Eight step collaboration workshop
from challenge statements towards action
I’ve just run a workshop together with Ian Graham @IanG_York which went well. We strung together a mix of techniques from different sources (Gamestorming, Liberating Structures and Y Lab / Nesta with a sprinkling of influence from ICA Group Facilitation Methods). I thought that this combination would be interesting to others. So I thought I’d share what we did.
Our client, the catchily titled York, North Yorkshire and East Riding Enterprise Partnership (known as the LEP) were interested in initiating change in relation to the circular economy in Yorkshire.
A circular economy is an alternative to a traditional linear economy (make, use, dispose) in which we keep resources in use for as long as possible, extract the maximum value from them whilst in use, then recover and regenerate products and materials at the end of each service life.
Transforming our current economic model, evidently requires an immense amount of change. More change than one organisation can bring about alone. The York, North Yorkshire and East Riding LEP wanted to initiate this change, essentially sparking a movement towards a ‘circular’ Yorkshire and enabling its stakeholders to take action.
They had already held one workshop of interested and motivated local people from business, government, education and the third sector. The outputs from the first gathering were eight challenges that the community agreed were worth taking on.
Our mission was to motivate 80 people who didn’t know each other very well yet (some had met at the first workshop) to collaborate and take the first steps towards understanding the agreed challenges and to start doing something about them.
We divided the aims of the workshop into rational and experiential.
Rational Aims:
- develop their understanding of the circular economy
- take ownership of the challenges
- understand the skills (or superpowers) of their collaborators
- develop their own actions to take away and act upon
Experiential Aims:
- feel motivated and valued as part of the network
- develop trust between participants
- feel inspired to take action
- build a sense of responsibility
Katie from the LEP did a fantastic job of gathering a well motivated gang of influencers and change makers from diverse backgrounds. Importantly, she also crafted a well thought out invitation, which clearly set out the challenges we’d be working on. This gave people time to contemplate the challenges before they turned up for the workshop.
What did we do?
The day started with some inspirational speakers talking about their experiences of the circular economy. We heard from Gordon Rogers at Yorkshire Water and Trevor Gibson from Circular Peterborough. It was a whistle-stop tour of what’s been going on in other cities and big business. This set the scene for the art of the possible and was very inspiring.
Then it was time to get to work!
We divided the day in two.
Before lunch we focused on unpacking the challenges. First we worked together to create a shared vision. Then we collaboratively built a shared understanding of each challenge area.
After lunch the focus turned towards action planning.
Step 1: Choosing the challenge
We started with each challenge owner doing a 30 second pitch for each of the 8 challenges. Participants were encouraged to score each challenge using the following questions:
- instinctively, how excited are you about this challenge?
- what potential for impact in your community does this challenge have?
- how feasible is it for you personally/your organisation to tackle this challenge and for you to have some impact?
People then gravitated towards their chosen challenge.
Step 2: Getting to know each other
It’s hard to work with complete strangers. So, once people had settled on a challenge and formed a team, they spent a bit of time getting to know the others around the table. We asked them to particularly understand the motivations and skills of one another. We deliberately delayed the networking bit until this point so as to create cohesion between team members, rather than random other people in the room. Remember, we had 80 people there in total.
We used Impromptu Networking (Liberating Structures) to facilitate the networking.
Working in pairs, people asked:
- why this challenge?
- what superpowers do you bring to this community?
- what do you hope to take from this community?
This helped people to quickly build a picture of who’s around the table. It also broke down barriers and reduced those awkward moments when people first met. It meant everyone could get to work more quickly. We felt that this was time well spent as it meant they gelled better and more quickly as a team.
Step 3: Building a vision together
Awkwardness out of the way, it was time to get to work on the challenges. When thinking about a challenge, it is all too easy to get bogged down by all the blockers and difficulties standing in your way. So it was important to get the teams off to a positive start and to begin to coalesce around an agreed vision of the future.
We wanted them to think big — in fact, so big it had landed them on the front cover of a well known magazine. The idea behind this was to plant the seeds for a future that perhaps wasn’t possible before and to create a coherence for later activities.
We used Cover Story (Gamestorming) which is a great workshop tool that helped generate conversation and instigate thinking.
Step 4: Unpacking the challenge
It’s very tempting for us to want to jump straight to a solution when confronted with a challenge. However, my work in design thinking has helped me to understand the importance of gaining a fuller picture of the challenge before trying to fix it.
We used Problem Cards (Y Lab, Nesta) to tease out the understanding of the team members, to put more meat on the bones of the challenge, surface assumptions or even rewrite the challenge. The exercise also helped people to start to realise opportunities. Ultimately, this exercise resulted in the teams collaboratively creating a design brief for each challenge.
We then broke for a well deserved lunch in the fantastic Railway Museum surrounded by Thomas the Tank Engine and friends!
After another inspiring talk from Nigel Lee (Amur) we focussed on action planning. If the fires were going to burn after we left, we couldn’t leave things to chance. We started people thinking big and gradually narrowed things down to what tangible steps individuals could take to make progress.
Step 5: What do we want stakeholders to do
We used Who / Do (Gamestorming) to facilitate a conversation around who else is involved in making things happen; who makes the decisions and has the resources the teams need; who is a supporter / obstacle? Then for each stakeholder in the “who” list, teams identified desired and measurable actions.
Step 6: Micro actions
Next we narrowed down the thinking to identify micro actions that everyone in the room could commit to. Taking all of the work, the conversations and the thinking teams had done during the preceding sessions, we asked people for their 15% Solutions (Liberating Structures)
These are things that don’t require a full scale system redesign, but small changes that people can make where they have the discretion and freedom to act and they can do without more resources or authority. We felt that it was important for people to leave the session knowing that they could act on something straight away, albeit fairly small.
The thinking behind this was that with 80 people in the room, if each person shifted a few grains of sand, we may trigger a landslide and change the whole landscape. If everyone gathered could commit to some of these “micro actions”, BIG things can happen.
Step 7: Before we finished
We felt it was important before everyone got up and left for the day that they did a bit of action planning around next steps. We also wanted everyone to agree on how the team members were going to continue to communicate once they’d left the room.
We also encouraged participants to agree who would take responsibility for taking away and sharing the worksheets they’d been working on all day. We wanted to ensure that the workshop resulted in action and that teams took ownership of addressing their challenge.
Step 8: Interview
We used an interview style to get each table to feedback to the room. This kept people on topic, reduced the risk of one team hogging all of the time available for feedback, and eliminated the need for teams to prepare for a presentation at the end of the day.
With time limited to just 2 minutes per team, Ian prompted one member from each group with a series of questions to understand what they’d started the day with, where they’d got to and what action they were going to take forward. He also asked the team if they had an “ask” of the rest of the participants.
Feedback
We asked participants to write their feedback on luggage tags.
Well we were in the National Railway Museum!
Do try this at home
This string of methods, from a variety of sources (Gamestorming, Liberating Structures and Y Lab / Nesta and ICA) seemed to flow well. It was effective in taking quite a large group from a set of pre-defined challenges towards making things happen.
I really encourage you to try this mix of techniques in your own practise. If you do, here are a couple of things to bear in mind.
Time was tight. We were working with a highly motivated group of individuals. You may not get through all this in one day with another group. We were impressed and pleasantly surprised with how focused the teams worked.
Plan, plan and plan again! (this was the ICA influence). We knew time was tight and we had a lot to get through. We planned enough so that we were prepared to bend and flex to the needs of the group. And when lunch overran, we had to have a quick re-think.
Understand the needs of the client and the group. I think this worked well because we spent a good deal of time up front exploring and understanding the rational and experiential aims of the workshop before starting the detailed design. We also kept in close contact with the client throughout the design phase to ensure that every element satisfied the needs of the group.
If you decide to try this out, or parts of it, I would be very interested to hear how it went. Or, if you were considering a similar event, I would be delighted to speak to you about how we might help.
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I work at The Satori Lab. Working together to deliver improvement in public services at scale.
We focus on helping public servants become more effective with digital, data, design and systems change.
