Method
Matter provides facilitated solutions, either through intensive 2-5 day DesignShop® events or through more extensive engagements where facilitation methods can help achieve alignment in complex, often un-clear situations involving large numbers of people. Whether an intense 3-day DesignShop event or a broader ten-week facilitated project, Matter provides focus, acceleration, and creative collaboration to its client’s most talented and impassioned people.
Matter’s events and projects make use of a simple Scan-Focus-Act structure, allowing participants to understand context and develop a common language before diving deep to stress test various options, eliminate alternatives, and finally to drive towards a detailed design of the desired solution.
Matter is a member of the MGTaylor value web and as such shares with a small number of other consultants a unique transition management methodology. This patented approach is built around several fundamental elements:
- a specially-built facilitation environment
- a pattern language enabling ad hoc teams to assemble common modeling tools and develop reciprocal understanding of shared elements of decision and design
- a series of models useful for identifying decision variables and for planning event architecture.
DesignShops blend design and decision processes to ensure buy-in built on detailed understanding and collective alignment.
DesignShops integrate the knowledge and experience of all interested parties in solution design.
Unlike most other facilitation methodologies, DesignShops provide increasing returns to scale: their ability to address complex issues grows with each additional participant and their effectiveness increases exponentially with each additional day of work.
All of Matter’s engagements make use of:
Parallel processing
Matter’s facilitation techniques allow large numbers of people to work in parallel, developing potential solutions from various vantage points to ensure speed, rigour, and completeness.
Rapid Iteration
Good enough is never good enough. Every solution benefits from aggressive testing, feedback, and revision. By designing work to be iterated, teams can jump in to detailed design in the knowledge that they will subsequently take a step back to apply critical judgment and new points-of-view, before once again diving deep to refine and improve.
Acceleration
The Scan-Focus-Act approach means that in order to speed a project team up, we initially slow it down. Participants need to take stock, assemble and understand alternative views, and deepen collective understanding of context, challenges, enablers, and individual and collective capabilities. This work constitutes Scan and Focus. The subsequent Act phase releases a burst of activity that rapidly overcomes barriers to achieve convergence.