What we learned about designing a social innovation learning experience
As a firm believer in incremental development and open communication this post is about what we’ve learned during Holis 2018 in Poland. Every organisation should have a learning cycle and every open organisation should share its learning.
Holis is a place-based learning 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 topics such as regional branding and sustainable tourism, food heritage, rural public spaces and well-being in Radzyn county, east Poland.
The following thoughts are based on the feedback received from the participants and our local partners and my own audio notes taken during Holis (I would like to thank my PhD supervisor, Martyn Evans for suggesting taking audio notes. This is a great tool to capture your thoughts when you are running around and don’t have time to write things down.) What we are missing at this point to make the learning process complete is a team retrospective and the aggregation of the team leader’s feedback. I will probably update this post if it’s done.
I will try to organise the learning points below in categories. People is about communication and organising participants. Methodology is about the structure, framework and tools we are using during Holis. Logistic is about what it says. Operational is more about Holis as an organisation and the team members who are working on making Holis happen. Strategy is about some thoughts regarding future development of Holis.
I will cover these topics in two separate posts. This is part 1.
People
We received 42 applications and selected 25 participants coming from 4 continents, 16 countries and 10 different professions. All this happened without using Facebook or Instagram as a recruitment/communication tools this year. I’m very satisfied with this outcome. Holis has never been so international and culturally diverse. What worked very well is the personal recommendations. Most of the people heard about Holis from a friend or their teacher. We will work further to develop a reliable and wide “Holis Network of Word of Mouth”. Part of this is our new Holis Ambassador initiative inviting previous participants and team leaders to be part of it. Will share more details on this later.
Participants mostly applied because of the interdisciplinary aspect of the school and because of the opportunity to work on real life social innovation projects in the countryside. This is a good feedback because this is exactly the kind of people we were aiming at.
We had some sharp feedbacks regarding the application process such as:
“There should be a more detailed description of what is needed for the application. For me it was very confusing because I only realised I had to write a motivational letter on the third page of application form. It would be useful to know that in advance so one can prepare everything and then just fill in the form.”
“Make the call for application louder. Some of my friends would have wanted to participate in the program but didn’t know about it before I mentioned them. The google doc (containing practical information about Holis) kept on updating constantly however, there were no notifications of those updates. Would be better to use another platform that notifies news about the program.”
“ I missed the outcome of previous years from the videos or from the descriptions. The concepts and project ideas weren’t really mentioned anywhere, but for someone coming from a non-design field, it would’ve made it easier to imagine what to expect.”
This gives us a clear direction on how to make the application process even better.
To have a better idea about who the participants are from next year we will introduce a video chat as a last step of the selection process. That will give us the opportunity to answer questions applicants might have about Holis and see if they are a good fit to the programme.
We have to work a bit more on structuring the welcome and goodbye ceremony. These are important touch points and this year for various reasons we weren’t able to deliver what we planned. It was good enough but could be better. A good idea to have plan B for cases when other challenges appear and drag resources.
Although participants were satisfied with the interdisciplinarity and diversity of the team there is still room for development. We need more male participants and also participants from fields like business and engineering. This is one of the challenges we will focus on next year during the recruitment campaign.
Something we probably missed this year and will make right next year is the balance of extroverts and introverts and to design the activities during the school that fits both.
And the biggest issue that we have to think about is the lack of “me time”. The programme was designed to be intensive on purpose. We want to deliver something valuable at the end of the 9 days and it means a lot of work. At the other hand it’s not a good idea to burn the candle on both sides.
Methodology
I think and read these days more and more about how our brain functions. We are operating in the knowledge industry and our brain is our work tool. So we better keep it in good shape. From next year on we will work on activities that will show our participants how can they take care of their brain, their mental health. We hope to partner up with neuroscientists and learning psychologists to develop our programme further (if you are one please ping me!).
We will also fine tune the role of the team leader to make it more of a facilitator and probably introduce the role of expert who will help the teams in getting the right information at the right time. We also recognise the power of the peer learning so there will be more of this too.
With the help of Stephen Miller, Head of Impact Evaluation at Power to Change Trust we will work on a model that will help us measure the impact of our actions at local level. We started it this year on a small scale, but we have to do more of this. Probably using the theory of change or some similar framework. As part of this activity we also think about how can we show the value of social innovation projects that is understandable for decision makers.
I also had an interesting talk recently with John Stevens from RCA about how the perception of design changed in the last 20 years from being an artistic “nice to have” to a business “must have”. I see some similarities regarding what should be done with the social innovation field (not the business part but the clear value proposition and measurement part).
Plan more do less or be prepared to do less. We tend to over plan activities. Having a plan is a good thing but being able to adapt to the situation is even better. I think it worked well during Holis but it’s good to remind ourselves.
Do have a conflict resolution plan / process / policy. I think conflicts are good and necessary. I don’t believe in the power of “everyone agrees on everything”. But not managed conflicts are bad. It’s a good idea to have clear and transparent conflict resolution process.
So far we were mostly focused on developing the internal processes and the activities for the participants. I think it’s time to design the touch-points where Holis meets the local community. Questions on when and how do we start the preparation work, what kind of information do they need and what kind of commitment do we need from their side. Also we will restructure a bit the presentation of the projects at the end of Holis. There will be a more detailed presentation to the partners who might be potential implementer of the ideas and there will be a more informal exhibition for everybody who is curious about what has been done during the 9 days.
And speaking about the presentations. Unfortunately it seems that universities still don’t teach presentation skills. This is something we will include in our programme and focus on some other essential skills that we see our participants are lacking. I’m sure there will be a post about skills that we at Holis find extremely useful and don’t see many education institutes teaching.
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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.
