Designing Knowledge Sourcing Workshops That Work
How do you get the most creativity while managing the risk?
Last week I was invited to meeting of a collective of which my company is a partner. As someone who is used to designing similar workshops and creainterventions, I was looking forward to participating rather than the facilitating for a change. Free to explore my ideas around a particular subject of interest to me with like-minded others without the responsibility of ‘designing’ the experience or room.
Such experiences are very common in arenas where there is always a lot of co-creation and collaboration going on. Whether you call them hackathons, scrums, sprints, activations (as we do), deep-dives or just plain old workshops, the idea of gathering people together to mine their collective creativity and ideas is also growing in popularity in more corporate environments.
Well designed and well hosted, they are energised gatherings where new initiatives are born, ideas can be moved forward into action, and connected relationships based on like-minded values can take place. They are brilliant ways to ignite what we call the ‘fire at the edges’ which is usually where the opportunity for innovation and creativity exists.
But there are pitfalls. Especially when taking this format into corporations with hierarchies and processes in place that ‘contain’ how ideas are taken forward but also amongst creative individuals. Learning to design experimental containers is a bit of an art as well as a science. It needs a mentality that understands human motivation, that is familiar with business processes and structures and that can imagine ‘what if’ scenarios with ease.
Here are a few of the challenges to consider when designing interventions for experiments and knowledge crowd-sourcing.
- Preparing Management for the Creative Burst
If you are taking a hackathon format into a corporate environment, it will inevitably have a management structure in place. Managers will most likely have been trained — to manage people! They will have all the tools at their disposal like annual reviews, approval processes, allocated departmental budgets and more.
Seeing the collaborative creativity of their teams explode into life can make managers feel very insecure about how to ‘manage’ and control the end result, and about their own role. It’s important to prepare the way with anyone in management around a collaborative experience to help them manage any fear or concern which arises.
The best way to do this is firstly to have a clear process in place to take forward any ideas which emerge within a framework that manages risk to the company but allows for creativity to emerge, and secondly to provide coaching support to the management team that is brave enough to initiate the process. - Setting Expectations & Explaining Limitations
You want your group to be as creative as possible without limiting their imagination. But there will be boundaries you have to latterly take into account that manage the risk inside the organisation — especially if you’re working in regulated environments like public services or pharmaceuticals/medicine/engineering etc.
Activating the collaborative and collective intelligence of a diverse group of people inside that organisation to collaborate around a cross-departmental issue or even within a single department, asks them to think outside the boundaries of their ‘normal’ containers so you have to give them new ones.
If they are given free rein during the process, make sure you have a system in place that reins ideas back into important boundaries — like legal and compliance — after the process. Not all of the creative ideas that come out of a hackathon can be taken forward. So make sure you explain to participants how all the ideas are going to be validated so that disappointment doesn’t occur. Ideally design into the hackathon a period where you examine all the potential constraints on ideas so that people are already aware of any limitations. - Design for Everyone
Undoubtedly the most difficult thing to achieve. In any given room you have a mix of personalities and characters. Introverts and extroverts. You have a mix of cultures which might mean some people work better as teams than as individuals or pairs. You have a mix of genders. You have a mix of levels of consciousness to design for.
Designing a workshop so that everyone gets to participate, everyone has a voice, everyone goes home feeling they were able to express what they needed to, is a real art. Our Activating Creativity 90 process took years to develop because that level of inclusion was what I was aiming for. - Have enough Facilitators
Often due to budget constraints, clients might only want one facilitator for a group. That’s always a mistake. It has taken me four years of studying and practising to understand that you need ideally one facilitator for every 10 people in a group — unless you want to miss things.
You also need different perspectives and roles. You need someone who manages the timing; you need someone to lead the workshop, you need facilitators who see shape and design emerging from groups of people and who understand what that signifies; you need facilitators who gently manage ‘penholders’ and the passion (and sometimes defensiveness) that ownership of an idea unleashes in individuals. - Intellectual Property & Ownership
If you are a company employee, there may already be something in your contract of employment that states that any ideas presented by you to the company whilst in the service of the company automatically become the property of the company. Often that’s also the case if you are working for a creative agency. In which case anything that arises from a hackathon automatically belongs to the organisation.
In the case where you are just the convener who wants to bring a group of people or organisations together to encourage action amongst them, it doesn’t matter because you have no interest in ‘owning’ the output.
But what about if you are convening a group of people from diverse organisations that derive their income from the subject that is being covered, such as consultants for example? If as the convening organisation you want to ‘own’ and manage the development of any ideas that arise from the hackathon, what is your responsibility? What do you do if someone in the group contributes an idea and decides to run with it?
The answer is, it’s a bit of a grey area legally, and emotionally it can be a mine-field. So it’s always worth making clear at the outset of any hackathon that all output will be owned and developed by the convening agent and having a clear process for how this will go forward (see below). I’ve seen very few co-creative groups get this right. It’s an area many avoid — because hackathons have become a good way to crowd source creative ideas for free.
As we move through the knowledge economy, there are many businesses that used to depend on their creative thinking for income generation who are having to radically re-think that model as collective intelligence sourcing becomes more common. Creative agencies and consultants are two large groups on which this has a significant impact.
By and large most people who agree to attend group-thinks are open minded and happy to share knowledge and ideas. But it should also be borne in mind that one of the quickest ways to quash interest and excitement or to build resentment, is if you have to go back to people after the event and explain that you want the idea to be developed under your auspices. So it’s being clear and open about why you are convening the group if it is your intention to own or manage the projects that emerge and how you want to do that. - A Way Forward
Once you unleash the collaborative intelligence and energy of a group, that energy has to have somewhere to go. If you build in the possibility of autonomy in taking forward the creative ideas, there has to be a process in place to take them forward, and an understanding of any necessary boundaries that autonomy should have to avoid raising expectations that cannot be met.
There must be a clear path forwards for next action. In other words, make sure you have thought about how you are going to take the ideas that have arisen forwards within the organisation or group, and that you have also made clear to the group that has convened what those steps are.
Is there a clear process and structure for taking ideas through the organisation at the moment?
How will you ensure that the ideas presented are compliant with the relevant law, standards, compliance requirements (if indeed these are touched)?
Will there be a panel to explore, develop and validate ideas? Who will be selected to be on that panel and how will that be done?
If you would like to explore more about how to design collaborative and collective knowledge workshops, or you would like to talk to me about activating the collective intelligence in your organisation, do get in touch at We Activate The Future or mail me, Jenny at jenny@weactivatethefuture.com or message me on Twitter.
