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.

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!

Larger Teams Require Different Methods

As teams get larger team leaders need to organize their team around optimized sub-teams. Teams are increasing their members these days. It’s not uncommon to find that there are 12-20 members on teams. These numbers make team meetings difficult to facilitate in that “air time” becomes difficult for team discussions. Two little known rules for team development apply in these cases, and I will even throw in one of my own. 

The first rule is that the norms that get established in small groups, get carried over to the large group. As much as possible organize your meetings into small groups that can work and feed their information to the large group. There is no need to break out to do this. Table groups work fine. In fact I call these “break-in” sessions where we assign the tasks to the small groups. 

The second rule is to optimize the real working sub-teams. Every large team has sub-teams, members that have to work closely together to achieve the results. These teams are the key to producing outstanding results. Map the sub-teams and have them do real work at the meeting. In many cases these teams also have to combine and re-combine in all the ways necessary to get the work done. Map this as well. Nowadays team members need to work face-to-face, virtually, alone, in pairs, and in different combinations. Aim for small. Less is more. Make sure only the actual people that are responsible to accomplish the work are on the sub-team. As a facilitator, work with the leader to set all of this up, and then get out of their way. It is critical that these teams find their own way. 

The third rule I call the rule of Twos and Threes. I got this rule from Yogi Berra, who reportedly once said, “Pair up in threes.”  This rule, maximizes air time and is useful for break-in sessions. Use threes as much as you can and when the numbers don’t work out, break out the remaining members in pairs. Small groups of threes are powerful. As two talk, the one can observe, give feedback, play devil’s advocate etc. Pairs are not at helpful. Paring can lead to distraction and flight from the work. It’s common in groups for pairs to collude, complain, retreat as the two support each other. 

Keep these rules in mind as you lead and facilitate larger teams. 

Pre-loading a Meeting

You have a very important meeting coming up. It could be a large town hall or maybe a senior leadership kick off. You want everyone engaged and fully participating. In short, you want something back for this large investment you will be making.

One way we have found helpful is to “pre-load the meeting.” Give the participants something engaging to work on prior to the meeting to grab their attention and peek their interest. I am not talking about sending out a large attachment in an email as pre-work. This would be way too predictable and way too boring. Better to have an on-line library they can access, and contribute to as well. Here are some things we do.

1.    Send out a survey that asks for their input on the most important decisions you will make at the meeting. Make this information public before the meeting. The best would be in real time. After they enter their comments, participants should be a button they can click to see their comments and all the comments of the other participants. This makes it sticky. They will keep coming back to the survey to see who else contributed, and what they had to say. Tell them we will open up this information at the session and work it. Have a “theme team” look over this information and pull out what is core common and consistent.

 2.    Create an on-line discussion prior to the meeting, and make sure your top team keeps adding to it and responding to it. Have the discussion identify by name those contributing. This helps to create a norm of “owning your own words.”

 3.    Host a brainstorm asking for innovative ideas about a sticky issue. These ideas can be the start of a brainstorming breakout group later in the meeting.

 4.    Send out a short slide show that allows your participants to add their comments to it. Keep the words to a minimum, use visuals wherever possible.

   5.    Have a place where the participants can add something personal about themselves. This is how like folks can connect with each other. Work to facilitate these connections whenever possible at the meeting.

Energy follows attention. Make sure you get a decent return on your investment by finding creative and innovative ways to engage your participants prior to the meeting. It will make you meeting more meaningful, more enjoyable and your participants will thank for it - in many ways!

I need to get out more!

Went to my township meeting last night. I resolved to get out more and offer facilitation skills to community leaders. This is so desparately needed. The officials seemed so stressed out, and so behind the times. We have come a long way in terms of what works in meetings, and it is such a shame that so many meetings are run so poorly. It adds up in terms of waste, frustration, alignment, commitment, time wasted etc.

Have to keep in mind the question, when is help helpful? Many seem not to want what we offer in terms of engagement, buy-in, change mangement, audience response technolgy etc. It's just so painful to see. Have to work in situations where I can be neutral, unbiased, and yet energized to help contentious groups to reach common ground. This current political environment is not conducive to some of our most powerful methodologies, technologies and processes.