The main benefits of the programme are:
Question the structure of your group sessions and meetings – you will develop the knowledge required to question the structure, effectiveness and ownership of your current sessions to developing a more facilitated and collective experience
Reduce the time spent meeting – through effective facilitation and following a simple process, decisions and agreements will be made rapidly
Better decision making – from using the intuitive reaction of attendees, achieving fast, quality decisions
Reduced conflict – by giving everyone an equal platform disputes will be avoided
More enjoyable meetings – avoiding conflict and getting straight to the point will make meetings a more pleasant experience
Reach a consensus that everyone agrees on – as all attendees have had a chance to air their views, all decisions are mutual
All attendees can feel empowered – by taking ownership and being fully involved all attendees have authority
A commitment to decisions made – with everyone feeling involved and having input, they will feel more committed to the meeting outcome
Motivation to resolve the problems – by looking at the preferred scenario, rather than the problem attendees will feel more inspired
Allows everyone to be heard – all views achieve equal respect
The principles of RapidConsensus™ have been developed through over 20 years of research and practice by Kevin Nuttall, Australia’s leading facilitator. RapidConsensus™ consistently achieves outstanding results across Europe and the rest of the world. The principles help you to:
Understand why people own what they help to create – Our experience shows that giving people the facts and space to work as a collective allows them to make great decisions. Furthermore implementation of those decisions is far more effective and rapid. Just telling people or imposing a decision rarely gains commitment. Your people will not be engaged or enthusiastic about the outcome as they will feel no ownership in the decision. RapidConsensus™ helps you to find new ways to engage people in the decision making process and they won’t make poor decisions.
Work back from the preferred future scenario – To go from problem to solution without articulating the preferred future scenario has severe limitations. Painting a picture of how things could be is a lot more exciting than describing and analysing the current problems. Your people won’t want to generate options and actions from a place they do not want to be.
Develop ‘Parallel Processing’ – A room of people left to their own devices will tend to work on less than 50% of the information and knowledge available in the room. The most dominant people (by position or personality) will control the conversation; while the more reserved will contribute little or nothing and are more likely to discuss, well after your group session, why the topic will not work. You can speed up a groups ability to process information by allowing separate groups to address the same question in parallel
Listen to everyone, defend nothing – A facilitator’s role is to remain neutral and listen to everything that is said and feed it back accurately to the group. Your people will come into the room from many different viewing platforms (marketing, sales, productions, operations etc). All seeing the environment a little differently. However it is the collective view of these perspectives and interdependencies that provide a complete view of the situation. Providing a process that allows all these views to be heard is a fundamental part of the RapidConsensus™ process. The group will work on the best information and knowledge available to them.
In order to do this the facilitator has to operate as an open conduit. This means you are 100% present and able to remain open to all the input from the group.
Use the ‘7 plus or minus 2 Rule’ – The combinations and permutations of diverse group opinions seem incalculable yet the underlying issues typically fit the ‘7 plus or minus 2 Rule’.
Why ‘7 plus or minus 2’? Research suggests the human brain categorises subjects into a relatively small set so it can remember, process and use information. A group is a collection of human brains, and displays this same effective categorising capability. You will develop a topic mapping technique to diagrammatically cluster the group’s inputs. The mapping is simple to learn and allows seemingly random input to naturally collect into the ‘7 plus or minus 2’ topics.
Understand how speed improves the quality of group decisions – People have different speeds of thinking and interacting yet we all have a rapid cognition capability that works best under time pressure. As a facilitator you will be able to utilise speed to the groups and your advantage. There are many benefits to this that include timesaving, quality outputs, finding collective breakthroughs and better working relationships.
Understand how proximity helps create a level playing field – The best input comes from people who stop hiding behind their roles and start talking on the same level.
This is a great tool to use with mixed groups of all kinds (Age, heirarchical level, experience, knowledge etc) and a great way to ensure that the decisions made are collective, agreed and believed in.
