Our collective approach to research for the ‘enhancing digital capabilities’ pilot

For weeknotes #3 a theme emerged through our work around different ways we are working collectively. Through our weekly meetings and rhythms we have established an approach, rooted in sociocracy, for collective decision making and our confidence is growing in using this practice. What emerged through our work together this past two weeks is that we can, and need to, work collectively in different ways — we don’t all need to be involved in everything. A few ways that we’ve been working collaboratively:

• Agreeing on tasks to be done and then identifying who can take accountability for those tasks — breaking into smaller groups to complete them
• Identifying where issues can move forward without all circle members present — thereby moving forward with momentum
• Identifying where a specific person or people need to be in the room in order to move forward with a decision or activity
• Using our communication methods actively — we don’t all need to be on a call to agree on next steps or share updates

Since Debby wrote about the start of our research work and Fergus detailed our survey approach we’ve moved forward apace, here’s what we’ve been up to:

• Following the survey results we reviewed what respondents had told us and held thirteen one to one conversations with Community Business to dig deeper on some of the insights emerging from the survey. To design these one to one conversations we came together to develop a set of questions to support those who would be taking part in the one to one’s within Power to Change. We did this by breaking into small groups and working on question sets together in Miro — a great tip from Danny on how to frame the questions ‘Keep it simple — imagine a 5 year old asking the question, keep it short and direct’

• Following the one to one conversations we emerged with a set of themes and an overriding recognition that finding space was key for community businesses to understand what they need. Interestingly we found that just by arranging and asking questions around digital needs created space that respondents found useful to reflect and think. We came together and from the theme of creating space we worked up a problem statement in order to start developing some ‘how might we’ statements.

• The how might we statements enabled us to explore different possibilities including how might we share stories and inspire, how might we create space to think and how might we show value and what’s possible.

Here’s some feedback from a few who took part in the workshop:

• Ellie Hale @eg_hale ‘It’s so nice to be really confidently & calmly facilitated through a design process @dannyhearn_me for guiding us through today’s workshop on how @peoplesbiz @wethecatalysts might support community businesses to find space to improve (utilising digital along the way)’
• ‘I got so much from the 2 hours I was able to come along yesterday — thank you for some great facilitation @Danny Hearn and also just want to notice the value of doing the slower and deeper research. The depth and colour we were able to understand and talk through about what the CBs might really need was fabulous.’

In our circle meeting this week we discussed a proposal to change the focus of our work slightly. This was a great learning experience as we found before we move this proposal forward we acknowledged that we need to work on a bit more detail and surface information about the existing process before we bring a proposal back to the broader circle.

We’re now planning the next steps of this work as we head towards prototyping potential ways forward. Watch out for our next weeknotes on that!