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Are you new to the role or do you need to reinvent yourself.

If you're new to the role you can ask questions like:

• What's going well?
• What's not going well?
• What do you want to tell me?

Using our tools you can canvass your managment team, or your whole organisation, and have a categorised response in hours, even before you arrive. This puts you in a great position for your first meetings.

If you've been in place a long time it can be difficult to break the routine and retake the initiative. One way is to signal change by asking similar or more targetted questions perhaps focused on a particular issue - asking for ideas maybe.

This enables you to bypass normal management processes, demonstrates intent and lets you initiate discussions on your terms.

Leaders must stay in touch with their people, and let their people get in touch with them.

Make your conferences interactive

Using their smart phones you can quickly capture and present back the ideas and insights of a conference audience on any topic or question. You can have an assistant, possibly off site, categorise these responses. This can inform a better discussion between conference attenders and between them and "the platform".

You can also use our voting facility to get immediate statistical information on different themes or questions and even segment this by personal attribute such as gender or management position.

You can use the same tools to help breakout sessions - remember the process is self documenting so you get better presentations to plenary.

These tools can help make your conference better: more enjoyable; more relevant; more informed.

Employee satisfaction surveys have become tired and cynical

Rather than asking employees how satisfied they are on a scale from 0-10 why not ask open questions like:

• What's good about working here?
• How can we improve your working life?

If you link responses to personal attributes such as: department, gender, or grade you will get good insight into the issues and ideas for development.

Remember you can theme participant entries and ask staff to prioritise them.

You typically get high response rates to our surveys.

It is important to hear the authentic voice of your stakeholders. Multiple choice surveys merely provide a reflection of your voice, not an articulation of their's

Employees value the chance to be heard.

You can set up an Online Workshop on this site for a free trial.

You simply set up an open question and invite participants to respond either:

• Online with their Personal Computer - the fullest offering
• Online by smart phone - wide participation but fewer features

Each question can be set up as:

• a consultation or problem where participants contribute their ideas and insights and can also comment on entries made by others
• a ballot where participants vote on options presented by you

Scoring or prioritisation is available on all consultations not just ballots. We use a points allocation system which allows you to assess strength of feeling.

Workshop data is normally anonymous but you can present a customisable personal questionnaire which allows you to segment contributions and scores.

As facilitator you control access to the workshop and final reports.

When you create a workshop we email you user guidance, suggestions and draft invitation emails to participants.

Organisation Listening is the perfect consultation tool.

In its simplest form you can set up a question in seconds and participants can repond immediately on their smart phones. Participants self theme their contributions or you can use our keyword search facility to categorise responses. Participants can also comment on each other's ideas.

If appropriate you can ask participants to vote on themes. You can also configure the tool as a ballot when voters can give reasons for their votes.

You control the reports available to participants. Usually they can see the full results but you may want to restrict this for confidentiallity reasons.

We always ask open questions. This is the only way you can hear the participant's authentic voice. Multiple choice questions merely reflect back their assessment of your thinking so people become cynical. What you, and they want is to hear their ideas and insights.

Normally our approach is to preserve anonymity. This gives some people more confidence to express themselves. You can, however, request participants' details.

You can consult with hundreds of people and produce a self documented report in minutes; or adopt a longer, more measured and selective approach.

Voting assists decision making and helps identify constituencies

We use a 3-point allocation system which you can use in two ways:

• To run a ballot on alternatives presented by you;
• To rank or prioritise ideas, insights or solutions created by participants

Our voting method allows you to gauge strength of feeling. For example a participant may give all 3 points to one alternative or theme if he or she feels very strongly, or allocate them more evenly. In a ballot participants can also give a reason for their score.

Participants may ask how they should assess priorities. During workshop set up you can set out what you mean by "importance", for example, "urgent action", or "long term sustainability".

Similarly, you can reset the scores to do a "before and after" assessment to see if a discussion has brought closer agreement.

Scores can be linked to an integrated, short online questionnaire asking for personal attributes such as gender, age range...

We have sophisticated online analysis tools to help you interpret this data.

We can help a far flung multi-disciplinary team develop a solution to a problem using the Nominal Group Technique originally developed by NASA

The site is structured to follow this process briefly described below:

• You assemble a team and describe the problem on-line
• Team members enter their ideas (perhaps by mobile phone)
• You group similar ideas by theme
• Team members evaluate the ideas - builds, benefits, concerns
• They then prioritise the idea groups using our scoring system

You can now facilitate an informed discussion on the best solution. Our analysis tools help you identify diffferent "constituencies", but it is your facilitation skill which creates agreement.

Our process lets you gather the best team, perhaps from all over the world and possibly very large, and allows them to participate at their own pace without having to meet physically. You control the process, and protect its integrity, by opening and closing pages as appropriate. You're not constrained by time: run the process during a conference call or over several weeks to allow for deeper research.

This process is self documenting and quick, allowing you more time to reach agreement and focus on action planning

Analysis turns data into information.

We provide basic data analysis presentations which can be accessed by participants to inform discussion.

We also provide very sophisticated analyses and commentaries for the facilitator. These work best when participants have voted on themes and entered personal data such as gender and department as defined in an integrated personal questionnaire on the workshop set up page. We provide various cross tabulations including responses across different questions.

For example we can identify different preferences by age group and assess their significance. We can also identify hidden constituencies - people who have similar views and preferances not necessarily associated with other personal attributes.

You can download all data to Excel if you prefer.

These tools enable you to add value by gaining insight into underlying issues: what do people really think and what are the fault lines of hidden conflicts in the organisation? This then allows you to openly address these issues and develop tailored communication or conflict resolution strategies.

You can transform information into insight, then foresight, then action.

We help you get to the nub of things more quickly.

In any workshop (or change project) there is an initial period of high energy, and perhaps cynicism, spent discovering facts, issues, ideas and opinions. At some point, the mood changes as people begin to realise what the issue is and what is involved. Energy is replaced by reflection, discovery by insight. Later still this may be replaced by foresight and a sense of conviction converted into action planning.

These later stages of workshop and project design require considerable interpersonal and facilitation skills, and leadership. We help you get to that point quicker, better and cheaper by:

• Canvassing a wider group of participants before the workshop
• Collecting more thoughtful ideas and insights not just 'soundbites'.
• Enabling you to collect comments on ideas and insights
• Better presentation: our tools are self documenting

You can focus on what you're really good at.

You can undertake a large market or social research survey covering many constituencies, or focus groups, quickly and easily.

You get high response rates using the smart phone version of our site and describing the context for open questions such as:

• What are your concerns regarding ...?
• How can we improve ...?

You can ask for personal information such as gender, age, and locality to help identify and analyse hidden constituencies.

Or, you can run a poll on an important issue listing out several options described by you. Our voting system uses a points allocation method which is designed to measure strength of feeling. Voters can also state why they gave the scores they did giving even greater insights into their opinions and attitudes. Our sophisticated statistics package can help you interpet the data.

You get a wealth of authoratitive, referencable information very quickly.

Understanding your customers wants and needs is important whether you are a business, a charity, a government department or even an internal service department such as HR or Financial Control

It is particularly important to hear your customer's authentic voice: they may have things to say that never occur to you. You can't afford to see things through rose tinted specatacles. So why not ask open questions such as:

• What do you want from us?
• What would be really great...?
• What disappoints?

You can leave the workshop open to enable customers to give immediate feedback if something happens, or a more considered strategic response later.

You can offer this service anonymously, which may be important if the customer does not want to embarrass the salesman or woman, or you can ask for contact information which enables you to explore their concerns and ideas more fully.

You can also use this tool as part of a focus group.

You can adapt our process to help with decision making

The simplest way to do this is to set up a question as a ballot. Participants can vote on options presented by you and give reasons for their scores. This is particularly useful if you want to quickly canvas people's opinions.

A more sophisticated approach is to set up candidates as themes and ask participants to write their insights about each one. For example, in an interview panel each candidate's name can become a theme and you can then ask open questions such as "What impressed you about this candidate?" and "What concerned you about this candidate?" You can later sub-theme these responses by some preagreed schema. The responses themselves can later be critiqued on the Report page and the themes, i.e. candidates, voted on.

Votes can be analysed by personal attributes to inform discussion and if required a second round can be conducted with before and after comaparisons. You can even select the top three candidates for further investigation.

This can all be done virtually allowing a large audience to assess the candidates but still restricting voting to top decision makers.

This process is better than simply scoring candidate qualities - it provides deeper insights, fuller discussion and better decisions

Our approach adds value in many ways:

• Its quick
• Its cheap
• If you ask open questions you don't need to ask many
• It's self documenting - and well presented.
• We provide advanced and interpreted statistical analysis
• Participants can tell you what they think not just respond to what you think - so you learn more.
• Doing things online means that more people participate and do so more openly, or daringly - they are less inhibited.
• It's more objective: everyone's voice carries the same weight except for the quality of their insights and ideas.
• You get a better handle on the constituencies or groupings of opinion, especially if participants are willing to share some personal information.

Our objective is not only to give you better information about the question at hand, but also better information about the politics within your organisation.

Information is only valuable if it leads to a better next conversation
or better action.

Be imaginative - here are some suggestions:

Too much effort reading all the responses

• Participants provide their own themes or meta-data OR you can run our keyword search routine - so the data can be quickly categorised
• If you promise to listen then you have an obligation to listen !

Too technical - we may loose personal contact and workshop energy

• No - we accelerate, widen and improve the thought discovery process
• All voices are equal and some participants value anonymity
• Workshops become less fraught, more reflective and easier to facilitate with more time to explore the deeper issues and next steps

Security - can the wrong people access our data

• You can delete and add new passwords with different access rights
• You control expiry dates and times (perhaps for just a few minutes!)
• You can download and then delete all the data and reports
• All free form and personal data is encrypted

It's too complicated

• Not really. There is a lot of functionality but you needn't use it all.
• See the "How to use us" page for a fuller discussion

You can try it out for free - perhaps test it with a few colleagues

Consultants and project managers can use our online
workshops to help clarify what the right change is, and to make it happen quicker, more effectively and with less cost and conflict.

Because we ask open questions you can use our online workshops to consult and involve a wide cross section of managers and stakeholders to identify issues, opportunities, solutions and risks. You can do this very quickly and cheaply.

This helps with the rational process, but change management is also a political and emotional process. By giving people the opportunity to express themsleves, perhaps anonymously, our tools help them feel involved and help you clarify the geography of difference: what are the different views and opinions and how strongly are they felt. This in turn enables you to manage conflict and resistance more effectively by designing better communications, meetings, workshops and other interventions to both listen and explain and to agree the way forward.

You can use our tools throughout the project, from issues identification through solution design to implementation planning and execution.

Our aim is to assist you, not replace you. Technology cannot replace the deep human skills that bring about real change:

We help you focus on what YOU are really good at.