Facilitate & Co-Create

THE MIND, ONCE STRETCHED BY A NEW IDEA, NEVER RETURNS TO ITS ORIGINAL DIMENSIONS.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Brainstorm.
Refine. Repeat.

It's amazing what can be accomplished with the collective thought of a team. The right questions, framing, and environment are critical to getting the most out of your people and their ideas.

Brainstorm and idea sessions can vary from team sizes of 6 to 40. There are multiple ways to help guide discussion and debate without disrupting original thoughts and creativity.

The below exercises are examples of the kinds of facilitation and brainstorming that have been successful with teams.

Systems
Mapping

Mapping out all of the major stakeholders, decision makers, relationships, and other elements within your system helps to identify bottlenecks and significant influences. It also helps you create a list of stakeholders that may have to be enrolled.

Making Toast

Inspired by Tom Wujec's TED talk Got a wicked problem? First, tell me how you make toast, this exercise generates ideas on how a process works and then continually refines so that the best ideas become clearer and clearer.

Attribute Tracking

By examining a specific attribute as they pass through a system, we can identify how and when to influence or intervene to adjust the specific attribute. From this exercise, an "upstream" solution can be developed.

State by State

Brainstorm and discuss ideas, programs, products, or other items by identifying how they change over time. Once this is laid out, you can identify when the best time to invest to stop/start the negative/positive attribute’s growth.

In addition to facilitating and brainstorm exercises, I have also had the honor of moderating public forums.