Consensus decision making can be critical to the success or failure of initiatives. This facilitation case study describes one of those initiatives. The decision that the senior management group was going to make over the next few days was going to effect the entire company and would need the whole hearted support of everyone in the room.

The Situation

This client's business had grown through acquisition. And with each acquisition came another call center. Although the business needed call centers, it did not need ten of them. The consensus decision that the group wanted to make was, how many call centers should we have and where should they be? They needed a collaborative planning process capable of reaching this decision. They wanted a participative process because each team member would have a key role in making the decision work.

The Facilitation

We met with the senior management group at on offsite location for a two and one half day session.  At this meeting we went through the following steps.

Stakeholder Groups

Going in to the session we knew that many stakeholder groups would be effected by this decision and that each stakeholder group would have their own set of evaluation criteria. So we started the session by identifying the various stakeholder groups including employees, customers and shareholders. We then identified the criteria that each of these groups would likely use to evaluate whether a choice was a good choice or not. 

Option Generation

Next we identified a range of possible options. For an option to be considered it had to describe the number of call centers, their location, as well as some technical details with respect to the network.  (For anyone familiar with the game of Clue, this is the equivalent of guessing Colonel Mustard, in the library, with the pipe wrench.) Initially we had a list of about six options. 

Evaluation of Options

As a next step we began comparing each option against the status quo for each criteria. Specifically we asked is this option better, the same, or worse than the status quo in terms of this criteria? A large matrix with "+" "-" and "0" symbols was used to keep track of our decisions. As the team worked through the matrix we learned a tremendous amount about the pros and cons of each option.

Hybrids

Once we had completed the matrix some clear patterns were starting to emerge. With some discussion we were able to identify the key drivers for each of the major criteria. Using this as a starting point we began to create hybrid options. The idea was to combine the best elements of existing options to come up with an even better solution. We kept creating hybrid solutions until no one in the room could come up with an option that would score better than what already existed.

Final Selection

After all this analysis and discussion the final selection took very little time. We asked everyone in the room to put a blue sticky dot on every option that they could personally support. They could have as many blue sticky dots as they wanted. We then gave everyone one green sticky dot and asked them to put it on the one option that they preferred. 

The results?

One option had unanimous support and a strong majority preferring it. When the participants saw this they knew that they were done.  Commitment to their choice never faltered as the team moved on to implementation. This in spite of the fact that the final solution was far more aggressive than anyone going in to the session would have expected. People felt that the collaborative planning process played a key role in reaching such a strong agreement.

For more information

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