Strategic Facilitation and Web 2.0
Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 08:20AM 
Strategic facilitation. That's what I think I do quite a lot of the time. Basically I try to help senior NHS managers and clinicians either a) to explore difficult and organisationally significant issues or b) to identify new strategic possibilities and form useful leadership coalitions that can help these aspirations come to fruition.
All mildly interesting perhaps, but what's this got to do with Web 2.0?
Well, as people who know me are aware, I also am an enthusiast for Web 2.0 tools and applications and recently I've taken to blending the use of some of these tools into the facilitation work I do. Garlic bread, it's the future!
Two straightforward examples might help shed some light:
Example 1
A few month back I was asked to facilitate a meeting of about 40 Health Economists, Finance and Public Health Directors. They were being pulled together to advise DH on whether a national support network ought to be formed to help PCTs make better revenue investment decisions - from both technical and allocative efficiency perspectives. I suggested that the organising group use SurveyMonkey to seek the group's views, in advance, about whether forming such a group was a good idea (it was thought to be so surprise surprise) and, more importantly, what the key roles and responsibilities of such a group might be.
An online survey was duly run (at no cost!) and the subsequent 4 hour meeting was then focused on 3 things: a) Quickly sharing and clarifying the results; b) Exploring the 2 issues where significant differences of opinion within the group seemed to exist; and 3) Asking the group to focus most of their time on providing detailed advice about how the top 5 roles, as voted in the survey, ought to be discharged in practice.
The point is that, without the free online survey, the group would have come together and spent alot of their time talking in generalities about the support network and what it might do. The survey 'cleared the decks' and allowed the face to face meeting to add more value to the proposed initiative.
Example 2
Currently I am helping a well established University research network to develop an accreditation re-submission bid to enable it to continue to receive a sizeable amount of research monies for biomedical research projects. We are using a tool called Ideascale to invite stakeholders to suggest, refine and prioritise key questions that need to be addressed before the resubmission proposal gets written. So instead of the 2 day workshop that was initially proposed, where everything is addressed in one go for better or worse, we are now holding a half-day meeting to address the 10 most powerful questions , followed, 2 months later by a half-day session with stakeholders where a draft re-submission bid will be presented and modified.
In both examples, Web 2.0 tools (SurveyMonkey and Ideascale in these cases) are being blended into the development process, helping to create less time consuming and more focused face to face working. Garlic bread, it's the future you know!
Reader Comments (2)
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Steve