The planning for the community building session is almost complete. The last details are how to conduct the plenary sessions for sharing information across groups to develop key priorities and themes that will need to be addressed.
There are 2 sessions that need to be planned. One is to review the work done by intact work teams. In this larger session the goal is to spot patterns and identify themes that can be used to plan actions. These patterns or themes will come from the stopcontinuestart charts developed by each functional group. In this way not only will the changes that need to happen be identified but aspects of effective work (those things that work well and should be continued) can also be reinforced.
The external consulting team strongly recommended a cross-functional by-level grouping for the first step. Their aim is to promote understanding of priorities and show how different issues at different levels of the organization can be aligned. The internal consulting team is excited about being the primary facilitators for these sessions. Everyone recognizes that a structured approach will be critical (for timing and to control decisionmaking inputs). The approach calledNominal Group Technique(NGT) seems to be ideally suited to this task.
You want to prepare yourself for conducting the session. Use the library Internet or other resources to research NGT. Because each grouping will be of a differing size you want to tailor the overall steps of NGT to the situation you will facilitate. To do this you must create a meeting session plan(a document of 45 pages) that will answer the following questions:
