Methods

Touchstone has over 15 years experience using innovative tools and techniques to support public and private sector clients in defining and achieving their desired future state.  We are particularly effective with groups of wide-ranging stakeholders that must come together, listen to each other and collectively reach difficult, complex decisions in a short period of time. 

Touchstone’s philosophy about facilitation is rooted in achieving results. Touchstone supports the group process of bringing many people to the table and inviting all participants to express their ideas.  In concert with this, Touchstone provides tools, frameworks, and processes to help groups sift through its ideas, zero in on the clarifying few, and determine its shared intent for action. 

This is unusual in typical facilitations.  Commonly, facilitators are “hall monitors”, keeping track of time and assuring that everyone participates in helpful and appropriate ways.  Facilitators keep the team organized and orderly. 

Touchstone insists upon much more.  We believe that leaders and groups are bombarded with the demands of change.  In order to respond, they need much more than help conducting a well-organized conversation. They need strategic support in doing their best thinking, anticipating new externalities, arraying their choices, recognizing the risks, and coalescing into an action team.  This is what Touchstone provides when we facilitate.

Groups are complicated entities.  Groups meet to share ideas, knowledge, and information and wrestle issues down to their root causes.  In addition, “shadow” issues can emerge that typically concern the nature and dynamics of the group itself – who has power, who has control, who is new, who is an appeaser, and so forth.

Touchstone uses several technology tools to facilitate open dialogue, assist with team productivity, create organizational memory from the critical dialogue, and achieve the desired results.

One of these tools, Compendium™:

1. Improves communication among parties by tackling socially complex and difficult problems
2. Enables real-time capture and integration of formal and informal material into reusable group memory
3. Transforms knowledge capture into simple representational formats for varied stakeholders.
4. Lets each participant's contribution be heard and acknowledged in a shared map.
5. Allows the group sees where they are, where they've come from, and where they are going, and is thus self-correcting if they get "off-topic"

Clients tell us that Compendium™ helps them “see” the dialogue as it is unfolding in the room and remember what happened and how. The use of this knowledge capture creates a real time summary transcript of the most important points raised, agreements reached and action items required, all in words validated by the participants themselves.

A second web-based tool, ThinkTank:

1. Helps groups collaborate with both attributed and anonymous discussions in or outside of a meeting
2. Gives participants the freedom to discuss and to vote on ideas, issues, and recommendations without the inhibitions that arise in group settings
3. Supports the generation of lots of ideas to solve problems or find opportunities and distill those ideas to the very best.
4. Enables the evaluation of ideas based on merit, not personalities

ThinkTank moves face-to-face or virtual workgroups through a process towards an outcome, faster and more completely and documents the process as it happens.

The third tool, Decision Lens:

1. Enables groups to organize and evaluate complex factors contributing to the decision and then prioritize those alternatives for the best outcome.
2. Improves the speed and quality of decision making
3. Maximizes returns by selecting the best alternatives
4. Improves accountability and transparency into decisions

When used with groups, Decision Lens quickly synthesizes qualitative and quantitative information from multiple stakeholders to gain buy-in for strategic trade-off or allocation decisions.  Through its process, Decision Lens establishes accurate relative priorities representing a group’s business objectives, performance measures and alternative options so that organizations can focus more effectively on the highest value activities. 

These technologies may be used in unison or individually, depending on the desired outcome of the meeting.