Designing Learning Conversations
I was fortunate to work with a team from Luminate to explore how to design good learning conversations. The objective was to pluck insights from project implementation rather than exact accountability from partners.
I run three sessions across the Luminate team — a face-to-face workshop for the Asia Team and two online workshops — one each for Africa and Europe (Global programs).
Here are a few tools that I used from different sources to help trigger insights from workshop participants.
Daniel Stillman’s Conversation Canvas
I am a big fan of the Conversation Canvas. When I used it during the Luminate Workshop, version 10 had not been released yet, so the visual below refers to the previous version. The canvas is self-explanatory, but if you want to learn more, you can click on the link here for a discussion.
The canvas is very intuitive. Applying it in real-life situations, whether with a colleague at work or with my 13-year-old daughter, has allowed me to make meaningful conversations. One very daunting requirement though, is for you to really know who you are speaking with when you plan the conversation (top left box). Without this knowledge, you will not be able to answer the rest of the elements in the canvas.
The good thing though in this information age, is the ease by which we are able to know about a lot of people — where they come from, where they live, which school they went to, what’s their favourite stuff (color, food, place, time, etc). — and thus having a level of informed description of other people helps us design our conversations and interactions better.
Harvard University’s Strategies for Developing Interview Guides
While the Harvard University Department of Sociology’s strategies for qualitative interviews may look a little dated, the nuggets of wisdom you can find there still remains relevant until today. When I read through it and applying it to designing learning conversations, I realised that there are at least streams that come out.
The first one, depicted in the visual above, is more about designing specific questions. The second one is more about how to phase the converstation to achieve the level of detail and interest during the conversation.
Harvard Business Review’s Conversation Frame
I find Lisa Zigarmi and Julie Diamond’s conversation frame in terms of structuring a replicable conversation “container” really useful.
While their work as published at Harvard Business Review focuses more on “framing difficult conversations”, what my main takeaway from the narrative is one’s ability to focus/refocus the conversation in such a way that the desired objective of the conversation, which is eventually to take action, is facilitated. In the case of this work with Luminate, I use conversation frames to structure a replicable conversation pathway that moves from experience to realisation and then to action.
Institute of Cultural Affairs’ ORID
I have been using ORID (Objective- Reflective, Interpretive, Decisional) in facilitating or leading focused conversations. It acknowledges how thinking moves from the sensing to feeling to thinking, and finally to acting, and how the progression of easy to difficult questions helps facilitate a more meaningful interaction.
We don’t necessarily start conversations with difficult questions, like why questions, which often make respondents defensive. We normally start with easier questions, especially those that people perceive using their senses. What people experience, how they feel about it, what they think about it, and how it influences future actions is an intuitive process of moving from experience to insight and to action.
Have you used any of these tools? What was your experience? Happy to know.
(This story was first published at https://mikocanares.com/2023/10/12/designing-learning-conversations/)
