Describe any facilitation and negotiation strategies employed in your group collaboration to reach a consensus on project decisions that will also be useful in your professional life.

 

I have learned a number of useful facilitation and negotiation strategies for achieving group consensus during my group collaboration that are very useful throughout my professional and personal life. The first strategy is being open-minded and welcoming disagreements in opinions on the task at hand. This strategy goes hand in hand with active listening as it allows for identifying similarities and differences in expressed opinions, where the differences in opinion arise from, and the renegotiating of a common solution. Other strategies involve brainstorming and tapping into the power of task delegation. Brainstorming allows for each member of the group to provide their views in a way that creates a wider perspective of the issue at hand and supports the development of unconventional solutions while delegating roles ensures that each member is actively involved and that they feel accountable for project decisions. A most important strategy is having a clearly set project agenda. People are more likely to buy into a project if they understand where it will lead them.
References
Aunger, J. A., Millar, R., Greenhalgh, J., Mannion, R., Rafferty, A. M., & McLeod, H. (2021). Why do some inter-organizational collaborations in healthcare work when others do not? A realist review. Systematic Reviews, 10(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1186/S13643-021-01630-8/FIGURES/4