The planning for the
community building session is almost complete. The last details are how to
conduct the plenary sessions for sharing information across groups to develop
key priorities and themes that will need to be addressed.
There are 2 sessions that
need to be planned. One is to review the work done by intact work teams. In
this larger session, the goal is to spot patterns and identify themes that can
be used to plan actions. These patterns or themes will come from the
stopâcontinueâstart charts developed by each functional group. In this way, not
only will the changes that need to happen be identified, but aspects of
effective work (those things that work well and should be continued) can also
be reinforced.
The external consulting
team strongly recommended a “cross-functional, by-level grouping” for
the first step. Their aim is to promote understanding of priorities and show
how different issues at different levels of the organization can be aligned.
The internal consulting team is excited about being the primary facilitators
for these sessions. Everyone recognizes that a structured approach will be
critical (for timing and to control decisionâmaking inputs). The approach
calledNominal Group Technique (NGT) seems to be ideally suited to
this task.
You want to prepare
yourself for conducting the session. Use the library, Internet, or other
resources to research NGT. Because each grouping will be of a differing size,
you want to tailor the overall steps of NGT to the situation you will
facilitate. To do this, you must create a meeting session plan (a document
of 4â5 pages) that will answer the following questions:
What is the goal of the
session?
How will the nominal group
technique be used to achieve this goal?
How will the members of
the team work together (guidelines for effective participation)?
What specific steps and
tasks will be involved in achieving the goal?
How much time will be
allocated to each step or task? What voting mechanism is most appropriate
for the size of the group and the specific stage of the process?
What will the outcome look
like? What will the group present to the other levels?
