Do you know the term ThinkLets?If you don’t, read on.
Before I define ThinkLets, let me step back to the field from
where the concept emerged - Collaboration Engineering (CE).
In any collaboration there are certain patterns of deliberation/collaboration. Although the language changes slightly among
practitioners, CE identifies these patterns
of collaboration as:
Diverge - moving
from having fewer to having more concepts with which to work
Converge - moving
from having many to a focus on a few concepts deemed worthy of more attentionClarify - moving from less to more shared understanding of concepts and labels
Organize - deriving
understanding of the relationships among concepts
Evaluate - increasing
understanding of the instrumentality of concepts
Build Consensus– move
from having less agreement among stakeholders to having more agreement among
stakeholders
In the words of two of the pioneers of CE, Gert-Jan de
Vreede and Robert O. Briggs, ThinkLets are “a means to express elementary
processes to create patterns of group interaction in a predictable and
repeatable way.” (1) In other words,
ThinkLets are re-usable and transferable collaboration activities for
facilitating the creation of the collaboration patterns described above.
The names of ThinkLets are descriptive of the pattern of
collaboration to be generated. For example, ThinkLets for the Diverge pattern
include: Leafhopper, Branchbuilder, and OneMinuteMadness. Each ThinkLet is documented
in a format that includes: when to use and not to use the ThinkLet, an
overview, inputs and outputs, setup, steps, insights, and success stories.
If you want to learn more about ThinkLets, I recommend ThinkLets:
Building Blocks for Concerted Collaboration by Robert Briggs and Gert-jan de
Vreede published by Colophon in 2009. It’s not available on Amazon but you can
order it from Lulu http://www.lulu.com
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