New research suggests that employees with a diverse Twitter network — one that exposes them to people and ideas they don’t already know — tend to generate better ideas.
The Humanitarian Innovation Guide is a growing online resource to help individuals and organisations find their starting point and navigate the humanitarian innovation journey.
Here is a collection of resources I use in my facilitation practice. By and large these resources support facilitation of participatory and self-organizing process at scales ranging from very small groups to large conferences. I use some of these tools directly and others as inspirations to design and create my own processes. The first section provides links to participatory group process that are inclusive and self-organizing to varying degrees. The section on process architecture and maps contains links to sites whose worldviews can inform process design from single meetings to large scale change. The next three sections cover more specific tools useful for particular purposes, and finally the last section contains links to sources of ongoing inspiration.
group facilitation methods for icebreakers, brainstorming, prioritizing, etc.
How and when to give different types of feedback on creative designs
At Dropbox, we’ve found that metaphors are a powerful tool to help people explore and share their experiences in more creative and meaningful ways. We use metaphors in research so people can talk about their experiences through a different lens. We can do this simply by inviting people to make a comparison through a single question. Or we can facilitate entire interviews by using tools to symbolize and explore meaning together.
In brief, it consists of 6 participants supervised by a moderator who are required to write down 3 ideas on a specific worksheet within 5 minutes, this is also the etymology of the methodology's name. The outcome after 6 rounds, during which participants swap their worksheets passing them on to the team member sitting at their right, is 108 ideas generated in 30 minutes.
Group facilitation approaches: Think Alone, Think Together Think, pair, share One, Two, Four, All
Here’s one way to deal with things : show them a clip from the film Apollo 13. Specifically, the bit where the crew on board the lunar module are facing imminent suffocation due to a faulty air filter, so the scientists on the ground are forced to make a ‘square peg fit a round hole’ with whatever is available to the astronauts. I showed the clip to one client team I was working with, who were all blockers and no action. Before watching the clip the team was fatalistically resigned to business as usual. They didn’t like it, but they accepted it. Business as usual was a six month requirement gathering phase leading to a £1.5m bet on an unproven concept. After watching the clip, they built a working proof of concept within two hours, a fully fledged beta test within 6 weeks and ended up with an award-winning product that delights customers and is incredibly valuable to the business.
