Massimo Curatella

Tag: how

  • Writing Concisely

    I constantly struggle against unnecessary artificial complexity and find myself uncomfortable when someone wants to communicate with me in an unnecessarily convoluted way. Likewise, I like to be straightforward and direct when I communicate, even, and especially, in more formal environments.

    The consideration that might seem obvious, however, is that writing well and concisely takes time, effort, and skill. It is much easier to let yourself go to an uncontrolled river of words, fueling the selfishness of unloading on others the task of extracting its value. “What do I care? I told you, now it’s up to you to do something about it.”

    Writing effectively and efficiently is a service rendered to others. It requires love, dedication but also the time and resources needed to do it. How do we always keep it short and direct?

    My solution: write a lot, about everything, often. Reread everything, cut and forge sentences with our interlocutors in mind. It is a job, a discipline, an art. Never sufficiently appreciated and practiced.

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  • Workshop Design methods, Discovery and Ideation

    Workshop Design methods, Discovery and Ideation

    How do you facilitate Collective Intelligence?

    How I used facilitation tools and techniques to organize and deliver a series of workshops for the Observatory on the Dialogue in the Agrifood System (OsservAgro).

    Series Navigation
    Collective Intelligence Design and Facilitation

    Facilitating Collective Intelligence for the Sustainability of Agri-food

    Workshop Design Methods: Preparation

    Facilitating Complexity Thinking

    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:

    1. Discovery
    2. Ideation
    3. Delivery
    4. 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 requires reflecting 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

    Facilitating Collective Intelligence for the Sustainability of Agri-food

    Workshop Design Methods: Preparation

    Facilitating Complexity Thinking

  • How I write

    How I write

    Between the 24th of September 2019 and the 31 of December 2019, I will have written for 100 days straight. I wrote every day for an average of 1’200 words per day. I’ve produced over 120’000 words. I collected more than 130 articles in my dedicated folder: some days I wrote multiple times. That amount, if printed, would fill about 500 pages at the standard average of 250 words per page.

    How much of this is good?

    All of it and I am going to tell you why.

    Writing is thinking

    I can think better when I write. I collect thoughts which, in great part, I would have lost because I would have forgotten them. I can dedicate focused attention to an idea, an inspiration or a problem. I can grow an archive of thoughts that I can search, compare and browse. I can be more precise with memories because they’re written down, I don’t have to make any effort, I just have to look for that thought.

    Writing is a habit

    The hardest part is to be fluent, constant and coherent. It’s important to go over the threshold of being able to type quickly without looking at the keyboard. Or, most importantly, to not type at all. I’ve been typing on a keyboard for four decades: I am fast, I can type blindly. This is an enormous advantage. You can cultivate this skill: this is strongly recommended.

    Or, just don’t type at all. Technology is marvelous magic: you can talk to your computer, it will type your words for you. Or, even better, get out for a walk, a long walk and talk to your phone. Either it will transcribe it or you can record a file, better for archiving and nostalgic purposes. You will upload it as soon as it’s ready. A few minutes later your transcriptions are readily digitized in your email or your cloud folder.

    Yes, it’s not a perfect technology, yet. But having from 80 to 90% accuracy while recording on the street, in the city, is pure magic.

    Moreover, editing your draft brings some benefits: you listen actively to your thoughts trying to catch the right words, misspellings, and concepts. You put a certain distance between the “you” who was speaking at the recorder and the present “you” in the role of the editor. Another benefit: you become aware of the useless interjections as the “ahm”, “uh”, “you know”, etc. I was able to almost eliminate any unwanted occurrence of such bad speaking habits. An added benefit: I have improved my speaking skills.

    Facilitate starting

    Preparation rituals. Create a checklist that you will refine indefinitely.

    Prepare the environment. Put your most inspiring music or noise generator. Use earphones or earplugs. Go in the quietest place of the building. Or, if you record, get out on your most loved path.

    Avoid distractions. Turn off all notifications from any device: desktop and laptop computers: email, instant messaging, web conference, social media; tablets, smartphones, landlines, buzzers, whatever is not vital, turn it off.

    If you need to remain available choose only one single medium of communication with your important ones and establish a code. Make yourself unavailable for the time needed to write.

    Set a threshold: time or quantity. I started, for fun, the “500 words per day” challenge. Some people do the “250”, others the “750 per day” or the “3 pages per day”. It’s not important. What matters is setting a daily goal. You should make it much more affordable and reachable if you are just starting. If you feel insecure try with something ridiculously easy as “10 words per day”. Can you write 10 words per day? Think about it: this is a sentence with just a little more than 10 words: 19, to be exact. Can you write a sentence per day?

    Ignore the “what”. What should I write about? It is not relevant. You just need to write. It’s like playing scales when you exercise with the piano. It’s a psychological exercise, not a creative endeavor. Let the words flow from your brain. Creativity will come. Naturally. When you will forget what you have to write: then the magic will happen.

    Go with the flow. Go in the flow

    Get focused on your writing only. Allow yourself time to get warmed. Feel the connection with reality fading away. Forget you are moving your fingers to type. Become one between eyes, arms, hands, fingers, keyboard, screen, text flowing.

    Reach the speed at which you are listening to your thoughts, free-flowing and just… transcribe them. It doesn’t matter what you are thinking: just write it.

    You will discover it will be easy to tell your truth in this state. You will listen to your inner voice saying unexpected things which, usually, you recognize as indubitable truths that, maybe, you were not able to express any other way.

    Keep the pace: write every day

    Don’t skip a day. If it happens don’t skip it twice and don’t catch-up with the lost one. Your first goal is not to write but to be able to be consistent with your commitment against all odds.

    I cheated. Yes. I did. I confess. I felt so painful the lack of motivation to write and I did not do it for two days, at the very beginning of my challenge. After two weeks I could not stand to see those two lines empty. In a frenzy, I started to search for everything I could consider passable as “writing” to fill those hurtful holes. Nothing! I had nothing! I’ve been recording dozens of hours of notes, I wrote thousands of emails, I sent an infinite number of… yes! Chat messages. So I put together the threads I’ve been following those days and I was able to cover my daily goal. Is this useful? I don’t know, not really in terms of having kept the commitment. But surely I feel like I don’t have to look at empty log lines. It was an important lesson for the following days. I would have not skipped another day for anything in the world!

    Anticipate, foresee unexpected events. Of course, life happens. And it doesn’t matter how much you plan: unforeseen things are real. That’s another harsh lesson I learned. It doesn’t matter how much relaxed and safe your day might look like. Block time early before normal “life” hours, usually before 8 a.m., much earlier if you can afford it and: write!. Even on the most tranquil day put your goal in the safe. You’ll always have time to go beyond your threshold.

    Block dedicated time on your calendar: set a reminder, do not postpone it. Set an appointment with yourself. Yes, this is what I do. It’s set at 7 a.m. It’s the first notification I get in the morning (together with any other coming from other timezones) and I get an email reminder. That specific warning, piercing through my retina as a bloody red dot in the tray bar is there pushing in painful part of my skull saying: “you have to write!”. And I don’t allow myself to postpone it. It stays on, and as an unread email until I’ve finished my writing ritual.

    The pleasure released when I am finished and I can delete that reminder is one of the most cherished pleasures of my current life.

    Don’t choose a topic: curate your thoughts.

    As I wrote in Why Should You Write? you are the best person in the world to make excuses for yourself. If you want to find a reason not to write, trust me, you will. And asking the most natural and logical question: what should I write about? It is the killer’s excuse. The mother of all excuses. Pregnant with beautiful children as “what if I don’t have anything to say?”, “What if I don’t know what I am talking about?”, “What if I don’t feel prepared without accurate research?” There you go. That is the way to declare defeat before even starting.

    This “free-flowing writing challenge” is for you to unblock you. To stretch your fingers (and your mind), to create stamina, to be able to prepare yourself for a long-term commitment. The goal is to write. Where did I write you should have to “write 500 words per day about a popular topic in the news?” Or about a “professional field”? Or about a story of how two people traveled to the other side of the world to find themselves?”

    You don’t need to check. Nowhere. The challenge here is to improve your ability to establish a more intimate connection with your inner voice. With your thoughts. And, tell me: do you ever think? Because what I am talking about here is writing as in “transcribing your thoughts”. That is what I am talking about. So, you have no excuses. You just need to recognize that voice always talking in your head. That is you. And, please, listen to it. What is it saying? What are you saying, in your head? That is the matter, the source, the input? And there is no judgment involved, whatsoever. We don’t care about correct spelling, punctuation or style. You don’t give a damn about it. Just focus on the words. Pick them one-by-one and transcribe them. Either with your keyboard or with your voice. What is it all about? You don’t care.

    At least for now. Follow me and you will discover what to do about it.

    After you have passed through the painful moments of starting this journey, you will feel ashamed of the incredible stupidity expressed by your timid and unstructured thoughts. After some days, that depends on how much you can hold the pain, things will start to make sense. You’ll be faster to catch your thoughts. They will start to have more sense when put one after the other. You will start to recognize patterns of meaning. Recurring thoughts. Elaborations on previous concepts.

    That’s the moment! Is there, that I want to bring you. That moment when you will start to lose perception of your fingers touching the keyboard. Your fingers will dance, on their own, at the sound of the most beautiful music. The sound of your brain talking. You’ll start to listen to the flow of ideas. They will start to compose more coherently. You will want to follow, listen and to interact! That is the moment when you are finally starting a dialogue, live, real-time, with your inner voice. And, my friend, at that time all about rituals, distractions, screens, fingers, all of it will become irrelevant. That is the moment when you have opened a door to your mind.

    What then? Just listen and transcribe.

    It’s only after having collected some thousands of words that you will take the time to reread, filter, select, aggregate. You will curate your thoughts. And you will discover the “what” you have to write about. Because you already did it. You have now just to keep going.

    Track your progress: do or do not, there is no try

    You can be obsessed with statistics about the number of words, the time spent in writing them, and the like. But the single most important data to track is: did I write today? Your only goal is to answer: yes.

    It’s as simple as that. There are no other criteria.

    Then, since you’re supposed to have digital copies of your writing, well, you can unleash the most advanced Artificial Intelligences and Data Visualization techniques to extract as much statistical data as you can. It can be useful but remember, you are building a habit. Writing something meaningful or useful for any other application is going to be just a consequence of the consistency of your practice.

    How am I going?

    I started, bored, unhopeful and a little desperate. I’ve been trying to write consistently for 20 years. I’ve started 100 times and failed 100% of it. So I was expecting the usual gig: some initial exciting little pieces and then, as usual, everything would fade and fail miserably.

    ✍🏻 Updated on the 31st of December 2019

    Yes, I’ve made it! 🥳

    And, instead, joyful joys have me, I not only did the 31 days as required by the “challenge”, but I’ve also reached 100 days and I have no intention to stop soon.

    Benefits, So far

    I created my personal knowledge matrix. This is how I want to call it, a table of topics where the columns are the canonical questions which will drive my inquiry. Can you guess them? They are: why, how, what, when, where, who. While the rows are the topics emerging during my exploratory writings: I am not a single-passion man, sorry, so they range from Design to Computer Graphics, from Futurism to Software Development, from Personal Knowledge Management to Systems Thinking. And (un)fortunately for me this is just a very small sample of what emerged.

    I’ve published my first blog! I’ve been planning to do it for too many years. Now I did it and what you are reading is the second article, the first one was Why Should I Write?

    I’ve built a new habit. It doesn’t matter how my day is going to be composed: I will reserve from 15 to 60 minutes to write. I feel immensely satisfied with this. It gives me confidence and hope. At the same time, I realize it is just the start. Writing is not enough: I want to publish, as well.

    My writing and speaking skills have improved. I can feel the improvement in my writing skills, both in English and Italian, my native language. I perceive a concrete improvement in the effectiveness of my communication skills. My style improved as well. Since I’ve recorded dozens of hours in English, I can see how my oral exposition is more coherent, understandable, and tidy, compared to when I started.

    I’ve walked for 300 Km in three months. I used to do it for one year, walking for 1’000 Km, so I maintained this habit and I merged it with the writing one. I’ve recorded lots of hours of notes while walking which I’ve then transcribed with digital tools. The immensely satisfying consequences are, not only saving time but losing weight and gaining a lot of health benefits derived from this practice. Joining walking and voice recording is one of the best things that could have happened to me.

    Conclusion: just write!

    So, how much are 100 days of writing worth? So far they are the world to me. They meant an incredibly exciting challenge with me, with my life, my job, my family and all the odds against me. I proved to myself that I can change my habits, in positive. I can pursue a more ambitious goal of nurturing my intellectual progress. That I can sustain the pain and the patience to exercise to improve a skill so crucial for me that, I am sure, will be responsible for future opportunities I am not even able to imagine.

    This is how I write.

    And you? How do you write?

    Which of the tricks, tools, and techniques I’ve mentioned are you using? How can I improve with my approach? What should I start doing? What should I stop?