The Highest Common Denominator

What if people — even longtime enemies — could transform conflicts into creative dilemmas they feel motivated to solve together? What if employees could leave a meeting empowered and with a joint sense of purpose? What if the positive changes community activists are working so hard to see in the world could have a lasting impact?

In The Highest Common Denominator: Using Convergent Facilitation to Reach Breakthrough Collaborative Decisions, Miki introduces a novel decision-making process called Convergent Facilitation that builds trust from the beginning, surfaces concerns and addresses them, and turns conflicts into creative dilemmas that groups feel energized to solve together. This highly effective process has been used successfully around the world to resolve problems and teach people how to collaborate without sacrificing productivity.

Since 2002, Convergent Facilitation has helped organizations, businesses, and governments upend traditional and unproductive decision-making methods, such as majority rule, top-down decision-making, or consensus, which can drain a group’s energy. In 2012, Miki worked with the Minnesota State Legislature to resolve gridlock on child custody legislation and helped stakeholders draft bills that passed nearly unanimously. In a 2014 op-ed in the New York Times, Miki explained how power differences lead employees to stay silent and not feel part of a common goal, which ultimately makes a business run less effectively.

The procedures described in this book can be used in any kind of setting–from grassroots social change movements to village councils to corporate boardrooms–where people are having trouble collaborating effectively in a group, which is almost everywhere. With the mounting social, political, and environmental problems of our times, harnessing a group’s energy for effective action is essential. And yet many people drift away from organizations they care about due to their inability to sit through meetings–where tensions may remain unresolved, power differences are not addressed, and solutions that work for all do not seem available.

The Highest Common Denominator provides readers with the tools to learn and implement Convergent Facilitation. The book moves through three phases of a process that brings groups to outcomes that are profoundly collaborative and genuinely supported by all. Through vivid case studies and practical examples, the book explains:

• how to guide people towards solutions that integrate everyone’s needs and concerns without requiring compromise;
• how to keep people on track with the task at hand;
• how to invite dissent and engage with it productively; and
• how to attend to the power differences that so often interfere with collaboration.

In this book you can discover how, in Miki’s words, “facilitation becomes a fast-track course in personal growth” as we can learn to draw on resources in ourselves that elicit a whole-hearted group response.