Needs and leads

Every member of a forum will over time have needs for a referral, introduction, expertise, new investment, or ideas on hiring, technology, or some other personal or professional issue.  At the same time, other members can often offer direct or indirect leads to help the first member.

Consider incorporating this “Needs and Leads” into your meetings on a regular or occasional basis:

• The moderator sets up the exercise by explaining the objective and giving an example. “I’m looking for distribution channels in South America” or “touring ideas in Italy” or “a science tutor for my son.” Note that even if you can’t personally provide a direct connection, you might know of others who could help.
• Go around the room, and each member states a need (or two) in under a minute.  If any other member thinks they can help, they raise their hand.
• It is up to the members with “needs” to follow up with any members who provide “leads.”

“Tweeting” your update

Shakespeare opined that “brevity is the soul of wit,” and Pascal observed “I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”

In that spirit, try one of these three approaches to concise updates, preferable with advance notice so members have “the time to make it shorter.”

• If your update this month was a movie title, what would it be and why?
• Share your update as a six-word story, and then “unpack”/explain the story. For more on this rich approach, inspired by a famous challenge to Ernest Hemingway, see this website.
• Prepare your update as a “tweet” (i.e. 140 characters, including spacing and punctuation), trying to include feelings. At the meeting, everyone will read their “tweet” (you don’t actually use Twitter!), have a thematic discussion, and go into more depth where needed.

Melissa Weiksar, who suggested the last option, reports that in her forum, everyone had a slightly different interpretation; perhaps the most interesting from someone who did his as a string of noun/verb/feeling updates. People appreciated how they had to truly distill what was most important.