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Concept Attainment

Reaching a Shared Understanding of Important Ideas

"Concept Attainment" is a simple group learning technique that helps you achieve a consistent understanding of important concepts and ideas. It is particularly powerful where team members’ judgment plays a large role in how they respond or make decisions and where consistency is important across your teams.

By discussing examples and individual attributes of the issue being discussed, you can help your team gain a deeper and unified understanding of the issues they face, so that they solve problems in a similar, effective way.

Examples of where this is useful are:

• In a customer support team: Helping understand service standards and service level definitions so that customer get a truly consistent, good service, whoever they talk to;


• In a customer service team: Defining "complaint escalation" so that important issues only are escalated to senior management;


• In a sales team: Understanding the company brand so that team members consistently "deliver the brand" as well as specific products to customers; and


• With wine tasters: Defining "taste vocabulary" so that team members describe and grade wine consistently.

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Key Points:

The concept attainment technique helps team members gain a deeper understanding of important concepts. By using examples, non-examples and exploring the attributes of the concept, the team can arrive at a team-owned definition that enables the concept to be applied consistently.

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