Quality of Report Outs: SCAN to FOCUS

During the Scan phase, we are more interested in what goes on in the break-outs than we are in the quality of the reports. In fact, we have the teams report mainly so that they synthesize their thoughts, iterate their work, and learn to play by our rules. The challenge comes when we reach Focus and suddenly we care a lot about the quality of report outs. They have gotten away with superficial work until this point, and we are now raising the bar. This requires a change in attitude on the participant's part, an acceptance of responsibility. I try to warn them in setting up the first Focus module (or at least the First Draft module, if I haven't warned them yet) but this is rarely sufficient. When the reports remain superficial, I flag this during Synthesis, but again, they have gotten away with platitudes once too often by then.