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

Facilitated meetings and workshops come into play when

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

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

XLeap equipd 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 most comprehensive answer they are jointly capable of, very fast. This includes important but 'hot' or awkward topics, which usually arise much later in the process or not 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 to alienate participants leading to their disengagement. 

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

Facilitators simply specify the rating method and criterion, then opy the relevant items, say, the ideas of a Brainstorm, to the Rating sheet. After only a few minutes, they can walk their participants trough 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 to say, cannot get a word in, don't expect them to stay tuned.

Being shut up by somebody else talking is bad. Worse, when nobody even notices that they disagree, which happens all too easily even with the better video conferences, attendees start talking over people or switch off. Introverts and experts often choose the later.

Breakouts do not solve the issue: Airtime doubles. But when something important is said, only half the goup gets to hear it and has a 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 solutions that promise to be effective.

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

For a 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 trade offs when we choose one solution over another?

This is where utility analysis helps. 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 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.

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".