Going Deep with Clickers (supportive confrontation)

A number of times, I use clickers with with The Hive to achieve a fast feedback system that I cannot get with a single application. Clickers allow us to vote quickly on any topic and they make collecting critical pieces of data easy and fun. Let me give an example of going deep with them.

Suppose your client, a large team of 30, wants to increase trust, and suppose further that they already know they have a number of issues that need to be worked, but are unwilling to discuss them openly. It’s a very common problem.

One way to get at what needs to be worked is to use clickers with a bit of Action Research. Here’s our method. Kids, don’t try this at home without a real facilitator present.

Identify the working sub-teams of the large team. For example in a large financial team you might have these subgroups. IT, Treasury, HR, Tax, Finance, and ER (enterprise risk).

Make the following table:

Notice that each of the intersections can describe the relationship between each of the sub teams. The interaction of HR Enterprise Risk and Tax offers two dimensions Critical and Compatible. The questions would be: How CRITICAL is it for Enterprise Risk and Tax to work well together on this team. We could score this by means of a 1-7 Likert scale, where 1 - not critical and all and 7 means essential for the well being of the team.

Next we could measure how COMPATIBLE they are in practice. How well do they actually get along.? Get along has the connotation of trust in action.

Now, what’s interesting is that everyone on the team knows everything about these dimensions for each of the combinations. They have not had an easy way to see it, or to discuss this openly. When you load this into the clickers, you have a powerful design that in the capturing of the information and in ensuing discussion.

The clickers capture the information instantly and anonymously. It take about 10 minutes to collect all the data. The discussion is rich, and can lead to significant breakthroughs. For example there may be hot spots in the team where Critical is scored high, and Compatibility is scored low. This is worth discussing. There may also be places where a sub team flat lines, that is they are not seen as critical even though they feel they are. Again, this is worth discussing.

Clickers can add a new dimension to your consulting work. Action Research in the moment. Can’t help to think that Kurt Lewin would have loved to play with these in action!

Giving Credit: I learned this technique from Will Schutz a long time ago. He was a genius at designing powerful, supportive confrontations that move groups to productive dialogue.