Dear Peter:
I have a response to your request based on my own experiences, so it may
or may not be appropriate or useful to you in your situation. I guess I
am a little leery of the assumption that everyone will agree with your
speaker or at least that enough of them will that you can assume
"institutional buy-in." I think that you will need to ascertain just how
much buy-in you have, which in part involves finding out if everyone got
the same message. (They often don't!). What might be useful after the
talk is to have a debriefing where people can discuss in a non-threatening
way (maybe in small groups) what they got out of it. Then pull together
the results and have a group discussion to clarify what people heard, what
questions they might have, what objections or concerns, etc. If the
questions are considerable, you might have your speaker rejoin the group
to respond to some of them. Then I would think about having people gather
into their work units and try and come up with one problem they have that
they might try solving with this approach. Let them develop their goals,
objectives, and activities, an implementation and evaluation plan, and
time line. The idea is to see if what this person had to say really can
improve what you do. Make it your manager's jobs to monitor the progress
of this activity and build in some regular progress report points in
management meetings to share how things are going. I think managers need
to be evaluating the process as much as the product. It may be that the
solution is not worth the effort!
Anyway, just some thoughts. I think i am always humbled by the fact that
(1) people don't hear the same thing; (2) "buy-in" is too often assumed;
(3) people aren't given a chance to implement the ideas in a manageable
way; (4) no one really follows up on the results. Harriett.
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