Helping Private Organizations
Through Tailored Projects
The typical way many private organizations try to solve their big challenges is through concentrating on the elite organizational leadership and supplementing them with small numbers of elite outside consultants and experts. This elite crew then goes through traditional methods of understanding their options, makes the final decisions, and tells everyone else in the organization or related to the the organization the plan.
This traditional approach is often ineffective and sometimes downright dangerous because it misses big opportunities in tapping into far more people’s ideas on the front end, and it risks alienating everyone on the back-end. Next Agenda’s process takes advantage of that opportunity and avoids that risk.
Tapping into the Minds of Many
Next Agenda’s process opens up what has previously been an elite, closed process. Our approach to meeting design is to get more innovative outsiders into the physical meeting and tap into the talents of even more experts online. Our immersive video techniques open up the proceedings of what happens in critical physical meetings and allow everyone in your organization, your key stakeholders, and, if desired, even the public to understand what took place.
Much of the best material from the meeting, the working groups, and interviews with key leaders and experts then gets moved to a collaborative online environment where those who could not attend the meetings but who have valuable input, can help evolve and refine the ideas.
Our more transparent approach allows your organization to get early feedback on potential solutions and to give stakeholders a chance to vet those concerns. Such a process builds much good will with stakeholders and the public, given the norms emerging in our much more transparent world. That said, we work with you to ensure that only the material you want exposed gets out there. We may borrow journalistic techniques for covering your meeting but you are always firmly in control of the output. Our collaborative web platform for private projects has various levels of access and you control all access to material on our collaborative website and can determine levels of exposure for different players in the process.
Our Three Areas of Expertise
The Next Agenda model for problem-solving involves three key areas where we bring world-class expertise and much recent innovation: meeting design; video capture and production; and web collaboration. We see the power in using all of them together in one overarching problem-solving process. However, we have done substantial innovation in each distinct area that sets us apart from other companies working in those generic fields.
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World-class Meeting Design and Facilitation
There are meetings, And then there are really creative meetings, designed in unusual ways, where a lot of innovation gets done. Next Agenda falls in the second group. We advise against planning a traditional conference with keynote speakers and panels, where most of the relevant conversation happens privately in the halls. We like to consider everyone who attends as a participant with something valuable to offer. The design of the gatherings should have ways for everyone to contribute – even if some do stand out more with speeches to stimulate the bigger group.
The design should not just be a setup for canned content with a predetermined result. It should pose open-ended questions and leverage the brain power of everyone there to shoot for breakthrough ideas and unanticipated results. We also design everything with an eye to how what takes place in that meeting can be captured on video for others to see and can continue the conversation long after the meeting ends – online.
World-class Web Video
Most video of physical meetings is boring. This is partly the legacy of television coverage which is expensive. That expense led to conferences and events of the past being captured with one lone camera in the back of the room and migrating unedited or only slightly edited material to the viewer. If an organization did have the resources to capture the event they often used a traditional television approach with a hierarchical assembly line of workers from people who only shoot the camera to those who only do sound to those who only edit – capped by a director on top who controls everything.
Next Agenda applies a new paradigm to video coverage. We start from the fact that digital video now is relatively inexpensive to produce given the free-fall in the costs of shooting and editing equipment and the emergence of a savvy new generation of video producers who can do it all. We apply numerous cameras to the coverage of what takes place at an event, and because we have many, we can capture far more than what just takes place on stage. We use a new breed of video journalist who can both shoot and edit and think for themselves. So what they see and experience can move quickly and accurately into content. They are all storytellers who focus on the best material and communicate it in ways that work best on the web.
Our director is not controlling coverage as much as coordinating it. The end result is we can orchestrate a final product that not only is a more accurate capture of what happens but the story is told in a way that is effective, hip, and maybe even fun. This is the kind of sensibility that works on the web and so ensures that your content will move through the social networks that make it up.
World-class Web Collaboration
Many people’s experience of collaborating with others online in the past is very limited and possibly disappointing. Conversations that take place there can seem more like a free-for-all heading towards random outcomes. The threads of the conversations can often get very divergent and go off in directions that lead nowhere until they peter out. And these conversations often seem to occupy a parallel universe where the people who talk and engage online are disconnected from those engaging offline.
Next Agenda approaches online collaboration the way we approach collaboration in the physical world. You need the proper orientation and clear goals. You need facilitated conversation that keep the dialogue moving and on track. And you need to constantly integrate the work online to the physical settings – and vice versa. These principles inform the design of the entire Next Agenda online platform and carry through with any work we do with outside organizations too.
Luckily, the state-of-the-art in online collaboration tools is just now taking a great leap forward with Google Wave and the offerings of other tech companies in Silicon Valley. As we explain elsewhere, this web collaboration space is exploding with innovation right now similar to what the social networking space was going through several years ago. Many new capabilities are now becoming available that will greatly enhance the online experience when it comes to web collaboration, or working efficiently and productively with large numbers of people.
These new tools are a far cry from the discussion boards or chat rooms that people have become familiar with over the years. These new tools are striving towards recreating the kind of nuanced interactions that happen between people working together face-to-face. They are not there yet, and probably will never fully do away with the need for physical meetings, but they are greatly improving the intricacies of the online experience.
Next Agenda is all over these current developments in the state-of-the-art online tools and we are strategically aligned with Google Wave, probably the most important of these forerunners. We have been given early access to using Google Wave and are one of the few companies working on this tool this early We are becoming bonefide experts in Google Wave and can help others by applying our knowledge in that platform specifically. But in a broader sense, we can help organizations take advantage of this next generation of online collaboration that will soon become more commonly available.
The typical way many private organizations try to solve their big challenges is through concentrating on the elite organizational leadership and supplementing them with small numbers of elite outside consultants and experts. This elite crew then goes through traditional methods of understanding their options, makes the final decisions, and tells everyone else in the organization or related to the the organization the plan. 
