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Luther College helps the Northeast Iowa Woodlands Cooperative
define its mission
The Opportunity
In 1994, Luther College received a
unique grant from the Olin Foundation for a building
that would support the Information Systems, Business
and Economics Departments on campus. This state of the
art facility includes a Round Table Room, known on campus
as the RTR. The RTR contains 22 computers all linked
to the Luther network and the internet. Facilitate.com
is the collaborative software used to support decision-making
and other types of group sessions.
It was Luther College's intent to
provide a collaborative environment for student services,
administrative support as well as community based activities.
Recently, Luther College facilitators ran a session
for a Northeast Iowa Woodlands Cooperative in order
to brainstorm ideas for marketing their products in
a sustainable way. The meeting owner wanted a chance
to bring this diverse group of people in and let the
ideas fly. The challenge was that the group had never
worked together, and they were from very different backgrounds
and points of view - from community professionals to
local farmers to forestry experts. At the same time,
livelihoods and a passion for sustainable woodlands
were at stake.
The Choice
Luther had been using a collaborative
software product that functioned only on a local area
network, and were looking for a robust alternative that
could run over the Internet or an intranet. They found
that Facilitate.com provided all of the decision-making
support tools they needed, required minimal technical
support, and could support both on-site and distributed
meetings with high performance and availability. With
their previous experience using collaborative software,
it took only a short while for the Luther College facilitators
to feel very comfortable with Facilitate.com.
The Solution
First, the facilitators worked with
the meeting owner to develop some creative questioning
and an agenda that would stimulate idea generation during
the session. Once the thinking was done, set-up took
only a few minutes. The agenda called for the group
to first identify their mission, then to identify their
key goals.
The team worked anonymously on the
system, generating and building on each other's ideas.
"In this particular instance, removing attribution
was important, because of the likelihood that these
individuals would not submit ideas to the process because
they thought others in the room were experts and their
own ideas were less valuable," noted Ann Mansfield,
Lead Facilitator at Luther's RTR.
In two hours, 17 people generated
100 distinct ideas. Throughout that process, the facilitators
used categorization and a multi-voting technique, condensing
four to six hours of work into two. Mansfield commented,
"It made people feel they really accomplished
something. The "build" function is a fascinating
one for me - someone submits an idea anonymously, and
another person can add in and either expand the idea
or take it to another level, … from the comments
throughout the course of the session - there was a lot
of building on ideas going on, so there was a lot of
consensus building, interjected with humor, that made
it fun … it added energy."
The Results
As a result of using Facilitate.com,
this group generated an impressive list of potential
ideas for sustaining the woodlands in Northeastern Iowa
that have the potential to be beneficial for the farmers
and land-owners, reinforced by the forestry experts,
and encouraged and supported by community representatives.
The group recognized the added benefit that having developed
consensus and shared interests, they will be able to
continue to work together over time. Mansfield
summarized it this way: "It was a very productive
and high energy session -- the participants walked away
very happy with their experience."
At Luther College,
the Round Table Room is seen not only as a way to support
strategic planning and student services within the college,
but also as a venue for outreach to the surrounding
community. Mansfield is excited about the future plans
for facilitated sessions run in the Luther College Round
Table Room: "All along, people have seen its
potential (RTR)… with this type of session, we
have been able to advance one more level, making use
of the RTR not only on campus but also in the community."
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