Sparkle School

A common pattern at events is you have a speaker, an audience and a space that separates the speaker and audience by a common event pattern, with a stage for the speaker and the seating for the audience.

So when an audience gets invited to an event to listen to a speaker, the focus and attention is on the speaker’s expertise and not on the audience.

This works but not all the time.

It means that often we ONLY hear from the speaker and at times we only hear from the same group of speakers.

The time for audience questions and sharing is limited.

This may restrict our learning, our perspectives and limit our thinking as fuelled by our own assumptions and biases.

This means we may only hear what we want to hear from people we keep hearing from.

As the audience listens, often passively, we unfortunately do not get the opportunity to learn about the people in the audience, what those people think and what expertise is hidden from our view.The next great speaker may be silently hiding in the audience.

What if we reversed this somehow?

We would like Sparkle School to be a place space where we identify people in the audience who are often silent to come forward and share a topic, from a wide selection of themes we have available, and to help facilitate and connect conversations to help answer this — how can we make meaningful work?

We are hoping that this will give more opportunity for people to share and contribute and help us all practice the skills needed to make meaningful work.

We are piloting this in Hong Kong in 2017 and will let you know what we learn.