The WebIQ™ Difference – Facilitating Dialogues and Decisions

Imagine doubling the productivity of your business teams, moving quickly through the group decision-making process: generating creative ideas, setting clear goals and objectives, making sound decisions, and getting buy-in – all at affordable prices, anyplace, anytime.

WebIQ makes this is a reality. WebIQ will significantly enhance your group’s productivity and give you a new perspective on group interaction, decision-making, and feedback.

Collaborative Decisions will help you directly tackle your most challenging and important issues. Our facilitation, coaching and training services help you quickly take advantage of these powerful computer assisted meeting tools, whether you meet with others from your desk, in a conference room, or at an event in another location.

Our facilitators, experienced in business, technology and group dynamics, help you use meeting software tools to guide your team through the process. Goal-directed dialogue agendas facilitate the contribution of ideas and lead teams to reach consensus.

HOW WEBIQ™ BENEFITS YOUR TEAMS

• Focus on the task at hand – your team accomplishes much more than individuals working alone.
• Concurrent input from all participants – everyone can "talk" at the same time, producing significantly more input and cutting meeting time as much as 60 percent.
• All participants have an equal voice.
• Anonymity promotes creativity by encouraging an uninhibited flow of ideas and opinions; People comment and vote on the ideas, not on who said what. This process minimizes "group think" or the "mob mentality".
• Ideas and votes can be attributed when you need to know the source.
• Everyone has a clear understanding of the goals and expected outcomes.
• Your team quickly identifies critical issues and generates better ideas and solutions.
• Each session is completely documented, with everyone’s ideas and alternatives, evaluations and decisions becoming part of your project and organizational history. You will see how you arrived at every decision without having to take notes.

Used by all participants by invitation to Web-based sessions, WebIQ provides powerful tools to:

• Manage the group process
• Generate ideas and solution alternatives
• Organize and categorize alternatives
• Evaluate alternatives
• And document the agenda, activities, and results.

THE WEBIQ TOOL SET

Group members access the software tools through a dynamic agenda, which helps guide participants through the process. The following tools are used to create user-friendly activities where group members, at their convenience or during scheduled sessions, contribute their ideas and evaluations.

Ideas

Brainstorming on the Web allows everyone to "talk" on-line simultaneously. The group works in a shared space where "What You See Is What I See" — each idea entered appears on all computers in real time, creating an exciting atmosphere of accelerated idea generation and collection. The medium of the computer gives the most reticent individual an equal voice. The ability to comment on ideas and other comments provides a structured means of sharing opinions and data on a variety of topics. Free-form comments can be added and viewed by everyone in the group.

Rate

Teams rate each alternative or idea using a predefined numeric scale (for example, 1 to 5). The software computes the group averages and displays the results in descending order (high to low). Rating quantifies strength of opinion, revealing significant differences in individual preferences as a range, and promotes convergence toward agreement.

Organizer

The Organizer allows the activity leader and participants to create categories and place any number of ideas, including those previously generated, into the categories.

Categorize

Categorize allows participants to select in which category or categories each idea belongs. The results show the number of times each Idea is assigned to a particular category.

Select

Each person in the group selects a specified number of alternatives from a list. The software computes the number of times each alternative was selected, revealing the group’s top priorities.

Allocation

Allocation allows participants to distribute a finite number of "points" or resources among alternatives, for example, allocating a fixed budget amount among a group of investment opportunities.

Rank

In Ranking activities, individuals sequence each alternative in order of importance or desirability. The software computes the average rank assigned by the group as a whole, and displays the results in order of group preference.

Score

This feature allows participants to rate alternatives using multiple criteria which can be assigned weighting factors. The software calculates and displays the group preference by total score.

Vote

Yes, No, or Abstain votes on a list of ideas quickly establish areas of agreement or priority within the group.

Questionnaire

Surveys are created, with questions posed as Rate, Rank, Vote, Allocate, Select, or Open-Ended with skip logic based on participant response. Reporting is flexible allowing for multiple analyses of results.

Action Plan

The Action Plan activity allows tasks to be identified and assigned, including critical dependencies.

Closure

Closure provides the ability to summarize and report the complete session proceedings including background facts, agenda, participants, decisions, and follow-up action items.

THE RESULT?

You will be astonished by the effectiveness of your team in just a short amount of time. Results often include:

• A dramatic increase in the effectiveness of the group
• Much shorter meetings
• More innovative and creative ideas
• Greater participation by all members
• Organized, evaluated ideas and alternatives
• And a written record of the entire dialogue for immediate action items and future reference.

A WIDE ARRAY OF APPLICATIONS

WebIQ is particularly effective when you need input and agreement from teams of people representing various organizational functions. Here are just a few examples of WebIQ applications:

• Conflict Resolution
• Focus Groups
• Needs Analysis & Requirements
• Planning
• Policy Analysis & Development
• Problem Solving
• Process Re-design
• Program Development
• Project Management
• Quality Programs
• Team Building

FACILITATED WEBIQ SESSIONS

Collaborative Decisions provides experienced WebIQ facilitators for clients who wish to use an external meeting facilitator. Your active involvement in planning for your use of WebIQ for meetings is key to its success. This includes:

• Clearly defining your team’s agenda.
• Including the appropriate people on your team.
• Developing team ownership and commitment to the session agenda and outcomes.

Here’s how Collaborative Decisions will help:

• Planning begins when a Collaborative Decisions Facilitator meets with members of your team. Together you set goals, develop a plan for one or more sessions, plan the agenda(s), determine the mode (face-to-face or distributed, same time or random access), select the
  site(s) if appropriate, decide who will attend, identify your team leader, and determine expected outcomes.
• Your Facilitator sets up your WebIQ agenda(s), tests it, and reviews the agenda(s) with your team leader to ensure it accomplishes the defined purpose.
• Your team and the facilitator then convene on WebIQ, either from their desks, conference room(s), or face-to-face at an event. After a brief introduction on the use of the software, the participants work through the activities in the agenda. Based on the needs of the group, they will generate ideas, organize and synthesize the alternatives, evaluate and select the best alternatives, and/or plan the next steps.
• Following the session(s), your facilitator is available to review and analyze the team’s accomplishments and determine your next steps. This helps ensure that your goals and expected outcomes are realized, and that your team is ready to begin its next task.

This comprehensive plan ensures that you will get the most from your facilitated WebIQ meetings. And when it’s over, you will see WebIQ’s extraordinary power to enhance your productivity and effectiveness.

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