PlusOne - Musings of a marketer

I have been expecting this sentiment to be expressed about the 2020 Summit:

Many delegates at Sundays communities session appeared frustrated with the lack of progress on reaching a consensus on what ideas they would put forward.

Fellow co-chair of the communities stream Tanya Plibersek said it was always going to be a challenge, but she was adamant progress was being made.

How delegates could have expected to have their ideas heard and any semblance of fleshing them out during a two day workshop is beyond me. I think many of us have been to two day workshops and find:

1. Too much time is wasted in preamble and breaks

2. The facilitator or workshop leader can ruin the effort by directing discussion too much and influencing who gets most say.

3. Dominant personalities will prevail - through domineering and intimidation

4. Time is wasted on generating the ideas at the meeting rather than developing and enhancing the best ones.

So how could it have been done better?

Simply by addressing point 4 even before this weekend’s Summit began.

Workshops are NOT the time to be generating ideas - and this is better handled in the days or weeks before the workshop using modern technology to allow everyone to be involved in idea generation and ranking and prioritising prior to the face-to-face meeting.

Here as PlusOne we have experience in doing this and know that the 2020 Summit could have been much more productive.

One example was a facilitated email ideas generation, discussion and ranking process we conducted for an international aid organisation.

The plan was to develop a new policy and input was required from a diverse range of people. So we used our facilitated email model that allowed input from key representatives. These representatives liaised with others who had input into the discussion between what we call ’rounds’, which is when everyone responds, all the responses are collated and sent out again with the next stage.

This is a powerful way to get ideas. Everyone was able to have equal say, in a considered manner (it is24-48 hours between rounds, so fastest typist does not win!) so the repnses were great!

At the end of the process a whole heap of ideas are generated, distilled and discussed and a short list created.

An added benefit is that the whole process is recorded, so a ‘transcript’ of all discussions is generated for later disection if required.

A similar process can be used to generate and merely short-list ideas to a larger number for work shopping - and hence saving precious face-to-face time.

Imagine how much better the 2020 Summit would have been with these idea generation preambles taken care of ahead of time.

We also offer a web-based interaction facility that allows sharing of ideas, comments and even voting on preferred suggestions and easy sorting. The system is great for easily identifying the most popular or well-thought-of topics.

Feel free to contact us if you have an interest in using this process for idea generation etc. It can be delivered anywhere.

Email me mattATplusone.com.au