Chris Hugill
Senior Manager
This is the third installment in a series offering stories and lessons from over twelve years of facilitating large group events and surviving to share the lessons. The clients I’ve worked with range from healthcare system leadership to large physician-owned practices, large shareholder groups, and faculty at academic institutions and research organizations. The goals of these large group events were often strategic, using perspective-altering games and tools to think about their future together in new ways. There was often laughter; there was often conflict. This series parses a few simple yet hard-earned approaches to get the most out of these rare and charged moments. My aim in writing it is to give leaders and planning teams useful strategies and tactics to take into their next large group event. While these events can be a big investment of time, money, and attention, doing them well can be transformative—and my hope is that this series will aid you in capitalizing on these rare opportunities for big leaps forward for your organization.
Thanks for reading!
The role of data and its myriad uses in large group events plays a critical role in shaping successful outcomes. We often invoke the following spectrum in thinking about how to bring the outside world into large group events for the purpose of coming away with actional decisions:
Data: specific, verifiable, true facts, which together can turn into…
Information: assembled summaries about the current state, giving way to…
Knowledge: internalized information that informs a world view, which, if you’re lucky, can become…
Wisdom: insights that embed and influence organizational purpose and strategic direction.
We’ve gotten to peek at a lot of prep materials from other consulting firms. We tend to see a lot of data, generally in the form of extensive and eye-blurring tables, charts, and figures. Our goal for prep materials, including current state analyses often presented early in large group events, is information well on the way to knowledge. This is the surest and swiftest route to generating wisdom in the room. In our view, there’s a big difference between this…
and this…
One of the most exciting moments in large group events is the opportunity to, in real-time, boil the collective wisdom of a group back down into raw data. Increasingly, this is done through technologies that, while not new, have improved considerably in recent years.
In one event, we had developed, over the course of a year, a “state of the debate” concerning a particular question for a medical specialty. It was a highly strategic question but could be boiled down into a simple yes or no: Will we pursue this idea, or will we not? One of the vexing aspects of the debate is that it was well known that the majority of the community was opposed to the idea, but that anyone who was presented with the data and had an opportunity to really think about it was frequently swayed to support the idea.
After presenting our state of the debate and then working through different scenarios with a collected group of about sixty leaders in the specialty, it was time to gauge the room. We put a QR code up on the screen, which took participants to a simple online platform with a short set of questions. The culminating question was, “Should the specialty pursue this choice? Yes, No.” We pulled up the results, and 77% of the group said “yes”. This elicited a mild shock in the audience. Everyone who had changed their mind figured they were probably one of the few to do so, but in fact, quite a lot did. The organization that sponsored the event elected to pursue preparations for this new direction while laying the groundwork for making the case for the specialty as a whole.
Because we came with knowledge, we were able to arrive at wisdom, which turned back into the clarity the organization needed to move forward. Large group events have a way of going by very quickly. Getting a fast start means getting high-quality information into the room as swiftly as possible and then focusing on turning that information into knowledge and that knowledge into wisdom. Insight doesn’t spring forth from the proverbial rock. You have to build it on a solid foundation.