by John Brooker | Mar 6, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
Creative Gorilla#66 A Haiku is a great way to consider and refine a challenge … “Waterfall roaring – though the sparrow sings unheard, still he keeps singing” James Kirkup ~ English poet Do you need to make a concise statement of a situation to help with challenge definition…? My wife gave me a beautiful a book of meditations called The Bridge of Stars, beautiful because the visual design and photographs are as much part of the book as the poetry. Reading the Haikus in the book reminded me that this Japanese poetry form is not just a great method of writing poetry but also a great creative technique when you want to define a challenge in a succinct way. I first learned about the Haiku on a creative writing class. It is a form of poetry in which you use 17 syllables in three lines, five – seven – five. Strictly speaking it was not invented until the 1890’s, adapted from the Hokku, the starting verse of much longer poems. A hundred years later I thought it would be a great way to have people redefine their challenge definition and so I experimented in my Open University residential courses. It worked very well. So I invited the students to consider their challenge situation (e.g. How can I motivate my team?) and reduce it down to 17 syllables. The power lies in the brevity and in the discipline of achieving the syllable structure. Brevity provides clarity and having to find words to match the number of syllables helps to give a subtly different perspective on your situation. As an example, I...
