Chapter 11. Defining the Steps

The heart and soul of team participation begins with ensuring that decisions adequately represent all participants’ views. That means that teams must learn to gather and share information effectively in order to grow collaboratively. Facilitating teams through information gathering can create great trust and energy, accomplish early wins, and inspire teams to reach solutions they couldn’t have reached as individuals.

Some fundamental information-gathering techniques include brainstorming, listing, grouping, prioritizing, questioning, small group discussion, and expert input. Each of these approaches needs context and structure that envelops it in a reliable packet for bringing it into the meeting as directly relevant ...

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