Collaborative Group Interventions

The group intervention process connects hindsight with foresight, while also understanding present circumstances, creating a pathway to the future and identifying core strategies to be implemented. Your organization can benefit from a collaborative group intervention if:

• Decisions and changes must be made that affect multiple types of stakeholders.
• The results need to be richer, more comprehensive, and longer lasting.
• Planning must be time efficient, inclusive, collaborative, resource efficient, and also build commitment.
• When there must be agreement on a future vision, action plans to achieve the vision, and a commitment by people to actualize the vision.

Scenarios and Techniques in Collaborative Group Interventions
Group decision making: to merge or not
Groups that have moved apart rethink their future

Some different types of intervention
Future Search, a large group intervention, is used worldwide and in diverse cultures. It offers a defined strategic planning process that leads to cooperative planning, shared goals, and fast action. It can be used to devise a plan and gain commitment for a strategy that already exists, or to initiate rapid action when there are complex issues but no coordinating structure or common vision.

Open Space is an intervention that is most useful when diverse, conflicted voices need to be heard or complex issues need to be managed in minimal time with little or no advance preparation or facilitation. Issues of concern get put on the table, including new issues discovered by participants. They are ranked in priority order and critical "focus issues" are isolated. Finally, next steps are identified.

Appreciative Inquiry is a process that looks for "what works" in an organization. The outcome is a series of statements that describe what the organization wants to be, based on the best of the past. The statements are grounded in real experience and history, which allows people to know how to repeat their successes. Participants generate a new energy that is drawn from their own memories of energizing periods of success.