Innovation & Facilitation

From conventional conferences to collaborative gatherings

Conventional "tell and sell" conferences have limited value in the new world. They may generate short-term buy-in but they are incapable of generating the high levels of ownership and commitment that are necessary for sustained success. Today's complex environment calls for new ways for people to congregate in large numbers and do real work together. It calls for collaborative gatherings.

This is about a new approach to organization called strategic collaboration. Strategic collaboration is a way of getting significant work done when faced with a lot of complexity, diversity and uncertainty, and very little clarity. It enables widely differing groups of people to work together on issues of mutual concern and strategic importance. The design and facilitation of collaborative gatherings becomes such a vital part of the overall strategic collaboration.

When to use collaborative gatherings

Broadly speaking, collaborative gatherings are convened to:

plan and implement organization-wide change; solve complex problems; facilitate breakthrough thinking and innovation; enable organizational learning; revitalize the organization and create community. Convening collaborative gatherings is likely to be an essential first step when the issue confronting you displays:

a lot of complexity and uncertainty; very little clarity of the issue is clearly defined, it's unclear what needs to be achieved, or the way forward is unclear; a requirement to involve diverse groups with different agendas; a need to produce breakthrough results quickly.

When not to use collaborative gatherings

If you use collaborative gatherings in any of the following situations, success? If any of is likely to be short-lived.

• You treat the gathering as a one-off event and pay little or no attention to the follow-through process.
• You introduce collaborative gatherings as the latest' flavor of the month' panacea.
• You exclude key stakeholder groups.
• There is no design group, or the design group blindly follows the recipe book instead of working with the underlying principles.
• You ignore the facilitation principles.
• You use the gathering as a ploy to get buy-in through subtle manipulation.
  　

Most importantly, you need to be fully aware that you're taking the first step towards liberating the organization from a "command and control" culture and nudging it towards a collaborative form of governance. If your organization is not ready for this, all plans involving collaborative gatherings should be abandoned.

Large group interventions: power tools for creating collaborative gatherings

A wide range of methods exists for creating collaborative gatherings. These are sometimes referred to as large group intervention (LGI) methods, although this is a misleading term because the group does not have to be large? It simply needs to be composed of the right people. Although there are more than 20 different LGI methods, we work and focus on a few  of them: Future Search, Participatory Strategic Planning, Open Space Technology, Action Learning, and SimuReal. Other popular methods include The Search Conferences and Work-Out.

Please contact us if you'd like/need to design and run a group intervention within your organization.