How we’re pitching at One Team Gov Global
As you will know if you’ve been following the One Team Gov story, the Global event on 16th July is the biggest yet. It is not just an unconference, its a One Team Gov Global unconference, and we’re thinking hard about what will work best on the day.
We wanted to make sure that we’re getting the information out there about how the unconference session will run, so we caught up with James Arthur Cattell to get all the details.
So, the usual conference (open space) format is people standing up and pitching for 30 seconds, and then hands up to express an interest. It’s not going to be like that at Global is it?
No, we just couldn’t find a way to fit in traditional unconference pitching on the day. There are so many attendees and there will be so many amazing ideas, it would have taken up too much time. We thought about pre-pitching — getting people to pitch online somehow, but again logistically it was a challenge. And looked like a lot of hard work, for not much gain.
Makes sense. What did you end up going with?
We heard about Liberating Structures and the facilitation methods that they offer, and had a chat with David Heath, Nancy White and Keith McCandless to see what would work best for us. We decided on what is known as the 25/10 Crowdsourcing technique and we’ve been trying it out at various Civil Service Live events all around the country so we know we can get it right on the day.
It’s a great way to generate and sift ideas, and we’re excited to bring it to OneTeamGov Global.
Interesting. How does it work?
Everyone writes down their big idea on an index card: the thing that they want to talk about. Then the movement begins: everyone walks around, passing the cards as they go. There’s no time to read the card, or to talk about it, you’re just passing them around. It mixes them up, and means that you’re far away from your own idea before someone reads it.
Then when the music stops (or we shout, or there’s a bell) people pair up with the nearest person, and talk about the cards that they have in their hands right then. And score it out of 5, with 0 meaning “no way in the world do I want to talk about that” and 5 meaning “I would LOVE to talk about that”.
Then we start passing cards again, and score again. This is done 5 times, so each card is rated out of 25.
We’ll then ask for cards that score the magic 25. Then we’ll ask for the 24s, and 23s and so on until the session grid is full.
And that’s all there is to it!
Sounds great! Thanks for taking the time to talk to us James, we look forward to seeing it all in practice on the day :)
There will be at least 60 sessions on the day, so get your thinking caps on: what is it that you want to talk about?
