Add any tools that you have used to facilitate discussion or to gather data.

One process that you might want to explore is Dotmocracy. Dotmocracy is an established facilitation method for collecting and prioritizing ideas among a large number of people.It is an equal opportunity & participatory group decision-making process. Participants write down ideas and apply dots under each idea to show which ones they prefer. The final result is a graph-like visual representation of the groups collective preferences. The website has a complete set of instructions for using this tool and many ideas explaining how it can be used.

Scroll down to Attachments to find other tools to download. The first of these is the Lotus Diagram. This is a great tool for identifying key ideas and exploring each idea in depth. Put your main idea in the middle, then identify the eight subcategories of this. Put these in the eight circles surrounding the key idea. Each of the other grids are used to unpack each of these ideas in more depth. From here you can assign tasks to various groups, prioritise ideas or develop an action plan.

For more information visit www.thinkbeyond.co.nz