Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems



"I can't resist telling you again how great your contribution was to the workshop. I'm absolutely a convert to Dialogue Mapping/QuestMap and cannot wait to train on it everybody in my shop who facilitates meetings. It's a wonderful tool, and in your expert facilitator hands, it's a marvel."
A Bay Area client




For more information and pricing, contact us.
Facilitation Services 
CogNexus Institute's Dialogue Mapping Facilitation Service is ideally suited for teams of diverse stakeholders working on complex technical problems. Our approach to projects brings decades of research and field experience to bear on:

Efficiently crafting shared understanding about the problem within the group,
Effectively forging shared commitment to a solution or set of solutions,
Coordinating conversations and action after the meeting to produce results.

What is Dialogue Mapping Facilitation good for?

Dialogue Mapping has been successfully used in a wide variety of problem solving, decision making, and design situations, including:

Software requirements and design
Defining goals, for example, organizational, group, pedagogical goals, etc.
Multi-stakeholder problems, for example cross-functional projects and multi-company partnership projects
Business planning, for example, market identification, product design
Strategic planning
Scenario planning

What is Dialogue Mapping Facilitation Service?

A blend of traditional facilitation with specialized software and a computer display screen showing the Dialogue Map.
Before the meeting, the facilitator meets with leadership to decide on the goals of the meeting (or series of meetings) and the issues to be explored.
During the meeting, the facilitator guides the group through exploration and resolution of the issues by creating one or several Dialogue Maps of the group's conversation and knowledge.
At the end of the meeting (and during breaks), the facilitator prints out the map or maps and distributes them to the group. These provide detailed notes of the discussion, but also of the decisions that were made and their rationale.
After the meeting (optionally), the facilitator creates and moderates a web discussion space in which all participants continue the meeting discussion asynchronously.

Who is the facilitator?

Dr. Jeff Conklin has years of experience in the design and execution of collaborative events and processes that support a deep level of ownership among the participants.

How does it work?

The key to the power of Dialogue Mapping facilitation is the use of the computer display, projected on a wall or screen, to create a "shared display" that augments the group's ability to think clearly and creatively together. For more details, see Dialogue Mapping.
 A sample map, at an early stage of group analysis, on a complex ("wicked") problem.
<--click to see a larger image!


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
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