Weeknotes: Lessons from Abroad Part 1

Kirsten Naudé
Nov 3 · 7 min read

My next few weeks of weeknotes are going to focus on a series of stories taken from my trip to Europe over the last couple of weeks. These weeknotes will build upon each other and the learnings I have experienced from other countries, other people and my experiences while there.

What a fantastic opportunity to be able to attend my very first International Fundraising Convention (IFC) event in Holland hosted by The Resource Alliance. I was told by one of the volunteers upon arrival that this is the best conference he attends every year and because of that, he has been volunteering at this event for now 14 years. I told him I had great expectations after talking to him and was definitely not left disappointed. The master classes, sessions (both formal and breakout), networking opportunities, and of course the entertainment was well thought out, relevant and practical.

This weeknote will focus on the masterclass I attended: ‘Shaking up organisational culture’ by Katy Grennier and Moh Suthasiny from DSIL. There is no doubt that in those two days of our master class, our collective energy, curiosity, and sharing helped us learn and integrate some tools to continue to shake up your organization’s culture for better and greater impact. Katy encouraged us that taking the first few steps would require courage.

I wanted to start off with something so simple but yet groundbreaking — and I’m definitely going to be using this in my workshops. An excellent tool in facilitation is three bells.

During discussions or group exercises, ringing a little bell often works better than shouting at people to wrap it up:

  • First bell (ding) = your time of discussion is coming to an end
  • Second bell (ding) = start wrapping it up
  • Last bell (ding ding) = close off your discussions

This allows people to have the time to wrap up their conversations without a facilitator shouting at people to conclude, but also allows for the time to get the final key points across in discussions.

One of the key learnings in this masterclass was about facilitating important conversations. There are so many tools out there that will make your job easier. There are tools to help you dig into problems and challenges and understand the reasons they are happening. There are tools to help you be more productive and help you think more clearly. These are widely available and can be flexed as appropriate. Talk to people and find out what they use and how they are using them. For instance:

  1. Drawing Together (the five shapes). You ask people to draw the organisation they want to work for with 5 shapes. The shapes they have to use are assigned certain characteristics e.g. a square is ‘structured’; a spiral is ‘evolving’, a circle is ‘inclusive’ etc. This allows people to express what they feel the organisation currently looks like and feels like, but also what they would like to see it become, as a graphical representation.
  1. Spectrums. Nothing in this world is really ever black and white. This exercise helps people decide where they sit on a spectrum of options rather than being ‘one’, or ‘another’. It’s all about enabling conversations to help people find where they sit in relation to a particular issue or challenge, but can also helpfully shape opinions and views and move people from potentially entrenched positions.
  2. Shift, Share and Reflection: make two lines of people standing opposite each other. Give each line a name, for example one is ice creams and the other is cones. People standing opposite each other have to share on a given topic, with each given a minute. For example, themes that can be covered include the meaning and origins of your name, superpower you’d have and why etc.
  3. First instinct exercise: Put the following four terms on a piece of paper on the floor: intuitive, emotional, somatic (physical response) and cognitive. Ask people to which term they naturally gravitate towards. And then discuss this amongst the group about why they think this is their first instinct.

On the same note, there are so many people out there with a variety of experiences in your field — trying to combat the same problems as you are. Getting heads together to try solve this is often more successful than sitting scratching your own head and having a limited field of vision. We used a tool in our masterclass (focused on shaking up organisations for change) called Troika. We split into groups of 3. One person has 1 minute to download to the other two the problem they’re facing. The other 2 then have 2 minutes to ask person 1 questions about their problem. Person 1 will then turn their backs on but lean into the conversation and listen to the other two discuss their problems and some of the potential solutions person 1 could adopt to solve or go some way to solve their problem.

Fabulous. I’ve come away with a completely new mindset and approach to a situation I’m experiencing at work.

When you’re overwhelmed and have a number of tasks to complete while trying to shift culture — focus on the task that is going to get you 15% further in your aims and objectives. The exercise used for this is 15% Solutions. You can reveal the actions, however small, that everyone can do immediately. At a minimum, these will create momentum, and that may make a BIG difference. 15% Solutions show that there is no reason to wait around, feel powerless, or fearful. They help people pick it up a level. They get individuals and the group to focus on what is within their discretion instead of what they cannot change. With a very simple question, you can flip the conversation to what can be done and find solutions to big problems that are often distributed widely in places not known in advance. Shifting a few grains of sand may trigger a landslide and change the whole landscape.

A great tool which can be used to get to the point, and get to it quickly is called ‘strategy strings’. Liberating Structures has created a series of these strings of exercises around a number of themes, which are extremely useful when plugged together as a series. They are:

  1. Finding everyday solutions
  2. Noticing patterns together
  3. Drawing out prototypes
  4. Unleashing local action
  5. Spreading innovation by scaling out and up

These few string examples illustrate how much you can accomplish in a short time — often less than one hour or ninety minutes — and how easy it will be for you to compose many others based on the specifics of your own challenges. Be prepared to be pleasantly surprised!

Scratching around the Liberation Structures website, I recognised that Liberating Structures are often mixed-matched-and-mashed-up with other innovative change approaches. This includes but is not limited to Lean, Positive Deviance, and Design Thinking. This seems to boost many efforts to generate momentum and innovation. Below is one illustrated mash-up of Design Thinking and Liberating Structures, which I love!

One of the final exercises we did is called the ecocycle planning. This can be applied to your individual work, your team’s operations or your organisation. Check out the slide deck provided by DSIL at the master class, pages 41–47.

TAKEAWAYS FROM THE MASTERCLASS:

  • No solution will work forever
  • Shake up culture is less about democracy and more about dialogue and conversation
  • Biomimicry: Looking at how nature works and use those principles in how you can innovate
  • ‘What emerges matters’
  • Never leave meetings without practical, accountable steps
  • Becoming a transparent organisation is the healthiest thing you can aim for
  • Always have a neutral facilitator who is intuitive — be as fair as you can when you are facilitating for others.
  • Base your strategy on the things you must NOT do as a start — this always helps to define what you need to do
  • EQ is vastly more important than IQ
  • Move together or not at all

Finally, Here are a few new activities that DSIL has seen a lot of success with if you, yourself want to jump into the experimentation! If your teams are working through the tension of pulling in Creativity vs. Wisdom- this is a good one. Systems to Self is the tie between our daily actions and global change. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Kirsten Naudé

Written by

Director of New Ventures at The Children’s Society. Director of KZN Consulting: Advisor to Charities, Social Enteprises & Commissioners

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