Page 75 - Enabling National Initiatives to Take Democracy Beyond Elections

The steps a process will go through include: • Information gathering, interrogating and judging (the divergent zone). This will involve participants gathering initial information, hearing from speakers, considering information gaps, requesting more speakers and ultimately deciding what information is important to their decision. • Information consolidation and theming (groan zone). This involves participants stopping with the information gathering phase of the process. It is known as the groan zone because it’s difficult: they now need to start making decisions around initial recommendations, the exercises change from asking for more information to participants deciding how they are going to answer the question. • Decision making (convergent zone). This involves the group deciding how they are going to answer the question and coming up with their own recommendations, supported by the reasons and evidence that led them to this position. They will need to make decisions around what the group does and does not support. • Coming to agreement (closure zone).The group will finally need to come to agreement on what recommendations will be in their final report. 73