Where organizations can find their answers on Google, they should google.

Facilitated meetings and workshops come into play when factors such as:

• awareness and assessment of the situation,
• discovery and potential expansion of the possible, and
• decisions on actions which must be both effective and feasible

depend on the knowledge and engagement of a specific set of people.

XLeap equips facilitators with a virtual toolkit, by which they enable open, honest, and dynamic exchanges. Whether facilitators ask for opinions, facts or ideas, they can expect their participants to provide the most comprehensive answers based on group input and discussion, very rapidly. This includes important but 'hot' or awkward topics, which usually arise much later in the traditional process, if addressed at all.

Joint prioritization is a key element of any process that has to deal with more facts, opinions, or ideas than can be meaningfully discussed. Effective prioritization means that many, if not most, possible topics will not be explored which makes it critical that prioritization is seen to be fair and non-arbitrary. If not, prioritization risks alienating participants, leading to their disengagement. 

Prioritization with XLeap is not just effective and fair, it is also fast, meaning that it can be employed multiple times in a workshop.

Facilitators simply specify the rating method and criteria, then copy the relevant items (say, the ideas created in Brainstorm) to the Rating sheet. After only a few minutes, they can walk their participants through detailed yet accessible results tables and charts which show:

• The highly prioritized items which warrant further attention
• Controversial items, where an attempt at building consensus may be worthwhile
• Low priority items the group should not waste time on
  
  

If the stakeholders, experts, or co-workers you have invited to contribute, and who have something valuable to say, cannot get a word in, don't expect them to stay tuned.

Being spoken over by somebody else talking is bad. Worse is when nobody even notices that there is disagreement which happens all too easily even with the better video conferences: Attendees either must start talking over people or remain silent which often means 'switch off'. Introverts and experts often choose the latter, not wishing to force a confrontation.

Breakouts do not solve the issue: Talktime simply multiplies. But when something important is said, only part of the goup gets to hear it and has the chance to respond.

XLeap solves the issue by letting participants contribute anonymously in writing. This means that participants can contribute honestly when they have something to say, and respond to others directly. With XLeap, you can have an afternoon's worth of discussion in 20 minutes. Just imagine what you can do in a day when you focus this intensity on issues that matter, and create solutions that promise to be highly effective.

Even when everything that needed saying has been said and been heard, it remains difficult to wrap up that wealth of information in a way that facilitates a decision.

For a deeply-considered decision, the group or decision makers informed by the group will ask questions such as:

• What exactly are the effects we expect?
• What exactly are the tradeoffs when we choose one solution over another?

This is where utility analysis helps greatly. With XLeap, participants can compare a set of possible solutions (or issues) regarding their effect on specific issues (or goals), their feasibility, cost, time to implementation, and so on.

Results can be analyzed in real time with the group, or passed on to inform decision makers via reports in Word or Excel.

XLeap provides a set of workspaces which are tooled for specific purposes such as presenting information and gathering feedback, brainstorming opinions, ideas or facts; prioritizing or assessing a set of items on one or multiple criteria; or taking a deep-dive into issues.

Facilitators map their successful methodologies to a sequence of workspaces and navigate their participants through these spaces where they perform the tasks necessary to produce the required outcome in the time available.

While such processes can be designed specifically for the task at hand and reconfigured on the fly, many firms provide their consultants with process templates for recurring use cases such as Ideation, Creative problem solving, Lessons learned, Mission analysis, Requirements gathering, Risk assessment, Stage-gate reviews, or Stakeholder analysis.