Moderator

I think one of the successes of Council was the fact that we have a moderator that actually controls the tone and controls the conversations within our organization. I mean, you gotta imagine if you've got 10, 12 very strong leaders in one room, you do need somebody, a separate entity that comes in and can work and massage that group, you know, so that you get the most results.

You have you know, 8 to 10 strong personalities generally, maybe 1 or 2 aren't, but if you don't have a moderator, I don't know that you would get the full— I don't know if you'd get the full experience because I think there would be people who would tend to be more dominant in the conversation, and there would be people who just wouldn't speak up, and maybe they wouldn't get as much out of it because they weren't encouraged to you know, to give their viewpoints. And sometimes those viewpoints— I can think of a couple people in our group who I really enjoy hearing from because they don't always speak up, and when they do, it's pretty powerful. So I think a moderator, a good moderator, is key to that, developing the whole conversation.

I think it's important to have a moderator because they pretty well provide the discipline needed to Give the importance to the attendance issue. Keep confidentiality on track. Keep the accountability when it comes to whether you're going to be there to give your presentation or not and the content of your presentation. It's evident if you haven't prepared much. And if you haven't, you know, some of these things we think, well, we can, we live these things every day, we can speak extemporaneously. But if somebody's unprepared, it's evident that they haven't prepared and they haven't thought about what they really are looking for in terms of the result, because we're not there to waste each other's time. We're there to help each other. And that moderator is responsible for keeping that discipline, keeping the follow-up.

We didn't have difficulty in the council getting to a subject, but we were— we stayed on track as a result of the effectiveness of the moderator.

I think it's a critical role because there's, you know, there's a lot of egos there, and you really have to have someone who everybody accepts as being in charge.

Good moderators are always really beneficial to the whole process. The group I was in before did not have really good people, and I think it's It's always great to have a challenge with just brighter, more interesting people, so that adds to the whole dynamics of it. And then keeping us on task and asking good questions and making sure that people are heard. So it's been—

I think the moderator is the one who keeps the conversation heading in the right direction. It steers things. All of us get to the point where we pretty well understand that once we're involved, but I don't believe we ever would have gotten up and going and doing it well together without somebody to help guide us.

Also to constantly remind us about the rules, if you like, confidentiality and really seek to share and speak from your own experience, not about what you think you should do, but speak from your own experience. So constantly setting those parameters I think is very important, and if you've got a poor facilitator, I think the group itself will be poor.