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.

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.

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.

• 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.

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!

One of the best ways to open up feedback across a team is include a leadership style feedback inventory into your next off-site. The very best inventory I have found is LIFO - Life Orientations. About thirty years ago, when I first took LIFO, I was amazed at the insights given to me. For example, my strengths revolved around desiring harmony and helping people to work together, not bad for a beginning group process facilitator. I also learned that defaulting to this strength in excess could get me in trouble by compromising too early or overplaying wanting to be liked. Great insights they were and the best part is that they are behaviorally based, meaning I have a choice in how I behave and which style I choose.

I bring all of this up because opening feedback up across a team is one of the best ways to reduce defensiveness and increase creativity, enabling a team to move more quickly to high performance. Receiving constructive feedback also increases my desire and confidence to disclose more about myself to my team mates and begins to equalize the risk across the team. When my team mates know more about me and feel comfortable discussing even difficult issues with me, and I with them, we can cut each other some needed slack. Defensiveness goes down trust rises, goals and roles are more easily clarified, and monitoring our progress becomes more like making course corrections on a sailboat.

LIFO does all of this with a humorous and light touch, the perfect recipe for these fear-based times of ours. LIFO is strength based, founded upon the work of the humanistic psychologies of Carl Rogers, Erik Erickson, and Abraham Maslow. It’s optimistic without being unrealistic yielding powerful insights without being internally focused. The styles are behavioral choices not personality types, and make sense only in relation to the others on your team. LIFO also delivers a picture of how our styles change under unfavorable conditions, definitely a good insight to have. A little self awareness goes a long way in helping team members and their respective teams to reach high performance.

Want to increase your team’s collective intelligence? Just add women! That’s right, and the research is both succinct and convincing. Collective intelligence goes up when people co-operate well. Women seem to be better at this than men. Adding women to groups increases the ability of the group to co-operate more, and discover and capitalize more on their interdependencies. The reaseach appeared  in the June issue of The Harvard Business Review.

I have had a good time discussing this research with a number of colleagues lately. Interestingly enough are the reactions. My male colleagues seem to get slightly defensive and a bit irritated. My female colleagues on the other hand often say something along these lines,  “Of course, we have all known this, I am glad someone has gone about researching it.”

My observations of over 25 years of small group work concur with the research, but I would add another dimension. As a team facilitator / consultant and observer of small group process, I tend to follow the energy displayed by team members. Good, positive, creative energy means good processes, solid membership, and a focus on achieving results. As such, I have seen much more than collective intelligence go up when women are added to a group. It appears to me that as teams approach an equal distribution of men and women, the energy level goes way up. It’s palpable. It’s just something I have noticed and commented on many times with my client groups. I wish someone would research this observation. I have also witnessed energy increase significantly as more diversity is introduced into small groups, racial diversity and cultural diversity. The most creative groups I have worked with seem to be composed of different cultures, different races, different sexes etc. More difference in small working groups seems to lead to more acceptance, more interesting points of view, more new thought, and better decisions. It also seems to allow for the natural conflict to be taken less personally.

I am saving the best observation till last. These diverse groups seem to get better over time. Familiarity does not breed contempt, nor compliance, but from my observations, to much higher levels of performance. Just coming off celebrating Independence Day in the US, I can’t help think that at some point in the future we might be pulled together to celebrate Interdependence Day!

Moving away from the excessive use of paper at meetings has been a dream of mine for awhile. I love flip charts as many of you know and I don’t like the excessive use of PowerPoint. So why paperless? I believe, with the right combination of process, technology, and facilitation we can bring a whole new era of meetings into being which will improve communication, shorten the time, allow conversations to go deeper, and encourage visual dialogue. Sounds cool?

Here is how I envision it. We need all of these to come together and we are so close right now:
    •    The Hive - allows for instant brainstorming, immediate feedback and unlimited playback after the meeting. Data entry devices include laptops, smart phones, iPads etc.
    •    The IPad - allows for illustrations, informal drawings, concept visuals for the “I see what you mean" visual experience.
    •    Laptops with a good word processing package installed - Office or I Work will do fine.
    •    Small pocket projectors and screens for break outs. So far the missing component. These have improved dramatically recently, so I think we are good to go.
    •    Clickers - for instant polling and the ability to do “digital decision making” in the here and now
    •    The techno - facilitation skills to combine and recombine all of the above in all the ways necessary into a seamless meeting process.

And, the good news is that all of this is doable in one seamless integration. The really great part is that the process I am envisioning is completely scalable. A whole new era is finally here! These are just the headlines. I will be describing how we can put this into practice.

This link is great. Michael Bierut identifies seven things designers can learn from stand-up comics. It’s a great article to keep around for meeting designers, action research designers, and facilitators. Here are the seven in summary, but do read the article. It’s worth it. Thank you Michael.
    1.    It’s all about the basics.
    2.    Once you have mastered the basics, make it your own.
    3.    Respect your audience.
    4.    Know your tools.
    5.    Honor your craft.
    6.    Don’t be afraid of failure.
    7.    Never forget - you have a special gift

One of LIF O’s assumptions is that teams can get into trouble when team members over play their strengths. I have seen this on many teams on their way to high performance. It only takes a few team members who consistently go into “excess” to set up a sequence of events that holds the team back.

As a facilitator, it’s important to understand that most times this move to excess comes out of good intent. Team members want to get things done, hold to high standards, make the right decisions, please each other along the way, or any of the above in combination. It also gets complicated.

Team members have various levels of comfort telling other  colleagues to dial their excesses back a notch. This can lead to triangulation, where instead of telling the team member directly, the person affected tells someone else about the team member as they try to gain an ally. Left alone a number of ineffective parings can come about quite quickly. It can be especially harmful when team members triangulate over excesses of the team leader.

A skilled facilitator can easily detect these symptoms. As Yogi Berra said, “You can observe a lot by just watching.” Seeing this in action requires some immediate action. I believe it is important to understand though, that high driving, highly intelligent, and often highly defended team members, acting with a combination of self interest and good intent, can create a difficult challenge even for a seasoned facilitator. Here are some things that have worked for me.

• Never own the work. It is their work and they have to do it. If you are working harder than your client, this situation will not resolve.
• Use Robert Fritz’s model of oscillation to illustrate how excesses and triangulation take away from the real work and cause oscillation. When teams oscillate they expend a tremendous amount of energy but don’t get much done.
• Use the Drexler Sibbet Team Performance Model to discover at which stage the excesses appear. From my experience these symptoms show up in Stages 3, 4, and 5. However in their expression, they also affect Trust - Stage 2.
• Use humor. While going into excess can cause pain, it also is often quite funny, in that working too hard, and taking things too seriously does not lead to fluid high performance. It actually leads to rigidity and bottle necks. Taking a step back an seeing the futility of these efforts is often humorous. Humor is a powerful antidote to this situation
• Use LIF O strength feedback exercises. Have team members recognize excess, and have them practice telling each other to dial them back. These exercises are fun, and can be done while the team is on task - discussing how to execute against their strategy.

Team leaders can move their teams more quickly to high performance by getting some help with these issues early on.