Samenvatting

During meetings, policy teams run the risk of producing false consensus and personal conflicts. Asserting one’s own viewpoint often reduces hearing those of others. Changing this requires developing recognition of the perspective of other team members, without depreciating one’s own. We aimed to study the effect of visualizing team members’ views of a problematic situation and their proposed policy approaches. We explored the feasibility of a network diagram visualization method, by assessing team members attitude towards it, expectations about the policy progress and its influence on their mental representation of the policy problem at hand. A field trial was conducted in two policy teams in two non-profit organizations: one healthcare and one financial. In both cases, we compared the newly developed visualization method with meeting as usual. Open and semi-structured interviews were used to collect team members’ views. The qualitative and quantitative analyses showed enhanced mental representations by means of visualization and positive ratings of both the method and its expected effect on consequent policy quality. In conclusion, the results warrant substantive investment into further large-scale research as to sample size, time window, and into its generalizability towards collaborative governance.