Category: Featured

3 Steps to Improve Your Next Workshop

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I have been facilitating lots of different sessions recently with teachers, school leaders and architects. Here are a few tips and ideas to help improve your next workshop.

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1) Don’t be afraid of providing independent reflection and thinking time.

All too often, we run workshops in the whole group mode or table group mode. We have to keep the individual mode active to improve the flow of thinking and dialogue.

Typically I use the individual thinking time as I would when running idea generation activities. Most of us are more receptive to other people when we have had time to think on our own. All you have to do is provide time for workshop participants to collect and capture their thoughts before launching into other modes. Compare the workshop scenarios below and reflect on which you think would be most effective:

(A) Take a look at the provocation on the screen [it reads] “If learning were a shape it would be a spiral” [no thinking time] What do you think? [to the whole group]

(B) Take a look at the provocation on the screen [it reads] “If learning were a shape it would be a spiral” [no thinking time] Talk to the people on your table about what you think.

(C) Take a look at the provocation on the screen [it reads] “If learning were a shape it would be a spiral” Spend a few minutes reflecting on your own about this. You might like to draw and make some notes. Gather your thoughts and be ready to share in a small group. [Lots of thinking time, pressure off]

(C+) Now you have had some time to think about the provocation. Talk to the people on your table about your ideas. Make sure you think carefully about stepping up and stepping back so everyone can share.

(C++) It sounded like you have had some time to explore that idea – I overheard a few points I would like to focus on, but who will share something that resonated with them [whole group dialogue, with a few points at the ready to provoke further and draw people in]

Your Next Step: Design your workshop to balance individual small group and whole group dialogue and thinking modes.

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2) Create the right conditions for high-quality dialogue

The most common piece of feedback I get from my workshops and sessions is about time. People wish for more time and hope they can recreate the experience in the future.

More specifically, they express gratitude and appreciation for the time and space to engage in authentic and meaningful dialogue with their peers.

It might sound almost too obvious, but stepping out of the “work” structure and engaging in dialogue about the work, is rare. My workshops put dialogue at heart.

Participants in my sessions enjoy the opportunity to share, discuss and explore with colleagues. It would help if you thought about ways to create these experiences too.

Your Next Step: Plan a little less, allow more time for dialogue, design simple ways to capture thinking, allow more time for dialogue.

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3) Respond to the people in front of you

“Football isn’t played on paper” as the saying goes, we might have a great plan but making it happen can often be the biggest challenge. Let’s keep running with the idea of “planning less” a little further.

I would say that in close to 75% of the time, I have more than I need for a workshop. My ideas flow, but the experience might not allow for deeper thinking and a better experience of meaningful dialogue.

Although I might have spent time refining a workshop plan and shared this with the client beforehand – I never shy away from going off-script. Respond to the people in front of you – use ongoing feedback to check in and gauge the progress they are making. “Everything ok? Do you need some more time?”

If you set up a chunky provocation and create the right conditions for deeper thinking and dialogue – you have to allow participants the opportunity to ensconce themselves. There is nothing more dissatisfying than being pulled abruptly out of this type of activity.

You want people to express appreciation for the time you designed for them, not lamenting the workshop as a missed opportunity.

Your Next Step: Design the workshop with rich provocations, allow time to get ensconced, respond to the needs of those in front of you.

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Are you designing workshops or staff meetings and want some inspiration? What are your biggest challenges when it comes to facilitating professional learning sessions?

dialogiclearning.com

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This first appeared in the 137th issue of the Dialogic Learning Weekly Newsletter

It does not matter how good the feedback is

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When we are not ready to hear feedback, it does not matter how good the feedback is. This tension is a simple truth that often goes unnoticed during the process. That is why many of my tactics and strategies to improve feedback focus on how well we can receive it. It does not matter how good the feedback is.

During the process of creating something, we invest in different ways. Let’s say for this article; the creative process is a student working on writing a narrative piece that has a simple planning, drafting and editing process. But it could be anything: from a conference presentation you are making, a script you have been pitching, a product you are building or a jewellery piece you are designing.

Please extend these ideas into your context and consider how it is more important what you do with your feedback.

Once the task of crafting her story is shared, our student’s ideas will begin to bubble. For feedback to be useful, it should happen as early as possible. Depending on the learning design a student will invest in her writing in the following ways.

Factors Affecting the Response to Feedback

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Cognitive effort

Is the work effortful? The challenge of planning and drafting a piece of narrative is quite broad. Our student invests cognitive energy in the problem. The levels of cognitive effort are likely to be very different for everyone. Some of us find it easy to develop slides for a presentation, whereas others have to invest more cognitive effort.

Perhaps what is more important here is the level of accumulated cognitive effort. In other words, how much thinking we have done. When feedback occurs at: “I have spent ages thinking about this.” it is received in a fundamentally different way to: “I have only just started thinking about this”.

Emotional Investment

When something is more meaningful to us, we want to commit. We cannot learn anything unless we care about it. Passionate commitment to a piece of writing is not always a part of the experience but given time; a writer will invest emotion into their work. When there is a high level of emotional investment, it is harder to hear critique.

Creativity

The ideas for the narrative piece need investment to get off the ground; creativity is the engine room. But over-investment in a poor plan is a harsh environment for feedback. There are lots of potential barriers to effectively hearing feedback here. For example, the first idea is considered the best approach or clutching too tightly to an idea even when it is a poor one.

Resources

Over time more and more resourcing is brought to a project. Tasks that have unlimited resources from the very beginning often lead to overcommitment. Should we be using every pencil in the set?

Accumulated Time

My reference here is the quantity of time that our student spends on her work. This amount accumulates as the work progresses and as the project continues. We are often far less inclined to action feedback when we have committed hours and hours to a version.

Here is another set of ideas that change throughout a creative task such as writing.

Fidelity

Although messy in reality, the path of a creative task is towards higher and higher fidelity. Let’s define fidelity as to how close the outcome is to the original concept. As time and effort accumulate, we would like to think that we are approaching a higher fidelity. At which point do we stop hearing feedback?

Opportunities to fail

Stakes get higher as opportunities to fail reduce. This is closely related to the amount of time that has passed and how long a student has been working on a piece of writing. Commitment to a “final” product or draft is crossed, and any significant changes or large scale feedback is difficult to action.

It is worth noting here that this could be a perception and have no grounding in reality. A student may incorrectly perceive they cannot start again or change their work at a late stage. It might not be ideal, but it may only be a perceived constraint. The second order effect is the stakes get higher.

Opportunities for formative evaluation

As stakes get higher, opportunities to fail reduce (perceived at least) and opportunities of formative assessment reduce. The word “formative” has a time stamp on it. Developmental evaluation should be happening as the writing begins to grow. Think of a more frequent reference to our “formative years’: that time in our life when we were learning life lessons.

The ebb and flow between divergent and convergent thinking

Convergent and Divergent Mindsets

At the very centre of this is the disposition of the feedback receiver. Typically the mindset is somewhere on the Convergent – Divergent scale. As we decide on ideas and as our commitment or effort increase so our disposition shifts to Convergence. We rally around a core idea and push on. Our thinking becomes narrow as opposed to the expansive open thinking we should have done to get started.

Remember, this is a critical shift and one that allows us to execute creative work and not just deliver a hot mess of ideas. When it comes to the conditions for effectively receiving feedback, we might assume we need to be in a divergent state. But that is not always the case – the feedback needs to match the disposition state.

If I am refining a single idea and the intricate detail within it, I do not need other more significant ideas that might replace it. We have to be aware of the mindset of the receiver of feedback and carefully adapt what is shared.

The exception to this is always having an open disposition to feedback regardless of when it occurs. In my experience, what is coupled with this is a well-established feedback filter. After all, just because it is shared and we have received it, does not mean we need to do anything with it. We can still be open to late feedback when we are narrowly executing an idea.

Late and Early stage feedback

Let’s map these variables and how their levels of investment increase or reduce over the course of a project.

Variables affecting early and late stage feedback
Variables Affecting Early and Late Stage Feedback

Formative evaluation needs to happen early on in a project arc. This allows the receiver of feedback to be most ready to hear it. Our student’s mindset is more open or divergent, and they are more likely to action new ideas.

Late stage feedback can still be invaluable, but we have to raise a red flag and be aware that receiving the feedback may be more challenging, requiring a much higher level of skill.

Practical Strategies

Here are five strategies that emphasise early feedback and ways to mitigate some of the challenges we have explored in this article.

  • Design the feedback process – take your time to consider the frequency and type of feedback that is going to be shared. Intentionally design feedback opportunities.
  • Design “low investment” creative tasks – increase the constraint on creative tasks at the beginning. Work on whiteboards or post-it notes rather than impressive graphic organiser, work with thick marker pens rather than every pencil in the set. Develop ideas on the back of a napkin, literally and metaphorically.
  • Create opportunities for early feedback – a tonic to many of these challenges is to design as many options for initial input as possible. Early in the process, we are more likely to have an open mind to critique.
  • Explore a range of ideas – work to develop a wide range of designs. We tend to have a bias towards our first idea. With little constraint, we might overcommit. Practice the thoughtful exploration of various concepts. Crazy 8s is always a good starting point.
  • Match the feedback type to the point in the process – a critical insight I want you to take away is that feedback is received in very different ways. Attempt to match the feedback to the person receiving it and their journey. (Learn more about this in my article about 30% and 90% feedback.)

Despite the best intentions of the feedback provider, their high skill levels and even high quality – unless the receiver is ready to receive, it does not matter. Mitigate this by using some of these practical strategies and considering how we might increase the capacity, readiness and disposition of receiving feedback.

Photo by Efren Barahona

Pre-Mortem Worksheets — How to Avoid Project Catastrophe

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A Pre-Mortem is a strategic planning activity that imagines a project has failed. This type of thinking helps to identify and mitigate risks early on in the planning phase.

Exploring the worst-case scenario is traced to great Stoic philosophers, like Seneca, who called it the premeditation of evils, “premeditatio malorum”.

What is quite unlooked for is more crushing in its effect, and unexpectedness adds to the weight of a disaster. This is a reason for ensuring that nothing ever takes us by surprise. We should project our thoughts ahead of us at every turn and have in mind every possible eventuality instead of only the usual course of events.

~ Seneca

Adding the Pre-Mortem technique to your planning toolkit will help you project your thoughts ahead, comprehensively assess the challenges to a project and adapt your plans.

I have developed a set of Pre-Mortem worksheets for you to take away. It outlines all of the steps you need to follow and provides a clear structure. Before you finish make sure you subscribe and grab a copy.

👉 Jump to the download link for the worksheets.

Improve Your Planning

One of the biggest challenges to a successful project is the quality of planning. A plan is weaker when it overemphasises a positive outcome. A Pre-Mortem activity helps to balance this outlook by allowing time and space to explore failure scenarios.

If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!

Benjamin Franklin

However, it is not negativity for its own sake. We are not simply amplifying the negative voices in a group or the whinges.

The structured Pre-Mortem process steps through how to explore each scenario, identify the causes and outlines methods that respond to each potential risk.

Prospective Hindsight

Instead of being reactive to problems, in this activity, you will use the thought experiment: Prospective Hindsight. You might even be able actually to say you are going “back to the future”.

Prospective Hindsight is casting our mind forward into a future time and then imagining what we might have wished we had learned by looking back.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing

William Blake

Prospecting is a powerful imaginative disposition when working with any strategic planning and is something I use frequently.

  • “I can imagine a time when we …”
  • “It is clear that in the future we might be…”
  • “When this is in place the benefits are likely to be…”

Strategic planning is all about prospecting, to imagine a future scenario – what Prospective Hindsight does is explore and recognise the risks and issues that might occur.

When and Who

To gain the most benefit, use the Pre-Mortem exercise with your core team at an early stage of the project planning. Potential risks and issues that you uncover may need time and resources to address.

The Pre-Mortem is a planning activity, and so unsurprisingly, it needs to occur during planning. The outcomes of the task feed into your project planning.

Instead of a post-mortem, when we look back on what went wrong, we establish this reflective practice even before the project has started.

Gather a core team who have a clear understanding of the proposed project plans so far. The outcome should be relatively straightforward and agreed upon; time should be spent exploring the risks, not what the project is about.

Disposition and Mindset

Establishing the right mindset is essential to the success of the Pre-Mortem: open to sharing risks and identifying responses to those risks.

Explicitly discussing the potential failure scenarios is a challenging type of talk. Our positive bias, especially for a project we have invested in, means we don’t like to be deliberately negative.

This deliberate and strategic negativity is a strategic muscle we are not often activating.

The Pre-Mortem also requires us to grapple with increasing uncertainty and ambiguity. This is a delicate balance and might need strong facilitation. Our tolerance for uncertainty is an indicator of our creativity.

Pre-Mortem Worksheets

Works Well With

Below I have outlined a range of other methodologies and mental models that the Pre-Mortem complements.

Playing the Devil’s Advocate

This activity works well with other mental models and planning exercises. Playing the Devil’s Advocate is something many of us have experienced.

It is a subjective version of the Pre-Mortem. An individual takes it upon themselves to imagine that something might go wrong.

The problem with that interjection is that the approach and disposition are often not mirrored by others in the group. A genuine insight might be discarded because others do not want to think negatively or are not ready for more uncertainty.

A Pre-Mortem brings the whole group into that thinking at the same time – that is its strength.

The Tenth Person Rule

The Tenth Person Rule is the deliberate opposition to a decision when everyone else agrees. If everyone else is saying “Yes”, the tenth person (or the last) is ethically bound to say “No”.

This opposition, regardless of personal belief, instigates further debate and challenge. The outcome is more coherent due to that conjecture, even if it remains the same.

The task of the Tenth Man is to explore alternative assumptions and worst-case scenarios…to challenge conventional and received wisdom. The aim is to look at things creatively, independently, and from a fresh perspective, to engage actively with and to reconsider the status quo.

How Israeli intelligence failures led to a ‘devil’s advocate’ role

The Tenth Person Rule was popularised by the film World War Z and had some real connections to approaches within Israeli Military Intelligence.

The Reversal Method

The Pre-Mortem activity works well with this creative thinking method as they both help create a new perspective.

The Reversal Method is a lateral thinking tool that encourages us to change how we think about a problem. In Lateral Thinking, Edward De Bono explains it might be used for the following reasons:

  • To escape from the absolute necessity to look at the situation in the standard way.
  • By disrupting the original way of looking at the situation one frees information that can come together in a new way.
  • The main purpose is provocation. By making the reversal one moves to a new position. Then one sees what happens.

SWOT Analysis

A SWOT Analysis is a standard managerial and leadership model used during planning and review. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Obstacles and Threats.

The Pre-Mortem focuses its lens on Threats in a much more systematic way than the SWOT Analysis. These two methods would complement each other well.

Running a Pre-Mortem activity could be done to create the outcomes linked and included in a comprehensive SWOT for a project.

De Bono’s 6 Thinking Hats

These parallel thinking processes fit into six key areas. The Black Hat type of thinking is most relevant to the Pre-Mortem exercise. We want Pre-Mortem participants to do Black Hat thinking:

The Black Hat is judgment – the devil’s advocate or why something may not work. Spot the difficulties and dangers; things might go wrong — probably the most powerful and valuable of the Hats but a problem if overused.

What balances the planning process is the use of Green Hat thinking once potential risks are identified. A team would explore new ideas to address the problems identified during the Pre-Mortem.

The Green Hat focuses on creativity, possibilities, alternatives, and new ideas. It’s an opportunity to express new concepts and new perceptions.

Further Reading

How our creativity is shaped by our culture

Creativity, FeaturedPublished onUpdated on2 Comments on How our creativity is shaped by our culture

When you think of creative people who immediately springs to mind?

Da Vinci, Ive, Lovelace, Pelé?

Far from just an individual capacity, our creativity is also influenced by the environments that we live and learn in. Each of those memorable people were shaped by their culture.

our behaviour is also shaped by the culture we live in, largely through social norms, contexts that cue them, and motives that drive us to follow, reject or invert those norms.

Thomas Wolbers a Professor of Ageing and Cognition explains in his essay,”Three Pathways By Which Culture Can Influence Creativity”, that it can impact on our cognitive abilities, the creative process and the value we associate with the output.

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Creative Potential

Wolbers explores the concept that our application of creativity fits the domains that our culture values. If we are products of our cultural influences then we all carry a certain bias.

This bias is perhaps towards applying our creativity in domains that continue to affirm what our culture deems as important.

For example, Korea with its strong cultural valuation of status and interdependence is the world leader in the industry of massively multiplayer simulation games, which involve accruing and using status and maintaining coalitions

Individuals may be more creative in some domains than in others because their cultural background values those domains and focuses the individual’s cognitive and motivational resources.

I wonder what those domains are for me? I suppose in some way sharing content, thinking and understandings through my writing is a direct consequence of the culture my professional life started in.

When I say direct result, I mean I worked in the opposite direction. Much of the expertise, sharing and learning was in closed and stagnant systems. That was a norm I wanted to invert.

In what domains do you apply your most creative self? How are those choices influenced by the cultural cues you have experienced?

Creative Process

Most people don’t think that creativity has a process. It can be often viewed as a magical act of serendipity for special talented people.

This is a long way from the truth. Creative processes are much more rigorous than we think. Those processes can be clearly defined and described. Also true is the ability to describe the salient conditions for creativity to flourish.

Wolbers explains that creativity usually involves two types of processes: the flexibility pathway and the persistence pathway.

Cognitive flexibility refers to the ease with which people can switch to a different approach or consider a different perspective, and cognitive persistence represents the degree of sustained and focused task-directed cognitive effort.

The reference to cognitive flexibility and agility here reminds me of the type of language we often see defining divergent thinking. Our ability to see a challenge from a different perspective is an important creative trait.

The cognitive persistence pathway refers to a more incremental, cautious, and analytical processing in an attempt to be incremental and cumulative.

Our cultural norms and cues will push us towards these pathways differently. What is valued in our society, in our culture, directs the process we apply in generating new ideas.

“inventions result more frequently from projects with incremental objectives in Japan (66 percent) than the U.S. (48 percent), and less frequently from projects with breakthrough objectives in Japan (8 percent) than the U.S. (24 percent).”

It is one thing to look at inventions in the US, it is another to look at the professional culture of teaching in the UK or Australia. On reflection the professional culture that I spent ten years working in was a risk averse culture.

The majority of breakthroughs and shifts in education are incremental, cumulative, glacial.

I may have a preference for more significant, higher-risk ideas as part of my process, but I think the culture around me wants me to slow down.

What do you think? Does education covet the paradigm shift, but really just wants slow change?

Creative Output

The value we place on ideas can be vastly different depending on the perspective we have.

Creativity is often defined as generating ideas that have value. Wolbers points out that this can be very subjective and wholly dependent on the culture of the beholder.

A famous example is the reception of Ang Lee’s movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which was acclaimed by Western film critics for its stylistic innovations, whereas Chinese critics judged it as Ang Lee’s weakest movie, presumably because they had seen many similar movies before.

Over the years I have spent countless hours talking with different groups about how we might judge different ideas as part of the process of design thinking.

All of this time perhaps our cultural preferences have been influencing what we consider has value. Wolbers explains that Chinese culture values usefulness more than novelty, whereas Western culture values novelty more than usefulness.

individuals with an Eastern background may be more concerned with usefulness than originality and engage different implicit or explicit standards to downplay or elaborate ideas and insights than their counterparts with a Western background.

As a primary school teacher I certainly had both in mind. I think the culture around me, in the schools I worked in and the wider education system valued usefulness over originality.

Original ideas were entertained on the fringes.

How does our definition of value influence the emphasis we put on certain ideas? Do you think you value originality or usefulness, or both?

Takeaways

A few key takeaways for me have been the three areas highlighted by Wolber. It is a succinct collection of elements we might consider in our own contexts.

  • Creative Potential — where we apply our creative capacity
  • Creative Process — how we go about generating ideas
  • Creative Value — what we value most about our ideas

As I have been exploring this work I have also been thinking how school culture might influence creativity. However you could replace school with company, organisation, club or whatever you like. When I say school culture I mean the implicit and explicit values, beliefs, and norms that surround each student.

Some takeaway questions spring to mind to ponder on further:

  • How might school culture influence each student’s creative potential and the domains in which they apply their creative capacity?
  • How might the culture at school dictate the type of creative process that is adopted by teachers and students (all learners)?
  • How might we explore what value systems we use to judge creativity in our schools?

Download the essay here: “Three pathways by which culture can influence creativity” by Thomas Wolbers.

This is the first in my thinking series exploring the Cultures of Creativity essays published by the LEGO Foundation, and their relevance to schools and learning organisations.

Next in my series is “Play, culture and creativity” by David Whitebread & Marisol Basilio.

The ebb and flow between divergent and convergent thinking

Design Thinking, Featured, ThinkingPublished onUpdated on63 Comments on The ebb and flow between divergent and convergent thinking

I thought I would take the opportunity to return to an article I wrote a few days ago. My blog post outlined a few of the key issues for developing creative teams. The article that inspired it from HBR[1] gave a broad definition of innovation and creativity which resonated strongly with my own experience in schools.

According to the author, Roger Schwarz[2], researchers commonly make a distinction between the definition of creativity and innovation.

Innovation involves two stages—the generation of new ideas and the implementation of the ideas. Creativity is considered to be the first stage of innovation.

I would call implementing ideas Prototyping and this typically comes after a range of ideas have been sorted, filtered and judged in different ways during Ideation. I always see a change in the energy levels during Ideation as people begin to flex their creative muscles more intensely.

Later in the article Schwarz outlines a conflict in factors that affect innovation, explaining that a different type of thinking is needed.

Creativity and the second stage of innovation require different individual skills and team structures and processes. The idea generation stage is often referred to as divergent thinking or exploration. The implementation stage is often referred to as convergent thinking or exploitation. Unless you plan to have your team hand off its creative ideas, you will need to create a team that can operate in both modes, switching among them as appropriate.

This whole area is invariably complex and more research is needed. However even from my own experience the requirements on an individual are much more intricate. I agree that we need to be in a divergent thinking state when we generate ideas, but this changes when we have to decide on which ideas are worth investing further in. It changes to a convergent thinking state. In order to identify our choices we have to narrow our field, we have to purge the ideas that don’t make the cut. For us to successfully judge a set of ideas we have to be able to converge and begin to make choices. Thinking big (divergently) and generating ideas at this stage would certainly be counterintuitive.

The ebb and flow between divergent and convergent thinking at the ideation stage is quite important and much more frequent than is suggested in the article. Idea generation is but one part of Ideation. Of course we may identify Emergent thinking as well at this stage which is exploratory and helps when we want to develop our ideas further. I see Ideation being made up of the sequence below:

  1. Generate Ideas (Divergent or Open Thinking)
  2. Explore and develop ideas (Emergent or Exploratory Thinking)
  3. Judge and shortlist (Convergent or Closed Thinking)

It is extremely useful to have a language for the thinking state or mindset needed. I would highly recommend sharing the definitions and helping others understand them. Talking explicitly about the thinking that is needed to be most successful helps signpost people to such expectations, and has helped countless teams of adults and students I have worked with. Don’t let this be a wishy washy stage, identify a process, like the sequence above and stick to it. Trust in the process.[3]

Once ideas have been explored and narrowed down then a team would move on to implementation. Taking a concept into a working or minimal viable prototype phase. Again the type of thinking here is not simply convergent as Schwarz outlines, in my opinion it is equally fluid and perhaps also made up of the combination of divergent, emergent and convergent thinking states.

  1. Harvard Business Review  ↩
  2. Roger Schwarz is an organisational psychologist, find him on Twitter @LeadSmarter  ↩
  3. And the force.  ↩