Hack:
Don’t Be Afraid to Engage the Masses

Engage the masses.

If properly facilitated, involving large groups in brainstorming, analyses, design, development, and evaluation doesn’t slow down the process; it speeds it up. When a critical mass of employees are involved, enough to create momentum -- they have an interest in seeing the projects succeed and a shared understanding of what it looks like. Also, by including them and using their valuable input, they feel they are in control and that their future is predictable, making them perform better.

How is this done?

• Identify the groups you want to include. Organization-wide? Departmental? Project-based? Regional? Functional? We’re talking scale here – you need enough people to generate momentum when you’re done.
• Once you have your target audience, determine how you will reach them. Meetings? Retreat? Workshop?  They need to be together, face-to-face at once to make this really work.
• Create an agenda focused on concrete outcomes.  Begin by making them smart – frame the issue, bring in external speakers, explain how you’re going to achieve the end goal.  Then break the problem into elements the group will work together.
• Once an outcome has been agreed upon, open up the discussion again to fine-tune a workable, realistic, actionable solution. As people begin to see the formation of a tangible result, the psychological momentum will increase.
• Ensure every member of the group is clear on their next step. They need to leave the gathering ready to charge.

A few examples:

A major defense agency engaged us to introduce technology to all field offices. Rather than deploying a prescriptive change plan, we pulled the entire organization together in regional meetings, 200 at a time, to create plans for their own offices. As they completed the templates, they debated the issues, they answered their own questions and they created the momentum necessary to effectively deploy the new system. This mobilized the organization with a shared vision, concrete understanding of first steps, and support for the deployment strategy. 

A large, multi-national corporation needed to restructure and spark momentum in a short timeframe. As opposed to bringing in one large group after another, we employed an iterative approach. We involved a core group of 30 who attended the working sessions. They then socialized the findings to key stakeholders and brought feedback to the next working session. During the session, we incorporated the feedback of the broader group and then repeated the process. Each session brought the group closer to a solution built and influenced by a large number of stakeholders. By the time we finished, we had the input and engagement of the whole organization.  

Attached are a few pages from our new book, The Change Book, published February 2011 by ASTD Press. The first file describes the principles of large-scale engagement, and the second describes the organization design process used in our second example, above.