Making decisions in large no-profit organizations benefits from structured facilitation. A Human-Centred Designer like Antonella Pastore facilitates the process of understanding the complex setting, gathering all diverse points of view, mapping information flows and processes, and convening all people to create a shared understanding.
In a CREAZEE Sprint, I discussed with Antonella a former illustration of her roles in Italian. Then we decided it was worth redoing it in English by summarizing her journey and highlighting some of the most interesting aspects.
Enjoy a video interview, also published as a podcast, in which we leverage an engaging work of exploration, reflection, and analysis of a crucial role: the Human-Centred Designer.
Thanks to my fellow Brain Trusters friends’ help, I have committed myself to create a learning challenge where I share my lessons learned with a group of participants.
The first cohort will be alpha testers helping me with a draft outline to refine it and fine-tuning it.
Learning Challenge Outline (preliminary version)
Express your interest in the “Write Every Day” Challenge
Pass the initial test: you need to provide three articles
100 ideas (or 10? Would you dare…?)
100 words describing yourself
100 words telling why you want to write daily
If accepted, I will add you to a private online community.
You, me, and the other participants will be part of a group of people aiming at building a daily writing habit.
For each of the 30 days:
you will receive writing prompts and some inspiration as a reference
you will get access to everybody else’s drafts with a chance to discuss and contribute
you will publish a short article on the Web
you will promote your essay with a Tweet
At the end of the course, you will evaluate the possibility of continuing your writing challenge by being proposed to take part in the second cohort.
Subscription fee
My experience taught me that, as a participant, you have to put some money at stake, even a small quantity because it helps you stay motivated and work consistently. So even if at a heavily discounted price, there will be a subscription fee.
Plans
I will work on refining the outline and the collaboration environments this weekend with the hope of launching the alpha version privately to a restricted group of selected people. I have about 10 participants so far to be confirmed.
Asking questions is an essential tool to learn about the world. Not all questions are created equal. When you want to assess a specific situation without the details quickly, you can ask closed questions. If you’re going to discover the nature of something, instead, you can ask open questions.
Closed questions
If you don’t want to promote interaction with the people you are talking to and need confirmation, you go straight to the point and ask for a yes or no.
Did you write today?
Are you wearing your facemask?
Are you hungry?
Did you get the vaccine?
Closed questions aren’t supposed to have a follow-up. They are frequently replied with a binary answer and are not suitable to discover details about the subject.
Open questions
If you don’t have specific options to offer when you want to discover, investigate, detail, explore or uncover the nature of something, you can ask open questions.
Who do you love the most, mamma or papà?
What did you eat today?
Where did you go this morning?
When did you write your last letter to a friend?
How do you find the motivation to write every day?
Open questions are conversational tools. When you want to learn more about your interlocutor, you can formulate questions starting with one of the five serving-men: Who, What, Where, When, and How. Sometimes you can also add “How much”, “How many and even “How come…?”,”
A researcher, writer, designer, or learner should make ample and profound use of open questions when approaching a new project.
Enrich your creative toolbox with questions
Questions are at the base of curiosity, creativity, and science. Ask closed questions to have quick confirmation without provoking further discussion. Ask open questions to explore, learn and facilitate richer conversations.
A Brain Trust is a facilitated workshop in which the participants share, in a one hour-turn, their challenges, and the others are giving structured feedback. The presented challenge can be about anything. In our case, it was a professional challenge. Everything started from the Knowledge Entrepreneurs community founded by Achim Rothe, who organized more than 10 Online Salons. Many people aggregated and talked about how to be involved in knowledge Entrepreneurship.
A knowledge entrepreneur is a person who gains an income by sharing his expertise. All participants were coming from that background. There were similar traits and similar aspirations.
In a total time of about 9 hours, we had six different sessions. Each of us presented their challenge and received an intense avalanche of feedback.
The Brain Trust Session’s structure
About 10 minutes: the presenter introduces their challenge. Spoken, no visual aids used besides few exceptions. Screen sharing helps to support your idea.
About 10 minutes: Silent feedback, the Brain Trusters write their feedback in a shared collaborative document. (we did not repeat this step for all presenters, we went directly to the live discussion
About 40 minutes (with the flexibility of going beyond the time limit), Live discussion. The presenter listens to each of the Brain Trusters’ feedback. Usually, a conversation starts. There is a lot of note-takinggoing on during this phase.
The benefits of the Brain Trust Sessions
I was the last one to present. Thanks to my peers’ diversity in age, cultural background, professional field, and attitude, I gathered an astounding amount of valuable feedback.
When you are called to give suggestions and comments to a stranger’s challenge, you might find some obstacles and risks.
We declared the rules at the beginning:
Radical Candor, no authority involved.
Permission to be direct
On the one hand, this is a strategic advantage that allows the feedback givers to compress in that relatively short individual session the best of their knowledge to be put at the presenter’s service.
On the other hand, you risk not having time to give enough human touch to your communication, and you could come out on the harsh side of the spectrum.
I made full use of this opportunity to be direct. I compressed many crucial and foundational topics in my feedback and role-played the Contrarian, trying to provide alternate perspectives to the group.
Both extremes have been touched due to my experimentation: not all participants accepted the radical candor comfortably, while others were enthusiastically grateful for the direct and transparent approach.
The Challenges
A Brain Trust is a place where you can propose a different type of challenges:
You are stuck in your career.
You need to make a difficult decision in life.
You want to change your job role.
You don’t know how to leverage your experience.
You see things not working in your professional approach, and you have no clue how to improve them.
You want to explore a different way of earning a living, and you need a starting point.
You have a creative idea you want to transform into a business.
You want to express yourself creatively or artistically, but you don’t know how to leverage that.
None of the content of our session will become public in any way, so I am generalizing to give you a sense of what kind of challenges could be brought on the Brain Trusters’ table.
Suffice to say, in our case, and they shared a common creative and entrepreneurial trait while coming from very diverse professional and cultural backgrounds.
Diversity in a Brain Trust is a powerful asset as it is in Collective Intelligence. Although it might sound weird to the inexperienced, putting yourself in the middle of people diverse from your field promotes the emergence of blindspots, original points of view, and the uncovering of exciting ideas you didn’t think about.
Opportunities for improvement
That experience made me reflect deeply about the rules of the games and how they can lead to force, maybe too much, the capacity of those participants who are not willing or equipped to sustain an intense, heavy, compressed session of radical feedback on their ideas.
Facilitators of Brain Trust-types of workshop need to be aware of this feature’s potential and the risks it brings to the group.
Achim has been excellent in all aspects: calm, empathic, measured, balanced. He orchestrated our long hours together in such a light way that I felt them passing by in an eye-blink. He was able to integrate such a diverse group of people by including them in a meaningful way and carefully respecting each person’s diversity. That is an excellent example of facilitating Collective Intelligence. We need more people like Achim in the World.
The outcomes and the implications
Meeting bright and motivated people like those I had the honor to meet never ends in just a meeting. At the end of the workshop, I could feel the bonding and the trust created.
Each of us collected pages and pages of ideas, notes, comments, resources, critiques, references, and whatnot.
Each of us committed with the group to tangible goals on which we will call to be accountable.
Achim proposed the “3; 3; 3;” activity in which each participant states their:
Three days goal
Three weeks goal
Three months goal
That made our one day and a half work during our precious weekend not only a fantastic way to grow as a person and as a professional but also the beginning of a personalized project and a small, connected community.
We will remain in touch to check on each other’s goals at the time we have planned. Spontaneous collaborations started, to get help on each project. It will allow creating even more tangible opportunities in the future.
I subscribed to the Brain Trust with doubts and fears, and I’ve ended up getting unstack on my projects while finding a close circle of trusted people.
“Nothing important, or meaningful, or beautiful, or interesting, or great ever came out of imitations. The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.”
Experts in diverse fields convene to provide structured feedback to each participant’s challenge in a reciprocal way.
I will present my challenge tomorrow, but today, providing my thoughts to the first two presenters, I have learned so much already!
I realized that when you face the challenges of other people’s lives, in their professional ambition, you look at them from your point of view and translate your context to theirs. This projection makes you focus better on hints, resources, and suggestions in a way that seems to be impossible if you had to apply them to your challenges.
Even if the presenters’ topic does not match your directions, you put a lot of your feelings, fears, and experience into your contribution to the group.
At the end of an intense, rich, transforming session, well organized by our facilitator Achim Rothe, I feel I have already collected valid suggestions for my challenge.
I am thankful and excited for the more extended session planned for tomorrow.
We decided to build opportunities to think and work together. Having people and friends to experiment together is one of the things I love the most. It’s an opportunity to grow, to learn, and to create experiments that could become real work.
What can we learn from each other?
What can we learn together?
What’s the service we can offer by combining our roles?
How can we be accountable for each other professional growth?
We will do a mini-masterclass, on a turn, each of us, to the remaining members.
The Plan
Matteo Carella will talk about complexity thinking and coaching in organizational and business environments.
Marco Valente will treat the discipline of facilitation and will share his experience about how to be a more effective and efficient facilitator.
Massimo Curatella will show how to get the best of the Design Thinking and Human-Centred Design approaches applied to Facilitation.
Working-Out-Loud
I will use this occasion to apply principles, methods, and techniques to this in-house lab experiment and I will write about it. It’s a meaningful opportunity to systematize my experience and to put it to an engaging test.
I have had frequently obstacles and difficulties in researching participants, attendees, and trainees to my courses, seminars, workshops, and like. It has always been a problem with schools, universities, maybe less with private organizations. I will need to look into the recent developments in a more agile and lean way of researching your users when you cannot research your users. It’s going to be fun.
How to facilitate group processes in solving simple, complicated, and complex Problems. Methods applied in the 1st Collective Intelligence Workshop of OsservAgro on the Sustainability of agri-food systems. Part of a series on Collective Intelligence Design.
Series Navigation Collective Intelligence Design and Facilitation
Facilitating Collective Intelligence to solve complex problems
To find solutions we need first to understand the problem we are trying to solve.
Not all problems are created equal. By distinguishing between different types of problems we can choose the processes that are better suited to solve them.
How to solve a problem?
You can work to solve a problem only if you have a clear model of the problem you want to solve. To avoid being busy just for the sake of it, wasting time and resources, we need to do some preliminary thinking about the problems we’re passionate about or which are creating pain to us.
Working at the definition of the problem is the first important step towards solving it. Problem setting is a part of the solution method.
In any design method, as the Design Thinking method, for instance, the initial effort is dedicated to understanding, clarifying and defining the solution we are designing for. The “design-as-a-plan” process includes a research and exploration phase which helps to clarify what the “design-as-a-noun” is supposed to be.
Identification of a “North Star”, a future vision where the problem is solved (or changed as we will see, later on).
Identification of a “Near Star”, the next big achievement we need to steward the system to, so we can concretely move towards our North Star.
How to define a problem?
It’s always difficult to put one problem, an abstract concept with tangible consequences, into clearly defined boundaries. But “boundary” is a key concept at the foundation of the Systems Thinking approach when talking about a system. How can you point your finger at “a system” if you cannot put it within finite and defined boundaries? We would go, of course, beyond the realms of concepts which we can easily grasp and manage, to reach the field of philosophy (what are the boundaries of the sky?).
Still, by arbitrarily setting possible boundaries to a system, it becomes easier to talk about it, to have the possibility, and sometimes the illusion, to manage it and, to a certain extent, to understand it.
Stretching our minds to define boundaries (think about nation-state borders, can you see them in real life?) is a needed step to start working with systems and to collaborate on understanding them.
That is why there are so many different thinking approaches, sometimes overlapping, other times contradicting each other.
Navigating and adapting to tides and currents are much better analogies when we talk about facing complex challenges. How do you command your boat in white waters? What’s the wind like?
Problems: making distinctions
It’s natural and intuitive for most of us to distinguish between two main types of problems: easy and hard. Sometimes we use words as “complex” or “complicated” by meaning the same thing: that is a difficult problem. By going deeper we discover that we can put the systems in which our problem lives in a more articulated set of categories. The most apparent to us are: simple, complicated and complex problems.
What is a simple problem?
Simple problems have a straightforward solution. They represent the “known knowns”.
If the water faucet is leaking I can call the plumber who will fix it.
I am not thinking about any other consequence besides calling another person, explaining the problem, setting an appointment, paying for the service and… using again the faucet.
This problem could become a completely different one if I start to consider:
I am in a nationwide lock down due to a pandemic. Can I call a plumber?
What if I try to fix it myself: am I able to do it? Should I study how to do it?
What if I don’t fix it? How much water am I wasting? Am I contributing to wasting public resources which could be precious in time of need?
As you can see the context I am setting to define the boundaries of my problem are directly affecting the consideration of the nature of that problem.
What is a complicated problem?
My car broke. While my grandfather’s car would have needed just a look under the hood, today, I just got an “error code XYZ.”
It doesn’t matter how much effort I make to classify this problem as simple: “My car just broke.” And, because of a more “modern” context I could not just lift the hood and “have a look at it”. Really, I wouldn’t know where to put my hands. I could even make more harm than good but intervening.
This is a complicated problem to me. It is part of my “known unknowns”. Sure, there will be hundreds of people able to fix this problem. But those would not include me. I am not skilled to solve it. I can only call somebody who is an expert on this and ask them to fix my car for me.
When we are able to recognize complicated problems we should have the humility and the wisdom of calling an expert to solve them.
What if by looking for the error message produced by the car information systems in the reference manual we discover that it means: “You ran out of fuel. Go to the nearest fueling station.”? Would that still be a complicated problem?
What is a complex problem?
By eliminating simple and complicated problems we remain with others less intuitive categories of problems.
What if there is no straightforward solution as in the leaking faucet case? What if there is a leak happening in several different places for several different reasons? What if my car doesn’t work anymore because there is no more oxygen in the atmosphere to allow the internal combustion engine to produce power? What if imposing a lock down to only some regions of the country, to prevent the spread of a virus, pushes people, instead, to run away to other regions, accelerating the contagion?
When we don’t know what is happening and why it is happening, when we don’t even know the things that we don’t know, we are descending in the realm of complexity: the “unknown unknowns”.
How do you solve complex problems?
Complex problems have no right answers. The relationships between many causes and many effects are difficult to identify and continuously changing.
It’s only by experimenting, reflecting and adapting our actions that we can find leverage points on complex systems.
Problem-solving approaches
Once you decide how to differentiate between simple, complicated and complex problems you need to choose possible problem-solving approaches. This will allow you to leverage existing methods and tools which worked on that type of problem.
Dave Snowden has been researching and publishing about approaches to problem-solving and organizational design for years. He devised a problem definition and solution framework called Cynefin.
What is the Cynefin framework?
If not all problems are created equals, we should be careful in choosing how we are designing solutions. We need, first, to understand the nature of the problem and then deploy a solution strategy.
The Cynefin framework provides thinking and collaboration tools to make sense of systems. Although it is not a way to classify problems it allows us to make decisions according to the systems they fall within. In this regards the Cynefin framework breaks down systems in five domains:
Obvious (Simple). Relationships between cause and effect are clear.
Complicated. Clarifying cause and effect requires expertise.
Complex. Cause and effect are clear only after they happened.
Chaotic. Cause and effect are unclear.
Disorder (in the middle). When you don’t know in which of the previous four your problem resides.
How to collaborate to solve complex problems?
Hunger, Sustainability of food systems, education, peace are just a few of the most crucial examples of complex problems we are facing. A pandemic as the Coronavirus in 2019 and 2020 (I really hope I will not have the need to revise the years in this sentence) is one of the global challenges which are not simple nor complicated. And we need to keep this kind of global issue out of the Chaotic and Disorder domain if we want to keep on walking on this Earth.
The workshop was titled: “The Common Heritage of Knowledge” and was aimed at re-establishing the dialogue between diverse stakeholders coming from all fields: science, research, policymaking, education, activism, business, and common people.
The facilitation agenda
The facilitator organized the session of about 2,5 h with about 30 people as follows:
Introduction and context description. Presentation of the rules of engagement. Organizers/Sponsors give short context on OsservAgro
Post-it
Filtering and clustering
Post-up
Topic selection
World Café
Presentation and Open discussion
Closure
1. Introduction and context setting
The facilitator, in charge of keeping time and establishing pace, stated the rules of how participants will collaborate and introduce the topic.
Sponsors, briefly, explained the reason why they’ve organized the session and suggested their expectation (rather than outcomes) by the end of the work.
The rules for inclusive collaborative thinking:
Dialogue is important to solve complex problems;
We don’t have to agree on everything except on the need to explore together;
Let’s admit uncertainty and not-knowing.
2. Post-it activity: What is Simple, Complicated and Complex?
We finally had participants activating their brains to fuel the collective mind. On each of three posters, hanged, each participant stuck a post-it mentioning, one by one, what they think is:
“What we know that we know”, that is the simple problems (Everybody knows it)
“What we know that we don’t know”, that is the complicated problems (Ask the expert)
“What we don’t know that we don’t know”, that is the complex problems (what we have to discover together)
Example outcome of “What we know that we don’t know”,
Is there a standard system of indicators for biodiversity?
Which diet should I do?
Is Bitcoin an opportunity?
What are the benefits of the Mediterranean Diet?
How can we produce more without polluting more?
Example outcome of “What we don’t know that we don’t know”
Trust
When should we ask the expert?
How will Artificial Intelligence impact our lives?
How can we give value to our local products?
How can we be intelligent together?
What does “good food” mean?
How can we protect planet Earth?
3. Filtering and clustering the emerging topics
By pushing towards creative divergence, participants generated ideas and had the opportunity to be part of the game. As in the brainstorming phase, when it is forbidden to criticize or reject any idea, participants created free thoughts and shared them in written format.
After that, it was time to refine the material produced. The facilitator asked participants to split in groups and create clusters.
To keep the session consistent, facilitators need to guide participants in refining the ideas produced by decreasing the level of approximation of knowledge and by minimizing redundant and irrelevant content.
In our case we had four key topics to emerge. Emergence is an important phenomenon of Systems Practice and, in this case, as facilitators (observer and Systems Changers/Stewards) we act on the conditions which promote the emergence of the outcome we desire.
An example of the clusters emerged
Simplicity
Food and nutrition
Health
Ecology
Knowledge
Complicatedness
Environment
Biotechnology
Health
Diet
Fintech
Epistemology
Complexity
Empathy
Method
Sustainability
4. Post-up: presenting and discussing the refined ideas
Each group, in turn, represented by one person, presented their findings.
This is an important setting in which participants interact: we finally had comments and exchanges on the various topics selected. I could feel the group to be productive, motivated, focused. This is the moment in which the magic of facilitated Collective Intelligence manifests itself in a joyous and satisfying way.
5. Topic selection
The facilitator had to make the participants converge. Usually this is a difficult moment to manage because people are excited, stimulated and while discussing others’ ideas they come up with new ones of their own. They want to talk. They want to participate!
And you have to stop them…
It seems to be counter-intuitive but when you have a limited amount of time, (2 hours!) you cannot allow discussion to roam free. At least not for too long.
At the end of the post-up session the group agreed upon summarizing the discussion in one key topic represented by the question: “How can we integrate diverse knowledge to create a sustainable agri-food system?”
Although the outcome of the first part of this session could seem to be taken for granted to you, and not novel, it’s part of the facilitation method to “rediscover the obvious”.
It makes an enormous difference to convene 30 people in a room and start with something like “Ok, thank you for coming, now split in groups and discuss how we can integrate the diversity of what you know to create a sustainable agri-food system.”
Participants have not been part of the process, they would not feel involved nor motivated to contribute.
What are the benefits of a facilitated collaborative process?
These are some of the reasons why you need to facilitate alignment for a group of diverse people:
To allow them to know each other
To promote diversity in the ways they are called to collaborate
To gain their trust in the collective thinking
To maximize their creativity and productivity
To increase the ownership of the outcomes
6. World Café: let’s imagine solutions by mixing minds
You have now original material produced by the convened participants. They can split in groups and move to a more hands-on activity. The World Café facilitation technique entails having participants break out in smaller groups, we had 4, and having one person to stay at the group table while the rest are moving and rotating among the other groups.
Diagram of how participants are moving in a World Cafè session.
The “rapporteur” who stays at the table will be the group facilitator, keeping the conversation’s continuity and presenting the outcome at the end.
Facilitators need to be prepared to manage high levels of noise and people moving around. This can be messy and loud so it’s important to establish some ground rules:
One rapporteur per group will lead the local discussion
All group members must be involved and included in the discussion
Using a poster, participants should write down their contribution as much as possible, in a collective collage which will build up the final artifact.
The lead facilitator needs to check timing and give the cue to switch groups considering the remaining time. At least two switching iterations are suggested.
The lead facilitator needs to prevent dominant participants to emerge and promote a balanced dialogue between everybody.
The lead facilitator needs to signal when delivery time is approaching to the rapporteurs to allow them to refine their posters.
7. Final presentation and plenary discussion
At the end of the World café activity, participants prepare to present their posters through the voices of their rapporteurs.
Facilitators set the allocated time slot for each and signal the beginning and the end of each presentation.
This is where presentation skills are useful. Still, participants are not supposed to be skilled presenters. That is why facilitators need to coach presenters so they are clear, timely and to-the-point.
In our workshop, we had 4 groups with four presentations illustrated on four posters.
Example of the posters produced by the 4 World Cafè tables.
Emergent benefits of Collective Intelligent facilitation
I won’t go into the details of the content produced in this session but I want to highlight the type of reasoning and expectations you can have:
Strangers, work together to produce a common idea.
People know each other: relationships and collaborations will bloom.
Sparse and disordered knowledge gets refined and its clarity is increased.
Lots of doubts and questions are raised: this enriches the key question and the foundation of the Sponsors’ mission.
Taken-for-granted knowledge and well-established definitions are put to a test. Examples: sustainability, collaboration, intelligence, problem solving, design, etc.
A more holistic and systemic thinking is naturally nurtured. A diversity of opinions promotes wider perspectives.
More inclusion. Shy, less represented, unengaged people are included in a collective process relevant to them.
Systemic Design. A more structured, design-based, rational process tends to emerge. Empathy for stakeholders increases. Consequences of actions are considered.
Critical Thinking. A more critical approach to thinking is reinforced by the diversity and the knowledge of participants. A more rational thought is a better thought.
Leadership. Participants get in touch with the process of governance, decision-making, management and leadership. Some of them, unfortunately, for their first time.
Personal development. A bond is created between participants. If they were motivated to participate in the first place, and if they had a great experience in the workshop, they will feel even more motivated to go deeper and to do more.
Did we solve our problem? How to measure the solution’s effectiveness?
This kind of workshop can be done dozens of times while discovering new knowledge, new ideas and useful insights, each time. The key concept is to iterate and adapt while integrating the discoveries and the clarification into an organic knowledge base. Facilitators and organizers, when it is not possible to delegate to participants, become the custodian of the new knowledge built. A heritage of refined knowledge which needs to be carried on the next steps, next actions or the next editions of workshops. With the same participants or with new ones.
That is why a workshop like this is to be considered the start of a process. At the foundation of a movement of people wanting to understand better the context of the complex problems they want to mitigate. Those same people, to have their time worth, need to meet, again and again, to apply Collective Intelligence techniques and methods if they want to see, in perspective, possible action to take, to dream about a solution. Or, a new possible and better future.
So it is difficult to talk about success criteria and metrics in this type of participatory workshop. It’s the group who decides what is useful and worth to produce, to write down and to transfer to the future activities. A lively and moderated discussion should be encouraged by the facilitator to promote reflection on the results and envisioning of the next steps to take.
And now what? What did we learn?
If we don’t reflect, together, immediately in the final part of the workshop and soon after with the organizers we risk to lose the best of the results. It’s important to reach the final part with focussed energy to spend. All the work done so far was to allow higher thinking and reflection upon the insights gathered.
Sponsors, organizers and facilitators should absolutely do a retrospective after the workshop. What worked? What did not go well? What have we learned? How can we refine our strategy by adapting the next workshop? Second-order thinking is the cornerstone of the entire work, otherwise, it is just a bunch of people talking.
An example of the outcome of this workshop:
We decided to share the material produced online to invite the discussion to continue.
Suggestion to apply, immediately, any new learning in everybody’s day-to-day life, especially in their organizations.
Identified the need of writing a manifesto to express our common intent.
Promoting each’s organization involvement to guarantee a more stable presence and participation to the next workshop events.
Initiating a systems change process by identifying specific actions to take.
The final message was: “(On the road to sustainability) we do what we must do. What will be possible will happen!”
A leader’s framework for decision making by David Snowden, Harvard Business Review, 2007. The Cynefin framework is a sense-making device aiding decision-making, created by Dave Snowden.
OsservAgro has the goal of promoting a collective reflection process on the relationships between science and society by involving all agri-food system’ stakeholders: knowledge builders, businesses, knowledge mediators, decision-makers, and civil society.
Collective Intelligence is the emergent phenomenon created by people collaborating. They co-design possible solutions to the complex problems they discover through cooperation. Co-creation leads to more inclusive and systemic solutions that are more robust, sustainable and long-lasting.
How to design a workshop?
A Co-Design Workshop requires these elements:
a Sponsor and/or a client which decide the purpose of the workshop;
one or more facilitators who are put in charge by the Sponsor to organize and deliver the workshop;
a facilitation plan, including a vision and specific objectives;
a location or an online facility where to hold the event;
technical equipment and resources;
participants invited to attend the workshop.
As a facilitator, you need to adopt an adaptive and iterative design approach. You have to learn about the objectives that sponsors want to achieve, so that you can plan and design together with them the actual structured activities to be facilitated during the workshop.
Workshop Design Phases
Usually, I divide the workshop design work into four phases:
Discovery
Ideation
Delivery
Reflection.
This breakdown of steps has a lot of similarities with the design thinking process, the Human-Centered Design framework, the Service design process or the Lean Startup model in the business field.
It is based on Strategic Design and it is inspired by many of the principles you can find in: Systems Thinking and Critical Thinking.
Second-order thinking is another approach laying at the base of a robust Workshop Design strategy. It requiresreflecting critically about how facilitators, sponsors, organizers and the same participants are acquiring knowledge to see if you need to adapt your plans according to what you have discovered through action.
The Discovery Phase
Information gathering
If it is your first workshop, you will need to meet Sponsors and organizers to understand as much as possible of their world. While you need to be a deep listener, you will have on the one hand to write down and have a shared agreement on the final objectives, on the other hand, you need to help them to clarify those objectives in a non-ambiguous and feasible way. Your role as a facilitator is already starting when you work with the organizers on day 1.
(Users) Participants Research
The facilitator needs to work as a Designer following the Human-Centred Design principles. We need to create tools, services, and co-design workshops that are solving the real problems of our stakeholders. While this requires, usually, extra effort in the Design Research phase which could increase the required budget and competencies of the designer/facilitator, it is also very difficult to access the intended audience.
Many social innovation workshops are open to the public and not strictly planned in terms of the profile for the people invited. It becomes very difficult, due to time and resources constraints, to interact with the workshop attendees with the intention of building a more tailored workshop for all of their needs.
There are several alternatives, from the very approximate and improvised ones (interviewing the sponsors, doing stealth guerrilla research, proto-Personas, etc) to the more radical and blocking (refusing to work for an unknown public!).
I was never able to do proper research and my best strategy has always been the following: never assume anything or, even better, always assume the worst possible scenario.
The Ideation Phase
Strategy and Planning
The craft of deciding how to actually organize the time in a room with participants is leaning more on the art side of things rather than science. You are dealing with people so you need to take into consideration the complexity of a group of complex organisms organized to create a synergistic mind to be more intelligent than just one of them. Yes, the ingredients are there, and experience helps but as it happens for the best cooks it is only when you have a wide range of facilitation tools available, good raw matter (the people!) and a clear vision, that you can aim at great success.
If you are preparing a workshop after the first one in a series, you will need to take into consideration any useful insights you have discovered during the previously facilitated events. This is where, in the Iterative Design approach, you apply the Adaptive Design mindset to facilitate the emergence of the final outcome most wanted by your group of stakeholders.
Using insights from previous workshops the designers refine and adapt the goals and the delivery plan to accommodate hints and suggestions.
You are building upon the feedback and the insights and the lessons learned from the previous workshop and you adapt your strategy and your plan in the structure of your delivery for the next workshop.
Define the Objectives
You need to transform requirements, needs and wants into objectives.
When it’s impossible to define a specific set of knowledge or skills that will be obtained by participants, the facilitator needs to negotiate, at least, the general aims or artifacts the Sponsor wants to get.
In OsservAgro’s case, there was the strongly declared aim of writing a Manifesto for the movement and a scientific publication illustrating the method and the outcomes. This was the North Star for me, as the facilitator, to drive choices and allocate resources. It was particularly useful to define the agenda for each workshop while keeping the continuity of all the design phases. I was lucky to work with clear-minded people: be very careful when you are not able to agree upon clear objectives for your workshops, it can lead you to chaos.
Content design and knowledge
During the preparation phase for the facilitator might be difficult to deal with new knowledge-domains, and new terminology, but this should not be the main concern for the facilitator because they are not supposed to be subject matter experts. Facilitators need to become effective collaborators by creating a synergy with the organizers in a way that they trust them and vice-versa. It’s difficult to design and deliver a workshop if there is not a solid trust relationship established since the very beginning.
The Agenda: Designing the Structured Activities
The Workshop Outline is the most important design tool for a workshop. A facilitator must use it as the single-source-of-truth establishing the written plan to reach the workshops’ objectives.
Sometimes you can be explicit and take the Learning Outcome concept from the training field as a design tool. But most of the time it is impossible to state, clearly, upfront, what “by the end of this workshop participants will know…”, know what?
We are gathering to discover together what we want to know more of, it’s difficult in these cases to state it upfront.
According to the difficulty and the ambition and the scope of the workshop, you might need a number of preparation sessions. Sometimes, a lot of them. In my experience, I tend to work from 1 hour to one day for each actual hour of facilitation. This is one of the difficult and hidden aspects to communicate to the outside world. That is why the session design should be participatory.
The facilitator is already starting to work since the first meeting with the sponsors and the organizers. They are more designers facilitating the process of co-designing together. Although there is less pressure for going fast and quick or having to respect specific constraints, so you are more free-flowing, the facilitator still needs to work as a designer having the goal of preparing the workshop. Especially if you need to be ready before the delivery date to support promotion activities start to prepare learning materials.
This phase needs to be managed as a real production process. The more you iterate, the more you’re able to reach your workshop with well-crafted sessions with very clear instructions enabling participants to give their best contributions towards the workshop’s goals.
How to collaborate
It’s very important to establish an environment of collaboration with a very open bi-directional communication channel, between the facilitator and the sponsors.
It is called co-design because the workshops are created together. Not only the participants are working collectively to pursue the workshop’s aims, but the Workshop Design is also collaborative and it needs to include, as much as possible, a representative group of all stakeholders. The facilitator is the orchestrator and the lead designer of the co-creation process.
The mood and the environment between the facilitator and the organizers need to be very smooth and the right place where everybody can be included in the preparation phase.
Not only everybody can be creative but the facilitator has the important responsibility of promoting the focused creativity of all the people involved.
While it is important to know how to combine different design and facilitation tools with the right timing, for the right people in the right way, (un)fortunately, there are infinite ways to prepare the recipe for a successful workshop. It’s like preparing to go into the field where you must have a plan but you also need to be ready to improvise. This is something that lies on the shoulders of the facilitator because they need to be ready in a redundant and conservative way about the many areas that can be faulty.
The facilitator’s role
During the delivery, the facilitator is not participating at all in the structured activities. A facilitator is responsible for:
leading the dialogue
timing
promoting the resolution of disputes
negotiating debates
And, the facilitator has a very important goal on top of all the others that is to bring the results home. The facilitator needs to do whatever is in their capabilities to reach the final objective negotiated with the organizer during the preparation phase.
In these regards, the facilitator needs to be a project manager, a coach, an organizer of the communication flows, and then needs to be the director of this Little Big Show that is going to happen in a collective way during the workshop.
From this point of view, it can be something really exciting. At the same time, you need to be able to get under a certain level of control of all of those aspects and be ready to improvise and cover any lack, or of any issue that will inevitably arise and still aim at creating the best possible outcome.
Learning experience design for social innovation
In the end, you are preparing a learning experience for a certain number of people that are going to learn, open themselves with others, discuss, work together in order to face some complex challenges. We’re talking about facing world hunger, improving the adoption process internationally, reducing the hazard of specialized workers in the heavy industries or in the healthcare or in the finance world or working in the field of social innovation in which you want to empower both the common citizens as well as scientists with the tools of clear communication with the final goal of facing problems as sustainability. The previous are some instances where I had the chance to facilitate workshops.
Keep following curatella.com to read about the next Workshop Design phases: Delivery and Reflection.
Series Navigation Collective Intelligence Design and Facilitation
Only shared decisions are effective in the long-term
It’s in historical moments like this that we need to think more about creating better futures. You need to act in advance to build a network of change agents that could work collectively in creating better futures. This is the main reason why I worked passionately and with great fun with the organizers of the Osservatorio sul Dialogo nell’Agroalimentare (Observatory on the Dialogue in the Agrifood System). We leveraged on the Collective Intelligence for envisioning together better futures for the systems of food and agriculture.
One of the Co-Design Workshops I have facilitated for OsservAgro.
I was the lead Collective Intelligence Facilitator for five participatory workshops held by the Observatory. I had a great learning experience with them. I met smart and wise people: scientists, researchers, teachers, communicators, managers, opinion leaders, event organizers, activists, common people, and facilitators. We investigated the stakeholders, we mapped the systems of their relationships and we ideated a better future for our Society by identifying a Vision, a Mission, and practical objectives to take action upon.
and by a group of researchers, teachers, and actors having an interest in the dynamics of the agri-food sector.
The key persons I worked with made a difference in how the movement has been organized and the opportunities they’ve created during the co-design sessions. I am thinking, in particular, to Andrea Sonnino, the Observatory’s Coordinator and Paola Carrabba, a tireless science researcher who worked hard to support all the activities of the Observatory. I’ve been lucky and honored to be introduced to them by my friend Marco Valente, a professional facilitator, initially involved with them.
The problem: Agri-Food is Unsustainable
We went through a path of collective reflection where diverse people from different backgrounds were convened together. Marco Valente facilitated the first of the six public encounters while I was responsible to organize and facilitate the remaining events.
We discovered that there is a lack of dialogue between all parts of society: Science, Politics, Business, Media, Education, and Citizens. The linear model for knowledge transfer of the past doesn’t work anymore. In the last century, unified knowledge was generated by scholars, recognized as the official creators of such knowledge, and then it was transferred by professionals, teachers, specialists and journalists to the masses which benefited passively.
Today, knowledge, pulverized in hyperspecialization, is communicated through fragmented narratives and languages to the large public, which on the one hand asks for more active participation in the decision-making processes which involve themselves, on the other hand, are frequently disoriented by a confused flow of contradicting information. The roles of diverse stakeholders acting as economic operators, decision-makers, influencers, and knowledge builders, became liquid, adapting to the different contexts where they act.
This has led to confusing communication, mono-directional information flows, fragmentation of languages. This novel situation generates a climate of confusion and uncertainty, reciprocal distrust, a lack of respect for competences and roles and a difficult resolution of diverging interests. This issue is particularly evident in food and agriculture, in which interactions with consumers’ health and with the environment are concerning the whole Society.
As a consequence, it becomes harder to make decisions: because they are not shared, because there are reciprocal distrust and a poorer recognition of the reciprocal role of everybody.
Our approach: Facilitated Collective Intelligence
We adopted and applied participatory methods of Collective Intelligence strongly based on Critical Thinking and Systems Thinking approaches. The agri-food system has peculiar features, but also universal elements, that is why reflecting on this system could offer important insights also for other scopes.
Participants, in a break-out room, working on their proposal for more sustainable futures in the agri-food systems.
In our workshops, we re-established an environment of reciprocal trust where, together, we could imagine possible futures and how to reach them. Now, we want to extend to the entire society our experience to make decisions that last longer. Only shared decisions are more effective in the long-term and we want to create a network of Change Agents to build novel sustainable futures.
The outcome: Mission, Manifesto, and Actions
This is the first of an article series in which I begin to write about my experience of facilitating several co-creation workshops. In the next articles, I will tell you how we’ve contributed to writing and rewriting the Observatory’s Mission and how we laid the foundations for a Manifesto to be published. I will write more about the method and how we have defined a set of actions for specific groups of actors to activate a Network of Change Makers for the Sustainability of the Agri-Food Systems.
While you can join the OsservAgro (if you can read Italian) to tell your story of food and territory and be part of a more Sustainable Society, keep on following me on Curatella.com to learn more about my facilitation experience with this project.
Thanks to Andrea Sonnino, and Paola Carrabba for the help in writing this article.
Series Navigation Collective Intelligence Design and Facilitation
As a Strategic Designer, I have the duty of facilitating collective intelligence. Leaders need to make decisions. Organizations want to innovate their production process. Social impact movements organize to address social innovation. Strategic Design for Collective Intelligence helps us to be more than the sum of our parts.
Collective Intelligence is the emergent phenomenon created by people collaborating. They co-design possible solutions to the complex problem they discover through cooperation. Co-creation leads to more inclusive and systemic solutions that are more robust.
What is a Strategic Designer?
A Strategic Designer is a Systems Thinker and a Facilitator. A Designer and a Communicator. A Strategic Designer is a problem-setter and a problem-solver. They define the context of a problem before ideating possible solution scenarios.
Facilitators build upon the knowledge of a group of people. They organize collective thoughts through structured activities. Collective Intelligence Facilitators make collaboration tools out of constraints. Time, resources, requirements, needs and wants become part of the context to work with.
Strategic Designers need to know well the tools of the Design Researchers. They map Stakeholders and their Experience Journey through the realms of the context. A Strategic Designer makes the systems visible to the eye of participants. Strategic Designers embody the principles of inclusive, compassionate and respectful dialogue.
The strategic aspect of design
Strategic Designers explore knowledge to make things clearer towards reaching refined goals. Among the many activities, Strategic Designers work to
Knowing the context
Knowing needs, wants and desires
Extracting knowledge from stakeholders: internal and external.
Knowing how to provide value
Mitigate unintended consequences
VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity) is the natural environment where a Strategic Designer thrives. They have to trust the Design Process more than their intuition. They need the persistence to sustain the discomfort of the unknown. Their strength is in trusting the processes of research, envisioning, prototyping, testing, and iteration.
Strategic Design leads to more rational decisions made
A designer should not impose their opinions nor their decisions. A designer should help collaboration among leaders, including all stakeholders. A collaborative decision is more rational and more accepted by the participant in the co-design process.
Strategic Design makes you see for the first time
A Strategic Designer maps processes and flows, components and their interactions. A System Map shows the actual purpose of a system: that is what the system does, not what you intend it to do.
When a leader of a large organization sees for the first time the entire production process, including every branch, from every department, and every possible action for all possible scenarios, they see their organization for the first time.
Trying to imagine what they would think at that time: “Where was I all this time?” “How all of this could happen?”, “What is my real role in my organization?”.
A Strategic Designer facilitates success
A designer facilitates success through context-setting, inclusive and structured acquisition of knowledge, by leading a collaborative process where decision-makers create the best solution for their problems.
How did I become a Strategic Designer?
I grew into the role of a Strategic Designer through many professional and educational opportunities. I moved to the “why” part of the job without anybody to ask for it. Then, people started to ask me less about the “how” part and more of the “why”. This is how I moved from “How to do things” to “Why should we do this?” and “What should we do to get what we want and need?”
It is a demanding role but exciting. It is a leading role but humbling. The more I work as a Strategic Designer, the more I think that every leader should embrace Strategic Design to build better products, better services, better solutions, and a better world.
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