Some colleges and universities need to accelerate multi-stakeholder decision making during budget constrained times to reach consensus faster.
Many leaders face making difficult decisions without a clear understanding of potentially damaging consequences. 2021 plans are focused on sustaining operations simultaneous with creating innovative solutions for the future.
The task at hand is to develop and deliver curriculums matched with job requirements in the next two decades. Citizens are proactively seeking reskilling and upskilling to further their socioeconomic standing in life.
We can all agree, emails and meeting minutes do not create collaboration primarily because collaboration is a process. WebStudy Foundation partners with colleges and universities to host virtual engagements designed to operationalize collaboration.
In these virtual events, we facilitate and engage the participants (5-500) to interact in real time on a solvable, difficult or ‘wicked’ barrier – specific to your organizations’ inability to move forward.
The WebStudy Foundation has coined our service ‘Facilitated. Interactive. Engagements’ (FIE) and the result is high-stakes decision making at warp speed.
Two characteristics make this methodology effective in generating collaboration:
What we do is needed, primarily because times have shifted to a digital information age.
Does your institution want a facilitator to accelerate communication and collaboration between administrators, faculty, staff and students to unearth missing communication, gaps in inter-departmental process steps and redundancies in system restructuring?
We use virtual conference technology and the design levers (packaged in a software application) to conduct a series of contemplative inquiries. The process of collaboration might be described as “the action of working with others to produce or create something” unforeseen in any one department or silo.
In short, we apply process design to achieve a meeting of the minds across multiple stakeholders.
All stakeholders partake in generating impactful answers to expertly crafted questions. The authentic answers offered anonymously are shared instantaneously for the audience and presenters to see simultaneously.
In real time, our facilitators work with a ‘dream team’ (set up by client) to review and guide the next series of inquiries. This accelerated process evokes an unprecedented mutual understanding across departments with very different points of view.
The process design unfolds further (may be tweaked in real time) – achieving the unforeseen, the unexpected – alignment towards something, that no one unit could have created independent of the other.
Meetings of key stakeholders for thinking together, for understanding each other, for innovating and, with good (and coached) leadership, making important decisions. The meeting formats are flexible — from all in the same room, to all online, or a blend of both. And at any size, up into the thousands.
With a computer tablet in each small group (on the table or in each online breakout group), connected via software built for large group communication, feeding an effective theming method, and all managed by the most experienced process designers … participants and leaders alike can know what the whole group is thinking in 5-10 minute time frames. This enables a “whole group dialogue” like no other.
Deeply experienced specialists pay careful attention to the purpose and group dynamics of an engagement and then manage large groups toward the desired outcomes. Add in knowledge of special technology for whole group communications and you have a powerhouse capability in our collaborative services.
Facilitated Interactive Engagements are designed to guide organizations most quickly through tough decision-making processes that incorporate all stakeholder perspectives via group dynamics expertise and group communication technologies.