Structured Discussions

Meetings and group discussions are plagued with biases and tend not to support constructive disagreements. Why? It feels good when we all agree! But it isn't necessarily productive.

We're introducing a structured way to drive async discussions through research-backed methods.

We think this helps productivity in a couple of ways:

• Fewer meetings: Adam Grant uses the '4 reasons' heuristics - we only meet to decide, learn, bond, or do. If we can turn a meeting on "let's get everyone's opinion on x" into an async experience, then that saves time
• The speed of information exchange: If we can dedicate and prioritize information exchange that leads to decision making, then decision makers can get the information they need faster.

And on the psychological side, there are many benefits:

• Mitigate groupthink: Aimless debates in meetings are fraught with information cascades, authority bias, and anchoring to name a few.
• Foster dissent: Complacency and social loafing are symptoms of group conformity - async discussions help encourage teams to disagree in a healthy, productive way
• Buy-in with ownership & accountability: Leaders should be able to take in perspectives as input, but retain the authority needed for decisiveness. Live meetings can often create an 'us vs them' environment making the final decisions a 'my side or their side' scenario.

How does it work?

To start it's quite simple - at its core, it's a survey experience, but built specifically for nominal group collaboration.

We start with three types of discussions:

• Question & Answer: These can be used to get a temperature check on a problem (e.g. what are the biggest concerns with a change to the WFH policy?) or run discussions like a pre-mortem.
• Agree/Disagree: These can be used to see where groups agree and disagree. We could take the responses from the WFH policy discussion and see if the group has similar concerns/viewpoints and where they disagree.
• Idea Generation: These can be used to quickly get options, proposals, and ideas from the team - or ask people to formulate an opinion on something.

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In the end, we can see all of the responses to drive better dialog in a live meeting (or to feed another discussion). For the agree/disagree discussions, we get a heat map where we can see the variance in opinion and hone in on viewpoints that are contradicting.

We'd love to hear how your team would use structured discussions! You can let us know here and join the waitlist below to try it out live!

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