Recurring patterns of facilitation interventions in GSS sessions

Now that GSS (group support systems) have been commercialized and are present in an increasing number of organizational settings, sustained use of GSS within organizations is an important subject of research. One of the aspects of GSS use that clearly poses challenges for organizations concerns GSS session design. ThinkLets are chunked facilitation techniques that can be used as building blocks for GSS sessions. In order to develop a library of useful thinkLets for organizations to use, this study researched patterns of thinkLets use in a large number of GSS sessions. We identified which thinkLets were used most and which patterns of thinkLets in terms of a fixed sequence emerged as ´best practices´. By identifying such sequences, called modules, we can offer organizations powerful capsules of knowledge to wield GSS effectively. The results of our study represent a first version of a lexicon for the discipline of collaboration engineering with thinkLets and opens various avenues for research on making organizational collaboration more productive.