[Sigia-l] We could just use whiteboards instead.

[Faith Peterson]

The challenge of eliciting useful results from a group rests largely on the
facilitator's skill first in selecting the participants, second in
structuring the meeting which must be planned in detail in advance, and
third in conducting the session in such a way as to elicit from the
participants constructive and useful information and decisions. Everyone is
differently gifted; one who has these skills can achieve a lot with a group
while one who does not probably should stick with more individual
approaches. If there is chaos in the meeting, it's not the whiteboard's
fault. It's the facilitator's.

A couple of pitfalls:
- having the wrong people in the meeting: users only should be in the
meeting. No managers unless they're the users. No user surrogates if it can
be helped. If user surrogates must be used, it's essential to use exercises
in the meeting to help them empathize with their users. One of the most
important skills to have is how to keep managers out of the meetings.
- failing to plan: I never go into a groupwork session without knowing the
objective I'm going to help the group achieve. I work backwards from the
objective to plan the pace and content of the meeting in detail. Perhaps the
biggest pitfall here is putting to much of myself in the objective. I frame
the objective in terms of its structure rather than its content. The hardest
thing is not to impose my own ideas about what the content should be, OR to
elicit the "best" content from the participants in such a way that they feel
they came up with it on their own.
- calling it a "meeting": I always call them "work sessions" and only use
"meeting" as the label for status or progress review meetings. I don't call
attention to it, I just do it. People have certain (usually bad)
expectations about going to a "meeting." People coming to a work session are
much less passive as participants and much less bewildered when it's evident
the process will be participative and interactive rather than serial
soliloquy.

Done well, a "transparent" process results in users feeling as though they
are better and smarter and more capable than they thought they were. A
"closed" process only reinforces their usually mistaken perception that they
don't and can't know what's best for them.

Faith

Faith Peterson
Schaumburg, IL, USA
faithp at wideopenwest.com


-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-admin at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-admin at asis.org]On Behalf Of
Listera
Sent: Sunday, August 17, 2003 6:21 PM
To: sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] We could just use whiteboards instead.

{....]If I'm tasked with doing the IA/UI/etc, I
consider myself a funnel through which all related activity go through. I
engage everyone concerned often individually and, occasionally, in small
groups, but very rarely in large groups, collaboratively playing with
post-it and chewing gum in a room. To me, that almost sounds like abdication
of my duties/homework. I trust that I can anticipate the vast majority of
potential questions, approaches, problems, etc. When I feel uncertain then I
engage whoever has that domain knowledge. Usually, the number of people in a
room is inversely proportional to the efficiency with which they create
solutions. When I have more than few people in a room, the exchange is at a
highly abstracted level, far from the nitty gritty of post-it and chewing
gum, which would normally have been taken care of at an earlier stage. You
say collaboration, I say committee work :-) let's call the whole thing...

Ziya
Nullius in Verba


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