By Roland Piquepaille
If you ever have had to moderate meetings with interdisciplinary groups, you know it's difficult, especially if these groups come from different countries. And a skilled facilitator can be expensive if he's not part of your organization. Now, researchers from the University of Missouri-Rolla have developed a virtual facilitator which will improve a team performance by helping people share ideas and stick to the original agenda of the meeting. They've already successfully used their software tools with more than 100 student teams. Now, they're working on customized versions of this software for specific applications, such as soldiers training in Iraq, where real facilitators might be hard to find. Read more...Here is how these researchers describe their experiments.
"Fairly simple interventions in a conversation can significantly improve team performance," says Dr. Ray Luechtefeld, assistant professor of engineering management at UMR.
"An experiment involving more than 100 student teams working in a problem-solving simulation showed that exposure to these interventions improved team performance by a statistically significant amount. Teams exposed to the interventions shared information more effectively and came up with win-win solutions more readily than teams not exposed to the interventions."
Luechtefeld recognizes that a virtual facilitator might not be as efficient as a skilled human one, but that is definitively cheaper. He also thinks that this virtual facilitator can be used outside the calssroom.
Luechtefeld and Dr. Steve Watkins, professor of electrical and computer engineering at UMR, see the virtual facilitator extending past classroom and cubicle walls and into the field, such as on the battlefield in Iraq.
"Not many facilitators are willing to travel to Iraq," Luechtefeld says. "Soldiers are in a life and death situation there. With further development, this tool could provide them with assistance to help improve their decision making."
Besides military applications, what can we expect from this technology?
"The possibilities are endless," says Luechtefeld, who has applied for a patent on the system. Besides decision-making and knowledge sharing, application areas include conflict resolution, negotiation, team learning, change management, motivation, and leadership skills.
So far, no commercial version is in sight, but this could change in about a year, according to the researchers.
Sources: University of Missouri-Rolla News, August 15, 2005; and various web sites
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