1-2-4-All

Facilitation Technique

Description

1-2-4-All leverages the Think-Write-Share cognitive construct to quickly enable even large groups to ideate through responses to prompts. The approach leverages creative combination, deduplication, and recombination, enabling critical thinking, mitigating many planning biases, and ensuring all voices are included (neurodiverse).

Inputs

Participants
Issue Prompt / Question
Writing and recording implements (post-it notes, pens)

Approach

Present the issue prompt or question to the participants. Set a timebox for each stage (depending on the difficulty of the question/response relationship). Typically no more than 5 minutes, but 2 or 3 is preferred (favor rapid, imperfect ideation).

1. Each participant writes down their responses to the prompt. They are encouraged to write down as many responses as possible within the timebox and iterate rapidly. The process of writing will activate different cognitive processes which may lead to more diverse responses, so writing more and discarding is better than reflecting and waiting until the end to write.

2. Individual participants pair-up and share their responses to the prompt. During sharing, they should deduplicate or combine similar responses, and capture any new ideas which emerge through the collaboration.

4. Pairs join to form groups of 4. They again share their respective pair’s responses, combine/deduplicate, and capture any new emergent ideas. It is especially useful at this stage to challenge assumptions, explore any “missing” areas or concepts, and look for any differences in framing the way the different pairs approached the prompt.

All. Each group of 4 reads out their responses to the prompt and, if applicable, places them on a board or artifact designed to capture the outputs of this method. When each group is complete, other groups may ask questions or seek clarification. When all responses have been reviewed, the groups can engage in debate or dot-voting to select the ideas most desired to apply based on the prompt or most likely to solve the problem.

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