, and distill the work into strategic themes, the strategy will fall flat.
When you do have all these factors in place, this collaborative strategy works tremendously efficiently and effectively. We talked about this strategic group collaboration approach on a webinar today for attendees at the Gigabit City Summit.
You can review a recording of the webinar here: http://ow.ly/GYi1k
The topic for the webinar and our workshop with the group at the Gigabit City Summit is how to more successfully develop a community-wide vision within cities implementing ultra high-speed Internet. The approach works across business situations though, so go ahead and grab a copy of the infographic here to help you decide which type of information sharing strategy will work best for your next group meeting.
And if you want great strategic group collaboration, let us know. We'd be happy to design and create the experience and organizational benefits you are looking for with your group! – Mike Brown
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