Lessons learned from organizing a place-based interdisciplinary summer school
This post is the second part of an in-depth reflection about what we have learned during Holis 2018. You can read the first part here.
Holis is a place-based educational project to foster innovation through interdisciplinary collaboration. Every year we bring participants from a wide range of disciplines to work on social innovation projects with the support of outstanding team leaders. This year we worked on 5 topics — regional branding, sustainable tourism, food heritage, rural public spaces and wellbeing — in the Radzyn county (east Poland).
In this second article we reflect on the logistical and operational aspects of Holis and also share some thoughts on future plans.
Logistics
The most important takeaway here is that small things matter a lot: you can ruin the work of a couple of months by not paying attention to small things.
As we change our teaching location quite frequently and each venue is run by another organisation, we have to make sure that everything is in place before everybody — tutors, participants, staff — arrives. Which means that we — Eszter Bircsak (the programme & food curator) and myself — have to be on the spot a couple of days before the course starts. A good idea might be also to prepare something like a tour rider as music bands have. We would need a technical rider and a hospitality rider. They should prepare the venue so that there is no surprise. The venue should be prepared by these riders 2 days before the event and should be tested by us in order to have time to fix all potential issues.
A valuable lesson from this year is that it is not enough to put some selective rubbish bins and tell people to use them. We have to design the venue to serve better sustainable behaviours. Which means that we have to put the bins where the rubbish is “produced”, make a tour on selective garbage and put on clear signage.
Something that occurred organically is a message board where people can share quotes that are relevant to the topics we are working on (or just silly messages bringing smiles on people’s faces!). I think we will make a dedicated space for such messages.
In terms of communication, we found out that using the times of the meals — when everybody was in the same place at the same time — to share information was a proper decision. Maybe, we could even develop the concept further by including 5 additional minutes during which the participants can share information with the others.
The same goes for the daily team-leader meetings that were held after dinner. Not only were they useful in terms of discussing what needed to be fixed and what were the plans for the next day, but they were also a great opportunity for the tutors to share what — according to them — worked and what didn’t. Peer learning is a useful tool and not only for the participants!
For what concerns the team communication on-site we used a mixture of Slack, messenger and running around. But when the venue is big and there are a lot of people running around, it can become very tiring to look for the person you want to talk to. We should, therefore, develop an on-site communication policy and just stick to it. Maybe we could invest in some walkie-talkies and a megaphone :).
Coffee and tea is an important part of any summer school. We need to make it easier and straightforward for the first person who is up in the morning to make coffee and tea. And also consider that she/he could be still sleepy; conceiving self-explanatory methods should be a must.
Operational
This part is about our working together as a team before and after the summer school. Fortunately there are more and more people involved in the organisational and follow-up process so this part is becoming more and more important.
Communication is the queen: this isn’t new and you can read about this everywhere. Still it is important to repeat the concept as true learning comes from repetition: you have to make sure that everybody has the information they need. Never assume, better ask or tell even the evident things. I mean evident for you…
We started to develop a system that allows us to work more efficiently together remotely (at the moment we work with people in Bratislava, Bregenz, Budapest, Lisbon, Ljubljana, London, Paris, Santa-Clara, Warsaw). This will certainly involve various online tools, such as Trello, Slack, Google Docs, Zoom, Mural and Loomio.
Funding is the king: you might have the best idea, you might help many people, you might involve the best people, but you will still fail if you can not make the ends meet. This is a crucial moment for Holis in terms of business model and funding. We were lucky enough to receive a lot of volunteer and pro bono help so far. But it can not go on like this forever. People will be naturally attracted to other projects if they can not make money on something. Of course it is not only about money (at least we hope so!), but a certain basic income should be provided for those who work on Holis :)
Recently, I had a conversation with John Thackara about how many social innovation or do-good projects are suffering from under-funding. My thinking around this is that these projects should have a mixed structure of income. We discussed with John that probably it would not be a bad idea to organise some kind of gathering where we can discuss the various opportunities. We would invite project owners and people from grant institutions, impact investors, etc. There are a lot of things going on right now in this field…
And finally this was one of my audio notes taken at the beginning of Holis (thanks to Martyn Evans again for suggesting me to take audio notes). “There is a strange transition between planning and execution. There is no more time for planning because you kind of have to start the execution but you are not starting it yet because you feel like you have to plan more precisely to be able to start to execute.” Meanwhile I have learned that this phase has a name: The Groan Zone. The term coined by Sam Kaner describes the tricky, messy and uncomfortable period of transition from a divergent activity to a convergent activity. Being aware of this phenomenon will help us to be better in this transitions.
What’s next
What follow is a series of personal thoughts regarding some aspects that might shape Holis in the next years. There are mostly questions that I do not have answers for. I hope to get some kind of answers with the team and people I am collaborating with.
Innovation vs. maintenance: innovation is not always the solution. Innovation have become the shiny fancy thing you need to pursue with your organisation and the term itself has attracted lot of attention and funding as well. The funny thing is grant institutions also want to take a ride on the innovation roller coaster but are so risk-averse that they want you to list the exact outcomes of your activity 3 years ahead! I believe that there should be a balance between innovation and maintenance. And innovation also has to be incremental and holistic. Maybe there is something we can learn from the punctuated equilibrium theory which says that there are stages of no or little change and there are stages with a lot of change during an evolution.
There is no solution for wicked problems. Most challenges in our society are so complex and interconnected that we will never be completely able to understand them and make changes that lead to desired outcomes. The best you can do is to improve things incrementally. Step by step.
This is why we are considering to have a series of mission questions instead of a single mission statement.
We have some ambitious plans for next year. This involves several Holis summer schools in different locations. We are currently having conversations with our potential new and old partners in Hungary, Portugal and Poland. There is also a possibility of having a Holis in Czech Republic, Slovakia and also Slovenia. If you are interested to be a host, partner or facilitator please get in touch!
Here are some topics around which we plan to develop the next year Holis programmes:
Holis Hungary
We will work with an NGO (Real Perl Foundation) based in east Hungary. The biggest challenge here is poverty and the absence of a real model regarding how to get out of it. Together with the local community and with the help of the NGO we will develop products that can be produced by local people to generate income. The NGO has a wood workshop and machinery to produce bio pallets, for instance. The aim is to come up with products that are easy to produce and that have a realistically implementable (and potentially scalable) business model.
Holis Poland
We will continue our work with the same partners (Sobole Foundation, Radzyn county) around topics such as small farming, regional branding and sustainable tourism. We already started to plan the activities for next year and are working on how to get the proper funding together while implementing the ideas that were developed this summer.
Holis Portugal
With our partner (A-F-Á-B-R-I-C-A, Center for Culture and Environment) which recently bought a former brick factory (!) we will work on the possible strategy and functions for this factory to become a regional sustainable development centre. Their aim is to bring back people to the region, knowing that in the last 5 years almost 70% of the population left the area.
For what concerns long-term plans, we are thinking about developing a longer course around social innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, deep generalism. Stay tuned and subscribe to our newsletter to get the updates!
Holis 2018 was co-financed by the Governments of the Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia through Visegrad Grants from International Visegrad Fund. The mission of the fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe.
