CoVision supports 2005 World Economic Forum

CoVision played on the world stage in January – providing our Council accelerated feedback method to the deliberations of 700 world leaders. The World Economic Forum in Davos kicked off with a Global Town Hall Meeting to help prioritize the top “tough choices” facing world leaders in 2005. It was facilitated by our long-time partner, AmericaSpeaks of Washington DC.

A Tough Challenge

The theme for the 2005 Annual Meeting was “Taking Responsibility for Tough Choices” and as Ged Davis, Managing Director of WEF’s Centre for Strategic Insight put it, “this is not just a throwaway line but one we hope will lead to clear, definitive action at the end.”

The challenge to AmericaSpeaks was intense: How to design and facilitate a session of less than 3 hours in which world leaders could meaningfully deliberate and then prioritize 12 complex and interrelated “tough choices”.  Further, the World Economic Forum’s processes had been in place for 30 years and this was an altogether new process – an interactive one and clearly an experiment – in the most visible slot, opening the meeting.

Thus, the first Global Town Hall Meeting was proposed and sold by AmericaSpeaks’ founder and president, Carolyn Lukensmeyer. She went on to lead the design and facilitation of the productive session, together with a seasoned team of 20, including five of us from CoVision.

Highly Interactive Process

The Global Town Hall was designed to fully engage participants in series of highly interactive, technology-enabled discussions at tables of ten.  Each table had a facilitator who was briefed in the process for two hours beforehand and a “rapporteur” – one of the participants who recorded salient points into CoVision’s WebCouncil wireless laptop system.

Before deliberating on the 12 tough choices, participants discussed and chose the most important values that should guide leaders as they address the world’s most pressing issues. These were narrowed quickly to: integrity, compassion, equity, tolerance, selflessness and stewardship.

Participants spent the most time discussing the 12 issue areas. In lively interactions at each table, everyone shared their priorities based on three criteria:  urgency of need, consequences if not addressed and greatest potential for impact.

All commentary collected through the WebCouncil laptop system was viewed immediately and distilled by a 14 member theme team. Those themes – representing all the table discussions – were fed back to the whole group by Carolyn prior to voting on the top priorities. This acceleration of the feedback cycle allowed deep dialogue on the issues at each table and revealed simultaneously the collective insights of the whole. CoVision’s WebCouncil methodology enabled this severely time-constrained process to work.

Our team provided technology design and process consultation in the planning stage and the WebCouncil software on portable intranet servers during the meeting. The software ran on Hewlett-Packard’s new Tablet PCs, provided to the Forum as part of HP’s sponsorship.

Immediate Results

Of the 14 tough choices that world leaders discussed in their table groups (two choices were added at one point), these six were voted highest:

These priorities were then fed into all issue tracks, panels and workshops during the subsequent four days and were reviewed at the closing plenary session. From all reports, the die was cast for this WEF Annual Meeting in the opening Global Town Hall Meeting. Time will tell how this focus – generated by influential people under the hot lights of the world’s press – will affect change in the world.

Fleeting Memories

Is this really going to happen?, beautiful train ride to Davos, stunning setting, snow everywhere, towering mountains, verrrry cold, great to be with this team, so many meaningful projects together, high integrity, low conflict, WEF production team as a well-oiled machine, uncertainty about so much of program till last days/hours, Carolyn’s steady soulful leadership, extraordinary participants with ordinary humanity, round tables work every time, surprising results, sooo tired, sooo happy about outcomes and our performance, celebratory dinner high on the mountain, unbelievable sled ride down mountain from dinner under full moon, stinging cold, exhilarating, drinks at the watering hole, sharing grins of accomplishment, sleeeeeep, packing up, thinking forward to skiing, reflecting about what happened, close to the center of world attention for a moment ... but so far really, must proliferate democratic deliberation in the world, over and out.

The AmericaSpeaks team, as good as it gets. 2/3 of us, on the way in ...

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