One Proven Prompt to Realign Organizational Efforts (Facilitation Friday #57)
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a good question or prompt can be worth hundreds of ideas.
One prompt.
Three hours.
31 in-person participants.
16 virtual participants.
519 ideas high-potential ideas generated!
It is possible I did a little happy dance when this occurred. What facilitator wouldn’t?
Few things are better than when a carefully crafted prompt or question inspires and unleashes the collective intelligence of those you’re facilitating. Even better? When your toolkit contains a decent supply of them.
I can add to your stash with the one from my effort described above. When generating conversation catalysts like this, I turn to IDEO’s Goldilocks Principle and the guidance from Warren Berger in A More Beautiful Question to help craft the question or prompt. I’ve highlighted a core takeaway from each at the end of this post.
One Simple Prompt
How might you better optimize and align your core values and organizational structure, systems, and processes to accelerate results for the current and near-term environment in which you operate?
Whew. Those 29 words are quite the mouthful, but sharing them immediately raised the energy and volume of conversation online and in-person. Here’s what transpired in the three hours that followed.
Round One
After a quick warm-up activity to introduce and connect participants to others in their work teams, these small groups unpacked the prompt/question as instructed in the slide. An “executive summary” of their most important thinking was noted on flipcharts (in-person) and whiteboards (online). Individuals then freely browsed all of the output to absorb the insights and ideas about the prompt/question from other groups.
Round Two
Informed by all they had just seen, individuals silently generated as many responses to the original prompt as they could in 10 minutes. These were shared in their in-person and online small groups. Additional ideas were collectively generated.
All ideas were then added to a shared document and tagged with one or more predetermined themes.
During a break, ideas in the document were sorted by themes, printed out for in-person participants and made available for download by online participants.
Round Three
Small groups reviewed this aggregated output. Duplicate/similar ideas were combined. A few new ideas were added.
Facilitated discussion with all participants determined five criteria to assess each idea’s value/potential. A subset of participants later used these criteria to rank each idea.
Round Four
The session closed with reflection and facilitated conversation about what had just happened, participants’ reactions to the experience, and lessons learned that they wished to remember for future comparable efforts.
Bottom Line
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a good question or prompt can be worth hundreds of ideas. The quality of questions asked in a meeting or workshop dramatically influences the amount of Individual intelligence leveraged and the value of subsequent discussions and decisions. Facilitators should build a supply of high-yield core questions or prompts that they can use in a variety of settings to produce better results.
Getting in Action
Using your own organization, take 5-10 minutes to brainstorm responses to the alignment prompt in order to experience the potential power of a well-crafted question.
Identify a few meeting agenda items or workshop topics you regularly encounter either as a participant or a facilitator. Try to generate one timeless prompt or question for each. Refine the language for each draft question or prompt at least once, assessing them against the IDEO and Warren Berger guidance about good questions.
Review the rounds and process of the gathering described. How might you modify what occurred to produce even better results or make the experience better align with your organization’s culture?
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