Mine Information – Lead a Mining Information Session
As an individual using MENTA-MORPHOSIS, you mine information. As a MENTA-MORPHOSIS Faciltator, you lead a Mining Information session.
As you recall in the “Mine Information” competency, you engage with some information and identify important elements contained within it. We call this process ‘mining information’, and use a mining metaphore to help understand it. There are two steps:
- Collecting information — Determine which information is available and desireable.
- Methodically studying that information to uncover Nuggets.
Used For
Any time the group must process a piece of information. For example, in the Strategic Planning Thinking Path, the group considers information from a variety of different sources. The process is similar to Brainstorming, in that you are trying to produce a long list. In this case, we call the items on the list “Nuggets.”
How To:
1. Collecting information
If you are going to dig a successful mine, you must first determine where to dig. Likewise, the starting point in the process of mining information is to begin with a question, or a series of questions, for which you’d like to have an answer.
Let’s use our Start Right example – the small business person with the cash flow problem. First, look at the question that was the output of our “Start Right” process, any component questions that develop out of that, and then ask, “What information would we like to have in order to answer this question?”
You can accomplish this in a couple of different ways:
- You can create a list of information from the group: Typically this becomes a mini- brainstorming session in itself.
- You could have done some of this homework and bring in a set of information to the group meeting.
It is not unusual for this to be a short meeting, with a list of ideal information created and each item assigned to a group member to collect and bring to the next meeting.
Remember, the defining(organizing) question is “How do we create a situation such that that we can pay our bills on the 17th and meet payroll on the 25th. and not have to continually worry about cash flow?”
We realize that our eventual solutlion will come from some combination of our customer, our vendors, our employees, and contractors and lenders. So, we use the sledge hammer to break the issue into its component pieces. We then formulate the ‘component questions.’
What potential is there within our customers?
What potential solutions are there within our vendors?
What potential solutons are there with our employees?
What potential solutons are there with outside contractors and lenders?
Now that we have these questions, we can create a list of the information we’d like to have in order to answer those questions. As we write this down, we come up with this:
What potential is there within our customers?
Information I’d like to have:
- An idea of how much potential there is within our current customers that we might be able to realize.
- The same information for our market in general — the prospects and ustomers we might reasonably reach.
- What prevents us from more fully pentrating our current customers?
We proceed that way with each of the questions, until we have an ideal list. Then we bring the real world into our process, and identify the information that we can realisticaly obtain that comes the closest to our ideal. Focusing on the first component question, as an example, we come up with this:
Information that we can access:
* A spreadsheet of our customers, and how much they spent with us durig the year.
- The results of a focus group we did to find areas of additional potential within our customers.
At this point, it is time to assign data-collecting responsibilities to the group members. Each one gets one or more of the ‘ideal pieces of information” to collect and bring into the next session.
When we have identified and gained access to all the information noted above, we have completed the “gathering informtion” part of the process, and are now ready to move onto ‘mining information.”
2. Mining information to gather nuggets
The brainstorming and mining information processes are very similar. The difference is the focus of the members’ thinking.
When you lead a brainstorming group, you encourage creative responses. When you lead a mining information group, you encourage analytical responses.
At the next session
We ask each member to be prepared to prepare the information he/she collected. So, for example, someone presents a spreadsheet of our customers, and how much they spent with us during the year.
On a trip to South Africa, as we flew over the city of Johannesberg, we noticed huge piles of dirt spread around the city. The pilot explained that these were mine dumps. In the gold mining for which the area was famous, large amounts of dirt were removed from the grouind, sifted for gold nuggets and dumped on the ground in big heaps. Some were 30 – 40 feet high and extended for blocks.
That provides a a great metaphor for the mining information process. You are leading the group to consider quantities of information, discard most of it as irrelevant, and sift through the information to find the nuggets buried within.
A nugget is a fact, an observation or a conclusion about the information that may be useful in answering the question.
So, we consider each piece of information and try to pry out any nuggets that may be useful. Look at each piece of information, and ask, “What can we draw out of this? What is important about this?”
For example:
- When we looked at the spreadsheet of our customers, we notice that some customers, even though they are the same size as others, purchase a great deal more from us. If they could purchase that much, then could the other customers of similar size and type have the potential for greater purchases as well? That leads us to project that there is more potential in most of our customers than we are currently enjoying. That statement become a nugget.
Proceeding like that, we write down any nuggets uncovered, using all the facilitator skills we’ve learned. We methodically consider
- The results of a focus group we did to find areas of additional potential within our customers.
- As we pour through the notes of the focus group, it becomes apparent that many of our customers would prefer to conolidate their purchases into more items from fewer vendors. That become nugget #2.
That’s the process, mining and exposing nuggets until you have exhausted the information and assembled a group of nuggets. The output of this process is a list of nuggets.
So, in this component process, you start with a question (which is the end result of the “Start Right” process) and end with a list of nuggets.
Review Other Menta-Morphosis Facilitator Competencies
Implement Accountability: https://www.davekahle.com/implement-accountability-a-menta-morphosis-facilitators-competency/
Set the Stage: https://www.davekahle.com/set-the-stage-a-menta-morphosis-facilitator-competency/
Select The Content: https://www.davekahle.com/select-the-content-a-menta-morphosis-facilitator-competency/
Nurture the Environment: https://www.davekahle.com/nurture-the-environment-a-menta-morphosis-facilitators-competency/
Lead Prioritization: https://www.davekahle.com/lead-prioritizing-a-menta-morphosis-facilitator-competency/
