Comments on: Figuring out what We believe

By: piers larcombe

piers larcombe — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 08:15:12 +0000

I think the implicit move towards finding a consensus, however carefully achieved and recorded, contains some dangers. My brief view of the above example, is to note that the intro says…

“… South Australian Department of Health and Human Services put together a 3 day “Summer School” on the topic of addictions, inequalities and their interrelationships, with a view to providing guidance for policy makers. They said that 20% of the South Australian budget is used to deal with problems of addiction, so this is a major issue. They hoped to come up with a kind of Position Statement, which would summarise the consensus, if any, that the group of 50 or so participants reached during the Summer School”.

I’d be happier with it all if the SA Dept. were challenged on why they felt the need to do this (wooly in this example, at least to my reading) and what precisely they thought they might do with a result.

By: Bern Grush

Bern Grush — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 18:54:07 +0000

i think there is a goldmine in here. I have to say that I am coming to rely less and less that anyone really has a strong handle on any answers to really tough problems. I had this driven home this morning by Steven Landsburg (The Big Questions, Chapter 8, Diogenes Nightmare). If you think you believe what you say you believe, you owe it to everyone you are in discourse with to read this chapter. I think Tim should make this Chapter, if not the whole book a prerequisite to participating in one of his workshops.

By: Ron Newman

Ron Newman — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:59:00 +0000

I heartily agree, and am surprised and delighted to find someone else willing to go out on this non-intuitive limb that meetings are not an efficient way to present information. I believe information should be presented beforehand, after which meetings are for 1) massaging social connections, and 2) deciding or creating something.

The problem becomes convincing institutions to set up their processes so that information is mastered beforehand. Are you familiar with the “brainwriting” technique of Paul Paulus?
In brainwriting, ideas are written rather than spoken, then passed among group members. If tool such as your software is being used, previous ideas necessarily are considered before one knows where and how to append one’s own.
http://www.ideatree.us/view-brainwriting.php5

By: Tim van Gelder

Tim van Gelder — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:07:49 +0000

Re “Do you have any thoughts for how you might increase participants understanding of “the field and the material they had been presented with”?”

Well, one thing that seems remarkably inefficient is the standard practice of having experts deliver presentations, typically aided by lots of PowerPoint slides dense with bullet points, charts etc..

Here’s a kind of cart-before-the-horse suggestion that might actually work: don’t bother with trying to get people to have a better understanding of the field prior to doing the consensus-opinion-determining activity. Rather, do that activity, and hand people the results. If they were to largely just accept the collective understanding, in most cases they’d be far better off.

By: Peter Herrick

Peter Herrick — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:42:03 +0000

That is fantastic! We always complain about the idea of “decision making by committee” but you’ve managed to find a way to use the technology to bring a serious number of people to consensus. Well done, Tim.

It’s also interesting to me that you were able to do it with, effectively, binary choices instead of likert scales, and still reach consensus. Obviously the initial work you did developing the Draft Statement paid off.

Do you have any thoughts for how you might increase participants understanding of “the field and the material they had been presented with”? Would that have been helpful to have more people ‘get it’ better, or counterproductive in that there may have been more divergent opinions that might have stalled the consensus process?

Thanks for posting this Tim!