By Mike Leamon, Operations Specialist

Blog #2 of “What is a War Room?”

“How” is the War Room method better and faster than the methods you use now?

A War Room changes the collaboration and human interface part of the game.  Incremental meetings and electronic documents on laptops are traditionally used to develop and manage knowledge and projects.  Using flip charts and dry erase boards are considered advanced facilitation techniques by most organizations.   There are inherent limitations when collaborating around one PowerPoint slide, spreadsheet or flip chart page up at a time.  Our world is getting more and more complex.  Only the most gifted presenters with sharp attentive audiences can solve complex business problems using incremental piecemeal approaches.

With a War Room, participants are quickly surrounded by a graphical representation of the system or subject being addressed.  They see every part of the, “What needs to change and why?” storyline.  The core team builds the base storyline on the war room walls.  Then, waves of extended stakeholders can “walk the wall” to contribute their wisdom and insights.

Done right, everyone has fun and gets excited.  The content on the walls becomes a shared narrative and the participants end up being able to tell the shared story.  The “army of story tellers” naturally provides strong informal project communications.  More importantly, the high involvement and public commitments to action ease friction and resistance during implementation.

So, “how” do you learn structure and moderate a War Room?

Learning to be a War Room Architect is a “mentored discipline.” We have the experience, training and patience to help individuals and organizations “land a fish” with their first War Rooms.  The “teaching to fish” stage for an organization comes after you confirm that War Rooms work and how they work best.  We must warn you that a botched War Room is a very public failure and may sour your organization to this game changing approach.