Radioactive gold data

A number of our posts and those of others, such as the excellent post by Jim Harris – “Predictably poor data quality” on the Dataflux Community of Experts site are exploring the concept of “behavioural data quality” – or people as part of the data quality problem.

A common concern is that people sometimes don’t treat data as if it matters, unless there is a direct impact on them. Building on the this area and our previous post “Would you allow this?” made me wonder what would happen if data were made of gold and radioactive?

“So do we have a deal?”

With the British General Election having produced a hung parliament our political leaders are in the unusual position of having to try and strike a deal to form a government. As most facilitators will tell you, getting a disparate group to reach a consensus on how to tackle an issue or to agree a joint way forward is one of the most demanding parts of the job.

So what approaches seem to work? Here’s some ideas

Brainstorming – effective tool, or comfort blanket?

I found this article about the reasons why brainstorms fail the other day and it got me thinking. Parker Smith raises some very vaild points about this tool. When I trained to be a facilitator, brainstorming is about the first thing you learn and it’s probably the tool I have used the most over the years. People can get to grips with it easily, there’s no maths to do or consensus to reach so it’s pretty user friendly.