by John Brooker | Jan 2, 2015 | Collaborate, Facilitate meetings, Free Articles, Innovate, Overcome Challenges, Solution Focus
“This is how humans are: we question all our beliefs, except for the ones we really believe, and those we never think to question.” Orson Scott Card ~ American Author Do you feel uncomfortable when people challenge your thinking or beliefs? Do you ever put yourself in the position where others can challenge your beliefs? Or do you seek to avoid such situations? If you do you may be missing an opportunity to stimulate your creativity and innovation. If you have the chance to attend a workshop on Solutions Focus (SF), do attend. Solutions Focus is an approach to change and tackling people issues. It differs from more conventional approaches such as Creative Problem Solving (CPS) because it focuses on finding a solution for messy situations (i.e. there is no right answer) rather than exploring the problem. Its central hypothesis (in my words) is that focussing on the solution builds positive energy to create change whilst focussing on the problem can develop a negative energy (resistance) for change. In that hypothesis, it has links to other positive approaches such as Appreciative Inquiry (AI). Having attended a course on AI and read a book on SF [The Solutions Focus by Paul Z. Jackson and Mark McKergow], I had been seduced by the positive approach; it appealed to my nature. But seduction can be dangerous (de Laclos didn’t call his book “Les Liaisons Dangereux” for nothing) and I had doubts that SF could replace CPS entirely. After all I have spent ten years schooling myself in various aspects of CPS and I find it works. As a recent participant in...
by John Brooker | Jan 1, 2015 | Collaborate, Develop Opportunities, Facilitate meetings, Free Articles, Innovate, Overcome Challenges
“I’m not at all creative, so I want to see how others do it.” Open University Student You can create and innovate. With knowledge of different methods and techniques and a creative climate, you can become more successful at both… The quotation above was the response from an MBA student (an experienced manager) when I asked for his learning objectives at an Open University, Creativity & Innovation course. Now I believe even gorillas can be creative, though I can’t prove it because I’ve never found one that spoke English. (This thought makes me wonder what it would be like to facilitate a group of gorillas. Would they listen more effectively than some humans?). So I asked the student what led him to believe he was not? ‘Because I am 64 on the Kirton scale and that means I am not creative’. ‘Whoa, that’s some limiting belief you’ve got their’ is a thought that crossed my mind but I empathised and explained that the ‘Kirton Adaptation Innovation’ inventory reflects whether you have a more adaptive or innovative style of problem solving, not whether you are more or less creative. [See here for information] What would you say to that student? Now, I say something like: ‘You can all create and innovate. With knowledge of the different methods and techniques and a climate conducive to clear thinking, you can become more skilled at both’. Many people say they are not creative. Some feel it is ‘arty farty’, tree hugging, warm and fuzzy stuff and they aren’t like that. Others see creativity and innovation as the generation of ideas. But this is...
by John Brooker | Sep 9, 2014 | Collaborate, Facilitate meetings
YES! AND… Collaborate. Innovate. Transform – Creative Gorilla #174 How can participants improve the meetings they are in? This is the first time I have run someone else’s blog in the Creative Gorilla. However, I think this blog from American facilitator Steve Davis is very useful. Group Process Skill As the information age races on, we find ourselves facing constant change, a global economy open for business around the clock, and increasingly complex challenges. With much of this work done virtually, via the telephone or the Internet, we’re becoming more isolated than ever and left yearning for human contact. To keep the machine chugging along, we find ourselves attending more and more meetings to keep up to speed and to stay connected. Research shows that a great percentage of these meetings are run poorly, resulting in huge losses of time and productivity. Why is this? I believe that there are three main reasons meetings continue to leave us wanting:
1) People underestimate the complexity of group thought.
2) Few people are trained in meeting facilitation skills.
3) Boggled by group complexity and lacking requisite skills, people fall into dysfunctional patterns of action or inaction, failing to do anything to change meeting dynamics. Given that in any given group there are, on average, eight times more participants than there are meeting leaders, targeting meeting leaders alone in our efforts to improve meetings may be missing the mark. What if we were to arm meeting participants with the basic knowledge, skills, and attitudes they could use to contribute to keeping their groups on track and moving forward? The 12 Acts below...
by John Brooker | Sep 3, 2014 | Collaborate, Facilitate meetings, Innovate, Tools
YES! AND… #172 How might your team make better decisions? “When we hear all voices, we make better decisions.” Headline on Loomio website. Four years ago we had to make a decision to buy a bigger house or extend our own. That was a hard enough decision for two people to make. How much more difficult is it to make a decision when there is a group of people involved? Last week, I completed an Inn8 Workshop programme with twelve senior managers, using the Inn8 Model and Tools, to help them innovate. They developed two excellent new service propositions for their company and to achieve this had to decide on the opportunity to exploit, the solutions to implement and whether to proceed. To have twelve people agree on a decision requires them to understand the situation fully (in our case, the opportunity and the solution). This requires a willingness to listen to all voices, a structure and thinking tools. How can you gain that agreement, efficiently and effectively, so that people don’t leave the meeting thinking, “That’s what we agreed, but this is what I will do.” True, if you have enough power, you can force through decisions unilaterally. Strange though how difficult it can be to implement such decisions! So Here are some ideas and links to descriptive articles of tools that should help you to build sustainable decisions in your organisation, in the context of facilitating people to innovate. Most should help in other contexts too. Create Understanding Good decisions are informed decisions. Therefore, you need to create understanding amongst the decision makers (the group). This entails processing...
by John Brooker | Aug 31, 2014 | Collaborate, Facilitate meetings, Innovate
YES! AND… Collaborate. Innovate. Transform – Creative Gorilla #170 How to Coach People to Be More Creative “The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.” Oscar Wilde Recently, someone asked me how I might coach someone to be more creative when they think they are not creative? The question provoked a lot of thinking on my part and I would like to share my response with you as leaders so that you can deal with such a situation. Everyone can be creative In my career as a business leader and as a tutor with the Open University, I met a few people who told me they were not creative and I observed quite a few who were not being creative. You probably have too. However, that does not mean they are not creative, it means we have different ways of approaching it. Dr. M. J. Kirton, creator of the Kirton Adapter Innovator (KAI) style profile, says: “Those who are adaptive in style are characterised by precision, reliability, efficiency; seen as methodical, prudent, disciplined. Those more innovative in style are seen as thinking tangentially, approaching tasks from unsuspected angles; undisciplined, unpredictable.” From this description, do you agree that adaptive people are more likely to say they are uncreative? In my experience it is true, but as Kirton explains, “One must remember that adaptors and innovators can have equal capacity, insight and creativity.” So, if someone tells you they are not creative, reassure them that we can all be creative, though we have different ways of contributing to creative outcomes. Four issues that inhibit creativity Having reassured them they can be...
by John Brooker | Aug 29, 2014 | Collaborate, Facilitate meetings, Free Articles, Overcome Challenges, Solution Focus
How might you resolve interpersonal tension between leaders? “Conflict can and should be handled constructively; when it is, relationships benefit.” In, “Who’s Pulling Your Strings?” by Harriet B. Braiker Recently, a company asked me to run a workshop for them. During a fact-finding call to establish the client’s situation and required meeting outcomes, I learned that two senior people involved in the workshop were not working well together. People had noticed tension between them in other meetings. As the client’s outcome for the pending meeting was to build an effective working relationship between three teams, it was vital that the two leaders work effectively together during the meeting. I suggested that I hold a pre meeting with the two leaders and the client arranged this. The following is an outline of the intervention that you can follow. Intervention Outline To establish a relationship with them, and to save time during the pre-meeting, I telephoned each leader to establish their view of the situation in terms of what they wanted. I asked them three questions: Imagine the pre-meeting works really well, what would your outcomes be? What would you like to be different about the situation? What would you and others notice is better if the situation improves? You can adapt these, but note that I did not ask, “What are the issues?” or “Why is there conflict?” These would focus them on the problem and achieve little. Before the meeting I wrote notes of their individual responses, and asked them to verify their own answers. I also wrote each answer on Post – it Notes (use a different colour...
