Problem
People will not be fully engaged to a topic they don’t feel passionate about or feel they are being forced into. They will announce that they don’t have all the expertise to solve a given problem, or find another way out of doing the real work required.
Solution
Sometimes the best way to “chunk” work is to allow the group to disassemble it themselves. This is one of the rationales of the synthesis conversation, to allow the participants to put it together, hence owning it.
You can also get interesting results by having people go to where they are most interested among a set of topic rooms during a museum tour kind of assignment.
The key here is to trust that the teams that need to get formed will get formed. The group will organize around the work that needs to get done, convince themselves that they can do it, and then make it happen. Attempts to manage this process will only get in the way.
Assignments should “guide”, not “direct”