80 people creating stuff together?
Text: Ola Berg
Renowned agile coach

Last saturday, September 1, a whole bunch of people gathered in the center of Stockholm to collaborate on how to create a better Swedish public sector.
It started with Kit Collingwood in the UK, who has during the last few years created a grass-roots movement within the British public sector called “One Team Gov”. Public servants in Sweden noticed this, formed a Swedish branch, the One Team Gov Sverige.
Many more heard her talk at the Offentliga Rummet conference and decided to join the movement. And I, as a supporter of the public sector, offered to help designing the process that would guide the participants in our first conference towards collaboration and collective designing of solutions to the public sector’s most pressing problems.
Creativity is basically about two things: generating a lot of ideas, and then zooming in on a few of them. The first part, when you generate stuff, is called the “divergent thinking” phase, and the second way of thinking, when you zoom in trying to find the few viable nuggets among the lot, is called “convergent”.
The challenge when you work with a group is to have everyone doing the divergent and the convergent thinking in synchronization. If some are in a divergent mood and others are in a convergent mood, they will even out and nothing valuable will come from it. But if you can make 80 people be divergent at the same time, a whole lot of ideas will be generated.
There is also this idea from different flavors of design thinking that it is a good thing to first explore the problem space thoroughly, and much later zoom in on the solutions. The same rule applies here: you need to have the whole room to be in the same phase at the same time. People who explore the problems will not understand people who simultaneously explore the solutions. We must keep them in sync, doing one thing at a time.
Fortunately there are a lot of workshop and facilitation techniques one can use for managing these processes, and I will share the ones we chose when arranging the conference.
We wanted to have an Open Space, a conference format where the participants plan what to talk about and when and where, and then do it. Normally when you arrange an Open Space, there are just a few participants (normally 2–3 out of 10) who has a well thought-out topic for a discussion and will propose it.
This is great since they often present great topics, but what about the rest? Can we help more people raise their ideas? Lift their subjects? Even if they isn’t as well thought-out as the others?
We picked Impromptu Networking as our collaboration pattern to help people verbalize their ideas. The idea of Impromptu Networking is that you change partner all the time, and that you take turns in answering a question. In our case our question was: what do you want to talk about?
The many iterations of this helped people to put words on what they felt was important, and helped EVERYONE to have a well formulated proposal of a topic to discuss. 80 topics, but only 24 sessions to fill. What to do now?
Fortunately we had summoned a small army (or a squad of twelve actually) of excellent co-facilitators to step in. They rushed out in the room, formed small circles around flip-charts, and started to collect the ideas. The circles started to discuss their topics and started to express what topics were the most important. The facilitators were told to find FOUR topics, ordered from the most important to the least important, according to the will of their small circle.
From that list it was easy to select the 24 topics. The unselected ones were put on a backlog called “This is ALSO important”, while we created a session grid: first we would discuss twelve topics in twelve different rooms for 45 minutes, and later after a break we would discuss the other twelve topics for another 45 minutes.
This was divergence and convergence in action. It also involved a lot of discussions and many opportunities to express why you were there and opportunities to hear why the others were there.
It helped those who weren’t used to talk about these things to speak their minds, and helped those who thought that they were alone with their thoughts to understand that they totally weren’t.
The spontaneous circle exercise also helped to form a group consensus of what was important for the day, creating a sense of a shared purpose. And that is something that is very important when you try to create a movement, since the notion of a shared purpose is what triggers our will to create teams and start to bond.
