Partner with Us and Sponsor a Critical Conversation

 

Does your community need to come together to find common ground? Do you have a real need to have a meeting of the minds, where everyone can participate equally and all voices count?

We have the means to hold these conversations. Whether you want to:

• Conduct a Future Search Conference for regional planning,
• Prioritize capital expenditures while keeping taxes down,
• Brainstorm new ways to raise revenue for your township
• Hold an electronic town hall 
• Plan a series of focus groups to research planning options

We can facilitate all of the above and much more. We are looking for companies and organizations that want to sponsor an experience in participative democracy. Our soon to be launched Website: Citizens Summit.com will blog about our experiences.

We want to change the tone of our large conversations and put people to work discussing the things that matter to them locally. We are not interested in furthering personal agendas, and we are not willing to help those who seek to divide us. We desire to bring about more light with less heat.

We will design the experiences with you and the meeting owners to create the means for maximum diversity and inclusion, and follow-up. Our tools are state of the art, and our process has been time tested for over 20 years in large and medium size businesses. Now we want to offer our unique set of skills and tools for the greater good.

Sponsoring is easy. We have several funding options for you. It will be similar to funding a golf tournament. You will choose your level of sponsorship. You will be helping your community to come to common ground, explore options, and make better decisions with more community involvement.

If this sounds interesting to you, please contact using the form below. If you’d like to volunteer to be a table facilitator at one of our meetings please contact us. In the future will also be training facilitators how to conduct their own participative processes in the future.

Join us.

McNeil Consultants Inc.

The GroupMind and Thought Capture

Ipads and Smart Phones can lead to some very creative ways to up the participation at your next meeting.

Have everyone attending link their device to The Hive. In The Hive, set up a simple thought capture page. A one-liner for thoughts that are triggered by the speaker. Thoughts from everyone accumulate as the speaker progresses.

As the facilitator - set the Hive Page to Anonymous and private, so only you can see the GroupMind. As people enter their thoughts help the team create a good norm  by censoring out any blatantly ridiculous ideas that appear. You will only have to do this once  as folks will get the message. And the senders, anonymous as they are will thank you later.

Click to try.

At the end of the presentation, with the OK of the presenter (you have contracted with him or her beforehand), display the thoughts from GroupMind

Often their will be a few questions that the presenter can answer right away, that didn’t get asked during the presentation. Often there will be some amazing insights about the topic, or nuances, not presented that give the presetner and the team pause.

This is a different way of attending meetings. It gives an eerie meditative quality to a presentation. Like in meditation, just let the thoughts flow by. Afterwards you have a chance at additional insights. Give it a try. My clients love it, and we have had several significant breakthroughs through the use of this technique.

Creating and Sustaining High Performance Teams

Allen Drexler and Russ Forrester are leading the Creating and Sustaining High Performance Teams Workshop - October 24th - 28th in Seattle. This is the one that gets you certified to use the Drexler Sibbet Team Performance Inventory. Boeing and Microsoft are both sending teams to this one, so it’s also a great way to do some networking. I can’t say enough about this experience. It’s total immersion, intense, fun and invigorating. You will be challenged by peers to contract with team leaders, design team experiences, and make critical interventions. The best part is that you have both of the founders teaching you! It just doesn’t get any better.

So if you are looking to expand your consulting offer either as an inside organizational consultant or an independent, this is the workshop for you. If you notify me of your intent to go, I can probably get you a discount, especially if you decide to take someone else, or a small team of folks with you. Let me know if you are interested.

Team Development - A Fresh Approach!

I have been experimenting lately with a new form of team development combining three successful and time tested methodologies:

• Action Research
• Story Editing / Story Prompting
• The Drexler Sibbet Model

Here’s the technique in a nutshell:

• The team and the team leader contracts with me to create an experiment to improve their team performance significantly
• We all agree to use an Action Research Design and to jointly design and conduct the research and the intervention.
• We make use of the Drexler Sibbet Team Performance Inventory to collect and publish the “current reality” for the team. This inventory reports how well the team has resolved the critical issues relative to developing a high performance culture. It also significant insights into current group dynamics that may be helping or hindering team performance. Finally it helps to create a positive and safe atmosphere where tough discussion topics can be aired and resolved. This work typically takes one day.
• The second day we frame up where we are and where we want to go. To get there we use several powerful story-editing techniques that we have developed over years of practice. These exercises, performed in small groups, create a reframing experience for the team, based on positive norms developed in small groups. Our experience has been that the norms created in the small groups carry over to the large group. The story-editing sets in motion a series of positive actions based on  strengths that enables the team to redirect itself and create highly positive outcomes. The team acts together to bring the new story into being. The whole process is fueled by discovery combined with creation. Its differs dramatically from the old problem solving / team building approaches.

The entire process takes two days. We do all the data collection and story editing around the real work the team must do. We are seeing extraordinary results.

Hive is "Word of the Day!"

To celebrate Hive being picked as the “Word of the Day” on Visual Thesaurus, we are pleased to announce our new business model for The Hive - the internet brainstorming, data collection, voting and prioritizing suite of tools for just $10 a seat at your upcoming meetings!

The Hive works with smart phones and tablets, iPhones and iPads, and laptops. Participants at your meetings can brainstorm, give live feedback, write on electronic flip charts, take surveys, vote on critical issues, prioritize their work, and store their documents. It all works off an easy to use electronic agenda that takes minutes to set up and use. All the data is stored for you, so there is no typing of flip-charts after the meetings.

The best part is that we can train you to use The Hive from our desktop to yours and have you up and running in no time.  

No more excuses for not using Action Research Technologies (ART) at your next meeting - be it large or small. As our inspiration, Yogi Berra once said, “Little things are big.”

Get back to us soon if you are interested in a demonstration of how The Hive can accelerate your next meeting!