Participation in Planning

Planning sessions are common in most businesses. The best ones involve staff who represent various functions in the business. By definition everyone has an interest in good planning because good plans drive good business. On the day, getting everyone to engage is difficult since people have different interpersonal styles.

A classic way of improving participation is to divide a large group into smaller groups for detailed discussion of issues or questions. This works because most people feel much more comfortable speaking with a few others than speaking in front of many others. Individuals who are naturally quiet are less likely to "hide" in a small group, just listening to others' views. Also, more information, opinions and ideas can be collected at the same time if several small groups are working simultaneously.

Work in small groups is more effective if the approach changes from session to session or from day to day. Example approaches are

• provide each group with three questions and allow twenty minutes for discussion of each question or all the questions, depending on the complexity of the topics;
• ask each group to draw the current state and the desired future state, mentally noting the meaning of their drawings;
• provide a different question to each group and allow ten minutes for discussion, then ask the people from one group to trade their question with another group;
• ask each group to brainstorm on a topic and then to group the thoughts into a few more fully formed ideas.

Reporting back in planning sessions can be really tedious if every point from every group is described to the whole group. Failing to do some reporting back undermines the feeling of the whole group working together. One approach that stimulates cohesiveness is as follows.

• Each group selects its top five ideas in priority order.
• Group A reports its number one idea.
• The Group B reports its number one idea, unless it is the same as Group A's. If so, Group B states its support for Group A's idea and reports its number two idea.
• All the groups continue to report in this fashion until all the prioritized ideas are reported.

This approach enables groups to see how they have a lot in common while bringing to light the best ideas.