Thinklets and Facilitation Technology

The Role of Facilitation Technology

Rarely can people bring to mind all the tools, questions or information relevant to a thinking task when they need to do so. In fact, our brains retain 100% direct recall of our learning and experiences for about five minutes. So when the time comes to apply learning and experience during a meeting … much may have been forgotten.

Typically, what happens is most meeting participants rely on using their normal or routine thinking patterns (called scripted thinking). This works fine if the participants thinking fits the meeting’s task. But, when the wrong thinking (script) is applied, people (meetings) generally produce the wrong results. Routine/scripted thinking prevent us from gaining innovative and problem solving insights by always channeling thought down certain rigid mental pathways.

What if, however, your meeting could benefit from the wisdom of many of the best facilitators, consultants and mentors? What if you could bring Ed De Bono into your meeting to help with creativity, or Peter Senge with systems thinking? Or, what if there was a technology that could have much the same effect? There is. It is Nth Degree Software’s Facilitation Technology that uses a proprietary Thinking Emulation Grid that duplicates the way humans provide intellectual guidance.

The Facilitated Thinking Emulation Grid follows a process that improves meeting participant thinking productivity in similar ways that the invention of the assembly line improved manual-worker labor productivity. With a just-in-time approach and one click of a button, a Virtual Meeting Facilitator can deliver within a precise thought process the right questions to ask, the correct thinking tools to use, and the proper thinking methods. It’s as if you had the human expert at your meeting. Components are:

A. Thinking Processes

There are 7 types of thinking processes that occur in meetings. Understanding which one(s) your meeting is using helps focus thinking.

1. Reactive thinking: Quickly resolve urgent problems, situations or conditions.
2. Systems thinking: Resolve the “whole” complex problem, issue or challenge.
3. Corrective thinking: Restore something to an original, past or standard condition.
4. Creative (Innovative) thinking: Develop something new and of value that has never existed.
5. Improvement thinking: Make current levels of performance better.
6. Planning thinking: Anticipate and prepare for future opportunities or problems.

B. Thinking Tasks

Thinking tasks are the basic building blocks of thinking. There are essentially 24 such mental tasks that can be applied to virtually all thinking processes. For example, Decision-making is one of the basic tasks. But it can also have sub-tasks like: Developing decision criteria, Identifying the right decision strategy, Validating the correctness of the decision, etc.

C. Thinking Points – Go links

Thinking Points are the intersection of “Thinking Processes” and “Thinking Tasks”. They reflect the fact that “thinking” generally occurs at “one” point in time. It is at these points that human facilitators and consultants are emulated and where cognition tools “Thinklets” are applied.

D. Thinklets – What are they?

They are “question” oriented cognitive tools that give the mind the best chance to find the right ideas, solutions or answers. They can be as simple as one question, questions embedded into a template, a thinking process or even a short tutor. And just like choosing the right manual tool (there are more than 125 types of pliers to perform different manual tasks), selecting the right cognitive tool follows the same principle: Choose the tool appropriate for the task at hand.

Additional Information>  www.yourmindatwork.com