I just saw the most incredible thing. I saw a meeting of about fifty people come to consensus on a large group of issues in an incredibly short time frame. And it was painless; no one spoke, but everyone was heard.

The group was GAZEL (www.gazel.org), the industry cluster for e-learning. The place was the Advanced Strategy Center at Pinnacle Peak, a place worth visiting even if it didn't have this kickass tool for organizational change. (Pinnacle Peak is a mountain in the desert surrounding Scottsdale, Arizona, near which wealthy people build winter homes and then leave them empty three quarters of the time. It's scenic. That's an understatement.)

GAZEL groupies thought they were coming for lunch and a speech, but Doug Griffen, who runs the Center, sat everybody down at a laptop and began to demo the tools and techniques by asking participants "in your view, what are the critical issues for Arizona in the future?" Everyone began typing his or her own list.

The trouble with Arizona is a topic being widely addressed everywhere from economic development to karaoke bars, without much useful activity. There seem to be so many things wrong with Arizona that no one knows what to do next. In short order, the group came up with about ninety issues.

Using the Strategy Center's Categorizer software, the issues were evaluated and reduced to a common fifteen. People whose issues were not represented on the final fifteen were then asked to contribute them. We wound up with eighteen, from water quality to "Fix the Phoenix Suns."

Then came the Prioritizer piece -- or the vote. Everyone simultaneously assigned a 1-10 value (1= not important, 10=critical) to each of the eighteen.

The Prioritizer ranked the issues. At the end of the process, everyone was asked to comment on the most important issue to him or her personally:What's the most important single issue in Arizona to you, personally? What's the benefit to the community of addressing it? What's the downside of not addressing it?

The result was a position statement on all the important issues.

All right, you've seen facilitated meetings before. But you probably haven't seen a computer-aided meeting quite like this, in which there are no BOPSATs. (Bunches Of People Sitting Around Talking) In the meetings with BOPSATs, the individual's goal is to make his point of view heard; the meeting is about making a good impression. Especially in meetings of community leaders, the BOPSATs don't accomplish anything except 1)ventilating one's particular grievance 2)lobbying for one's particular point of view 3)showing the other people in the room that you are wise and articulate.

In the anonymous, computer-aided meeting, none of this is possible. No one knows who thinks what, except in the individual position statements. But at the end ( probably less than a half hour), everyone knows the feeling of the group.

I want you to focus on the incredible amount of time that could be saved in meetings by people using an automated process like this. I also want you to understand that you don't have to be in the same room with your fellow attendees to use this process, since it can be facilitated over the Internet. (www.advancedstrategycenter.com)

But I know all you really care about is how it ended. So here are the original eighteen issues as presented by the Categorizer:
1. Education access and quality
2. Level of traffic and congestion
3. Overall air quality
4. Fix the Suns!!
5. Lack of HQ corporations based here
6. Increasing crime rate, concern for personal safety
7. Lack of a clear and compelling vision for the State
8. Reduction of open land/space...becoming overdeveloped
9. Lack of effective public transportation system
10. The load that immigration is placing on our services
11. Inability to balance the budget
12. Lack of effective telecom infrastructure
13. Lack of career opportunities/activities for teens
14. Lack of effective public leadership
15. Overall reduction in quality of life
16. Concern over wayer supply
17. Lack of access and affordable health care
18. Bringing together multiple cultures

And here are the results of the Prioritizer (the vote):
Mean
8.37 1. Education access and quality
7.63 2. Concern over water supply
7.47 3. Overall air quality
7.00 4. Lack of HQ corporations based here
6.89 5. Lack of effective public leadership
6.63 6. Lack of access and affordable health care
6.63 7. Level of traffic and congestion
6.53 8. Lack of a clear and compelling vision for the State
6.53 9. Inability to balance the budget
6.21 10. Reduction of open land/space...becoming overdeveloped
6.21 11. Overall reduction in quality of life
6.00 12. Lack of career opportunities/activities for teens
6.00 13. Lack of effective public transportation system
5.79 14. Increasing crime rate, concern for personal safety
5.68 15. Bringing together multiple cultures
5.32 16. Lack of effective telecom infrastructure
5.21 17. The load that immigration is placing on our services
2.37 18. Fix the Suns!!

Notice that this group doesn't care much about public transportation, telecom infrastructure, or the load that immigrants place on our services. But what they really *don't* care about: the Phoenix Suns.

Namaste,

Francine