by John Brooker | Apr 8, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate, Tools
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 98 Sometimes it is difficult to judge if a group understand the challenge you have, this technique will help you do that… “Yes! And…Explore World With…Suppose that…Associate…Next idea…Do it now” Cyriel Kortleven, Crew – New Shoes Today How might you confirm that everyone in a group has understood a challenge? Have you ever been to a really entertaining evening where you learned something (and the beer was cheap)? Last week, I attended my first workshop of the London group of the Applied Improvisation Network (AIN). The facilitator was Cyriel Kortlevel, who hails from Belgium and works with a creativity company in the Netherlands. Cyriel treated us to a really enjoyable evening, taking us through an improvised creativity session i.e. using impro to create some ideas for making the AIN successful. I knew most of the impro exercises, but Cyriel has a neat way of turning them in to creative techniques, especially through using random connections and provocations. One technique I had not used before was “The Problem Walk” (I don’t much like using the word “problem” due to its negative associations, hence my title). So How does the technique work? After the challenge has been explored, the group stand at one end of an imaginary line. The facilitator stands at the other end of the line and summarises the challenge. He / she asks people to stand somewhere on the line, depending on their understanding of the challenge (you might do a scale where the facilitator stands at ten and the group members stand at a number on the line). If the group steps up...
by John Brooker | Mar 29, 2012 | Facilitate meetings
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 89 Your style of communication can influence how you make decisions in the creative problem solving process… “We don’t know the effect of our actions. That is because we are either too embarrassed to (want to) know what actually was implemented or are too busy to track what was implemented.” Pete Senge, Management Consultant, in “The 5th Discipline” Does your team struggle to make decisions or make them too quickly? I was re-reading a book this week on the science of non-verbal communication, “The Elusive Obvious” by Michael Grinder. (Buy it at www.michaelgrinder.com). In the book, Michael describes two types of communication style; Approachable and Credible. The Approachable style, he says, tends to be more People focussed and the Credible style more Issue focussed. Groups tend to form a culture over time which we can describe as mostly Credible, mostly Approachable or a mix. What was especially interesting for me, as someone who uses creative solution finding (CSF) processes with groups, was Michael’s comments (see Page 57 of the book) on how groups with a bias towards one style or the other work through the basic problem solving process of Gather (information); Evaluate; Decide; Implement. The mostly Credible groups tend to shorten the Gathering stage and are quick to make a decision. Whether they have gathered the appropriate information to make the decision is questionable. The mostly Approachable groups spend a long time gathering information and tend to be reluctant to move from the Gathering stage. They seek consensus and harmony and so can take an age to make a decision in case...
