Workshop activities to Analyse, Understand and Innovate

You can help a large group of people identify obstacles and opportunities for spreading ideas or innovations at many levels. Panarchy enables people to visualize how systems are embedded in systems and helps them understand how these interdependencies influence the spread of change. Participants become more alert to small changes that can help spread ideas up to other system levels; they learn how shifts at larger or lower system levels may release resources to assist them at another level. With better appreciation of the Ecocycle dynamics at play, the group creates “opportunity windows” for innovations to spread among levels and across boundaries.

One, Two, And More is a flexible structured sharing activity for exploring different topics using different sets of questions. A unique feature of this activity is answering each question in three different modes: individual, pairs, and in teams.

Help Me Understand is based on the underlying (and accurate) assumption is that employees come to meetings with widely different questions around a topic or a change. It also allows the players to discover overlaps with other players’ questions and to notice the frequency with which those questions occur—something they may not have known prior to the meeting.

Systems thinking is a way of approaching problems that asks how various elements within a system — which could be an ecosystem, an organization, or something more dispersed such as a supply chain — influence one another. Rather than reacting to individual problems that arise, a systems thinker will ask about relationships to other activities within the system, look for patterns over time, and seek root causes.

Organizational life is full of paradoxes. It looks as if you always get contradictory advice. For example, one manager suggests that all your training should be on the Web. Another manager extols the virtues of classroom teaching. In a situation like this, it is useless to ask, “Which is better: online learning or instructor-led learning?” The answer is invariably, “It all depends.” In the complex real world, the effectiveness of any strategy depends on the context. For example, training effectiveness depends on the content, objectives, learners, technology, and facilitators. In order for you to come up with the best strategy, you must explore the advantages and disadvantages of conflicting guidelines.

That's what BOTH SIDES helps you to do.

Here's an interesting game that produces humorous results. Hidden behind the humor, however, is subtle provocation that forces participants to think deeply to justify some of the basic principles and assumptions related to the training topic.

Participants write “Why?” questions related to the training topic. Then each participant writes a response to someone else's “Why?” questions. The questions and answers get mixed up, producing incongruous results.

In this workshop groups examine the unintended consequences of new technologies and use those to inspire new potential business opportunities. It looks beyond the common understanding of new technologies, challenging participants to discover unexpected potential and how it might be harnessed. For instance, Instagram was created as a virtual photo album for smartphones, but through the human connection between the people who use it, it has the potential to affect something as deep as our grieving and healing process, as a recent example of this author’s daughter showed.

Open Space is a methodology for large groups to create their agenda discerning important topics for discussion, suitable for conferences, community gatherings and whole system facilitation

This exercise supports a user-centred approach to product and service innovation. Teams create an imaginary user (a persona), map out an average day in his or her life, and identify the challenges that he or she experiences. Teams then use this to brainstorm new products or services that could help with those challenges. Finally, sketches or prototypes of the best ideas are quickly developed presented back to for feedback.