Solving Problems Through Meaningful Dialogue

Identifying problems. Exploring issues and options. Making decisions. Sounds pretty much like what every successful organization does every day to address challenges and find a resolution to tricky problems. Whether you’re the CEO of a fortune 500 or managing the day-to-day activities of a not-for profit in your home town, the actual steps of identifying, exploring and resolving problems is usually the same.  While that may be true, when confronted with tough issues and critical decisions, using the right kind of process to work through these steps is vitally important to ensure that decisions are arrived at in the most informed way for everyone involved.  Assistance from a competent facilitator can greatly improve this process and ensure that the kind of meaningful dialogue that will lead to the most effective and efficient decision-making can take place.

Who Wins With Deliberative Dialogue?

When we watch a debate between political candidates on television, we know the purpose. Each side is trying to win. Each wants to sway the public to see his/her side of the issues. The candidates spar, trying to score points and undermine their opponents. They are certainly not trying to find common ground! Deliberative dialogue, on the other hand, is a distinct way of conversing that asks us to put aside our inclination or desire to win, to be right, or to have the other person be wrong. It is a method by which we can learn from one another and search for the common ground on which solutions often grow

Could the Way Your Meeting Space is Set Up be Affecting the Outcome?

With meeting spaces at a premium at public, private and non-profit organizations, work teams and volunteer committees often have to make do by meeting in tight quarters. While this may be necessary for regular activities, when strategic thinking or challenging conversations are needed, it can be very important to provide a physical meeting space that will encourage participants to engage in respectful, productive conversations.

Studies have shown that the physical set-up impacts the outcome of a meeting. For example, a group of researchers from the American Psychological Foundation and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology conducted a study in 2011, in which they found that natural light can help alleviate headache, fatigue, and other symptoms associated with harsh artificial light, as well as to increase alertness and productivity.

Unlocking Answers and Different Ways of Learning through Facilitation

Mention the word facilitate to people and it can stir up multiple images such as; teachers and blackboards, a conductor with baton in hand, or just someone making things happen.  In fact a facilitator is a type of enabler and to a company undergoing major change, an NGO needing to re-align their vision and programming directions, a multi-interest group working to find new ways to address a pressing issue, and others, a facilitator can be an invaluable asset to draw upon. A skilled facilitator can help spark new ways of thinking and innovation, guide informed and effective decision-making, and bring out the best in people, an organization or a collective.

Paving The Way For a Successful Facilitation: Avoiding 4 Common Pitfalls Copy

Much can go wrong during a planned group facilitation. Unfortunately, even the most well designed event can have mishaps. While it’s easy to think about best case scenarios, let’s understand a few of the things that can go wrong in a facilitation. Highlighting some of these common pitfalls will help you more effectively plan for and lead group discussions in a way that ensures you get the positive outcomes you’ve planned for.

Building Competency in Dialogue and Engagement Processes

In today’s political, social and economic climate, there’s a real need to build competency in designing and implementing effective processes of engagement, dialogue and consultation. This is the case within all types of organizations and institutions (i.e. public, private and governmental). Many leaders, decision-makers and staff are either searching for more creative approaches to finding sustainable solutions to challenging issues and problems, or are being compelled, sometimes legislated, to engage a wider scope of stakeholders in defining, resolving and carrying through on important issues or problems. In an effort to contribute to such competency building, One World has frequently offered training in this area to specific groups and organizations. Recently we offered an open 2-day introductory workshop called, “Dialogue: Key to Productive Engagement and Consultation”. We were pleased to have been able to work with the very mixed group of participants working in diverse sectors who joined us for this workshop.

Is Developmental Evaluation Right for Your Program?

When you hear the word “evaluation,” you might think of it as something that is done after the fact. That would be fair, because that’s when many evaluations take place — after an event, program, or course. Evaluations typically tell us how we did, as well as what we could have done better. While this approach can be very useful where you have an established program model that you already understand well, it is not very useful where you are working in completely new territory – where you are trying to figure things out as you go.  Developmental evaluation can be a powerful tool for these situations.

What Are the Main Features of a Developmental Evaluation?

Developmental evaluation can be especially useful in helping to deal with complex issues where more conventional approaches to evaluation fall short. It is a way to support the development and testing of creative approaches to address complex problems; it is well-suited to those situations where you are “learning as you go”.

Jamie Gamble describes three main features of a developmental evaluation:

Planning for Effective Evaluation

Currently most public engagement is done because morally it’s the “right thing to do.” If you are affecting people’s lives, you should ask them about it. But can we do more? Can we demonstrate the value and impact of public engagement – the difference  that it can make?

This is one of the biggest challenges we face in the field of public engagement. There is an abundance of anecdotal evidence that points to the efficacy of our work, but concrete, measureable data that demonstrates impact is scarce. Planning and building frameworks for evaluation is essential to the long-term success of public engagement in order to collect the comparable evidence we need to demonstrate the value of public engagement to participants, communities and funders.

How to Make Evaluation Practical

As a professional field of endeavour, public engagement is relatively new. In the past, it has not been a priority to collect and disseminate evidence on the impact and efficacy of engagement initiatives, but that is changing. By combining qualitative evidence with quantitative data we can determine to what extent  an initiative was successful, if it had the impact we wanted and how it could be improved upon. There is so much that can be measured that a key challenge is making the evaluation as practical as possible.

Often, when we think about  evaluation, the number of questions we have multiply rapidly as we brainstorm what we want to find out and discover. As we go through the process, the list of items that we want to measure and examine outgrows the time and resources available.