Practical Takeaway: The Rising Status of Care
For each of the provocations in the Koreo Futures, we wanted to provide a simple way for people to take some of the themes and questions back into teams and organisations, thinking about the possible implications for them and their work.
How will the future of our work be influenced by an ageing UK population, uneven rollout of automation, a crisis in social care, and gendered understanding of work? For this first provocation, we wanted to use a classic workshop format to get any team thinking about how these trends could or should affect their work.
What you’ll be doing
The format we’re suggesting, World Café, will be familiar to many of you. It’s a classic, and while it’s been around for a long time, we still find it an effective way of pulling out different perspectives on questions and themes, and leading to collective action to address problems. We use it across our ventures and consultancy work as a technique for going deep on the issues that matter to an organisation, building consensus, and improving problem-solving skills in teams. Below you’ll find what you need to run it, an outline of the process, and some suggestions for the questions you could set for the discussion.
What you’ll need:
To run this activity, you’ll need the following:
· 9 or more people including you
· 60–90 minutes
· A room/space that can accommodate some moving around
· 3 lots of flip chart paper & markers
· 3 volunteers to help you facilitate
The Process
There are four stages to a World Café:
1. Welcome and Introduction. A welcome to the group, explaining why you think the discussion is timely, explaining how the exercise will work, and outlining how you think it could support their work. You will introduce three questions for discussion, which will be arranged on 3 tables or stations, with one person anchoring the discussion on each table. You could send our provocation as pre-reading if that’s helpful.
2. Small group rotations. Once the group has been welcomed and introduced to the activity, they’ll split into small groups. Those group will rotate through 3 questions over the course of 45 minutes, with 15 minutes for each question. At the end of each 15 minutes, the group will move on. Each time the group arrives at a new question, they are given a summary of the discussion from the last group, and are asked to build on it without covering any of the same ground. Depending on how many people you have, you can put them into larger groups (though we’d recommend a maximum of 5), increase the number of questions, or duplicate the questions so that everyone covers the same three.
3. Feedback. At the end of the rotations, the person anchoring the discussion on each question feeds back the nature of the discussion to the rest of the room, usually with a limit of 5 feedback points. You will need to be succinct with their summarising when joined by a new group and especially in the final rotation.
4. Next Steps. At the end of the feedback, we’d suggest you facilitate a conversation about what the people in the group could do in response to what’s come out of the session. If, for example, you’ve decided that your organisation needs to implement an HR policy for staff who are also carers, how are you going to take that forward? If you’re suggesting a community of practice to skill up around artificial intelligence, who’s going to convene the community and when?
A quick note on your facilitators. The facilitator at each table will need to own the questions at their table, prompt discussion, make sure people stick to the principles of World Café (for example not to repeat the same content etc.). Pick them well!
The Questions
The success of a World Café exercise is always dependent on the quality of the questions and how engaged the group feel about answering them. To that end, we think it’ll be a good idea for you to choose the questions which feel the most relevant to the context you’re currently working in.
If you’re interested in the effects of an ageing population, you might want to ask some of the following:
· If the population of over 85s grows by 106 per cent in the next 20 years, what will that mean for what we do?
· If we’re working until we’re 85, how might our work need to change?
· What would it look like if we encouraged inter-generational working at and through our work?
If you want to explore the impact of technology, you might consider:
· What parts of our job could be done by a computer, and what could we use that extra time for?
· If manual, routine jobs are automated, what will that mean for the communities we care about, and how might we support them?
· What technology is likely to have the biggest impact on our success, and how might we influence its development?
If you’re looking at caring and gender equality, your questions could include:
· How do we currently support carers in our organisation and how could we do it better?
· How can we make sure that efforts for gender pay equality don’t ignore lower income jobs, or pay equality for people from different backgrounds?
· Do we or the people we work with contribute to in-work poverty, and if so how can we stop?
· Are any of the roles in our organisation understood through the lens of gender, and if so how can we avoid contributing to those stereotypes?
Sharing your answers
If you do run this activity we’d love to know what questions you ask, and what comes back from your group. Feel free to share @HelloKoreo #KoreoFutures, but we’d love it if you dropped us a line (hello@koreo.co) and we’ll be in touch with you. Equally, if you want any help setting up or facilitating this kind of exercise just let us know!
