IngeniousPeoplesKnowledge

On 3 and 4 November we had the opportunity to facilitate our first workshop in Maputo, Mozambique, for the ILO’s Women’s Entrepreneurship Development and Gender Equality in Southern Africa (WEDGE-SA) programme. The workshop was designed to enable the roughly 70 participants from the four programme countries (Mozambique, South Africa, Lesotho and Malawi) to elaborate the major building blocks required to move policy formulation in their respective country forwards, i.e. influence and transform their national policy environments to become more favourable for women led and owned enterprises.

Some participants struggled to grasp the abstract nature of working on measures to influence national policy formulation and other frameworks (macro level) – they had an inevitable tendency to fall back into discussing and suggesting issues and measures linked to the three other levels, such as: changing the socio-economic context (meta level); providing training (micro level) and; financial assistance to women entrepreneurs (meso level). For many participants thinking on the policy and framework level might have been a new experience, for others it wasn’t. At the start of the second workshop day we, however, successfully clarified the difference between the four different intervention levels using the following graphic illustration.

It was a bilingual workshop and the fact that about two thirds where Portuguese speaking (of which probably about half were also fluent in English) and the other third of the participants were English speaking posed certain challenges. We were fortunate to enjoy the services of two simultaneous interpreters as well as many of the bilingual participants helping out with interpreting during the small group working sessions. The small groups were formed randomly in a self-organising fashion, which sometimes led to language imbalanced groups in which in some instances the minority language monolingual speakers felt isolated from the rest of the group. We conclude from this that at our next bilingual event, we would like to try giving participants clearly recognisable “language tags” next time around, i.e. English only, Portuguese only or bi-lingual. This way we could ask participants to form more balanced language groups when re-grouping between the different sessions. We would still not recommend sticking to monolingual groups at a bilingual event, as we feel it would be a missed opportunity in terms of captialising on the experience of learning across borders and working across country and language barriers, and thereby creating more cohesion and understanding amongst the different participating countries and organisations within a project/ programme.

What exactly do we do at IngeniousPeoplesKnowledge? What services can we provide, what are our strengths and specialisations? On which assumptions, concepts and methods do we build our work and trainings? And: who is behind I-P-K? Answers to these questions in a nutshell. Fresh from the (Word)Press…

Download Our Company Profile 2010

From 18-20 October I-P-K facilitated the Inception Workshop for the Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme at the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Educational Technology (CET). SCAP is a project of the centre for educational technology and the Research Office at the University of Cape Town. About 12 scholars from the four participating universities (Cape Town, Mauritius, Namibia and Botswana) attended and explored the workshop’s leading question “How Can We Go About Creating Sites of Innovation?”. The Inception Workshop was designed for participants to gain a better sense of  what SCAP is about and is not about, as well as acquire a strong and shared ownership over the SCAP project plan and methodological approach.

During the first day participants explored the scholarly communication ecosystems at the different participating institutions (creation of a Mind Map) and gained a sense of the SCAP background and context (participatory Fish Bowl discussion). They also had a first glimpse into the suggested methodological approach by attending a “Speed Geeking” session on Activity Theory, Change Laboratories and Cost Analysis. There was a lot of discomfort and confusion on the end of the first day due to the (only limited) exposure to the unfamiliar methodological approach. This prepared the ground for the next two days in which participants crafted their vision for Scholarly Communication in Africa and started identifying possible areas of SCAP activity as well as ideas for possible measures, stakeholders and activities. They concluded by looking into how strategic partnerships could best be leveraged to ensure an even broader impact of SCAP.

Whilst some of the participants expected “a room full of scholars feeding them with a lot of information” they were surprised to experience the “magic of working in small groups”, achieving more than they expected by surfacing more internal knowledge than is usually the case in more formal workshop set-ups. They also remarked that the workshop methodology enabled different ways of intuitive thinking and that it created a nurturing environment for expressing views, ideas, drawing connections and insights.

We wish SCAP well in taking up the various project activities scheduled throughout the course of the next two years and look forward to learning about the progress made in the different Change Laboratories. Many thanks for a wonderful collaboration and viva Innovation in Scholarly Communication in Africa! To learn more about Scholarly Communication Access to Knowledge in Africa you may also want to visit http://www.sca2kafrica.org/.

On October 8, Frischer Wind (in English “Wind of Change”) – one of our network partners  in Switzerland – celebrated its 10th anniversary in Aarau (Switzerland). Frischer Wind and I-P-K have had the opportunity to cooperate in several projects in South Afria. Frischer Wind is specialising in large group interventions (pursuying a whole system approach as we do), where they have tremendous experience and success. To I-P-K, this organisation has always been a great source of inspiration and learning. We appreciate their pragmatic and unideological approach and attitude a lot.

Frischer Wind had the courage and consistency to not just have a celebration with the traditional ceremonial addresses and the like, but they held it as a large group event. This was probably much more interesting and revealing for most of the participants. I-P-K had the honour of holding a small workshop on dealing with and designing international conferences as large group events. From this angle, the probably most frequent “large group format” appears in a new light, unveiling new interesting aspects and offering new opportunities.

Thank you for letting us being part of this! Our best wishes for another 10 successful years of your precious work!

We are happy and proud to launch our new Facilitation Handbook. The title “Knowledge Sharing for Change – Designing and Facilitating Learning Processes with a Transformative Impact” embodies our credo that underlies our work and in particular the events we design and facilitate: that the ultimate goal must be to bring about transformation of some sort, however that learning (in particular peer-to-peer learning) and knowledge sharing are key to such change.

The Handbook explains our own, particular approach to change processes, that builds on the idea of looking at social groups and institutions as complex systems. It contains various sections: starting with a brief general outline of how we believe we can deal with complex systems in a change context, it then draws practical conclusions on designing and delivering change events (such as workshops, meetings, conferences, …) – in particular in terms of the architecture of such events; it then creates an overview over methods and tools which allow to select and assemble them into a meaningful order that directs the event towards results.

What initally had triggered off the writing of this Handbook was the need to have some sort of “training script” for our facilitation and change trainings. We since have successfully held our first training events and are very happy about how people received and appreciated this tool. If you’re interested to learn more about possibilities and maybe a tailor-made training for your context/organisation, please touch base!

If this Handbook is useful to you, then we are very pleased. We welcome any comments, ideas, also for improvement! Please don’t hesitate to contact us!

Catherine & Marc

To download, click on the cover above or visit our “Resources & Downloads” section, where you find it under “General”

We are just returning from a wonderful week in Chaminuka, a little paradise not far from Lusaka. We spent three days training a group of 15 participants – about one third GTZ staff members, and the other two thirds working with GTZ partners in government departments and civil society organisations.

The I-P-K training approach is built on three levels:

1. The conceptual level provides participants with a complexity-based understanding of social change, ie. the system of thought around complex-adaptive systems and how to cause transformation in such a system. We consider it absolutely essential to see the big picture underneath in order to competently design change processes and events. After all, there is nothing more practical than a good theory! Furthermore, if we want to avoid a devaluation and disrepute of many of the tools and methods, we must contain the risk of their inconsiderate and mechanical applications. Yet, we introduced the complex ideas and concepts of complexity on a playful way, ie. by playing and simulating complex systems, an experience for every participant we could constantly refer to.
2. The second level of training deals with “practice”, which contained two kind of modules:
   • Sessions on more general, yet very practical aspects of faciliation, such as the role and behaviour of the facilitator, promoting diversity and dealing with conflict, and similar areas, which help the faciliators to consiously improve their own practice in any faciliation situation.
   • We introduced a series of methods and tools by practicing them in the training itself. Participants hence had a first-hand experience of how these methods “look and feel” and had an immediate insight in possible applications and the practical aspects of applying them.
3. The third level aimed at the experience of participants. Participants submitted “clinic cases”, ie. real events they will have to organise, design and facilitate themselves in the next three months (in distinction to “case studies” which lie in the past, “case clinics” are in the future and have more relevance and urgency for the participants). At the beginning of the workshop, they introduced their cases (in a Speed Geeking session, a method which they thereby learned) and then they worked in groups on their cases for 1 hour per half-day, immediately applying what they had learned. They walked out of the workshop with a clearer understanding of their upcoming tasks and new agendas for the events, where they will immediately use the methods learned.

The training cycle consist of three phases. We now held a basic training of three days consisting of modules on all the levels mentioned above. Subsequently, participants will now hold their events between now and December, thereby making their own first steps and gathering own experience. Towards the end of January, they will return and in an advanced training, we will capitalise this experience, discuss and understand it, and complement it with more sophisticated approaches and methods.

From September 21-23, 2010, we have faciliated the ILO Asia Pacific Regional Workshop Entrepreneurship Education.  The workshop was aimed at identifying ways to improve quality and impact of youth entrepreneurship training in South-East Asia. The workshop gathered 90 participants from Indonesia, Laos, Vietnam, China, Thailand, and the ILO Headoffice in Switzerland. It truly followed the approach of bringing the entire relevant system into one room: the group comprised trade unionists, delegates from employers’ organisations and the private sector, school teachers and headmasters, government officials from various levels (national, regional, local), experts on entrepreneurship education, and donor represenatives.

On the whole, the process followed the basic structure of an Real Time Strategic Change (RTSC), with a large Speed Geeking session integrated into the first day and an almost full-day OpenSpace towards the end. The event did not only produce a series of recommendations based on the insights and lessons learnt extracted from the collective knowledge of participants, but it led to about 30 action items that various groups and persons decided to take up and put in practice to make a real difference.

On September 2nd, 2010, I-P-K has been faciliating the 2nd Round Table on Local Economic Development of SALGA, the “South African Local Governance Association”. This multi-stakeholder event gathered about 45 participants, representing in particular donor organisatgions, but also delegates from municipalities, government agencies, and some NGOs working in the field. The Round Table was hosted in OpenSpaceTechnology. During a 6-hours event, 12 working sessions on various topics were convened and held.

Over the past few weeks, two persons asked me the same question that I was unable to respond to – which was very strange: They asked me: “What is your approach then?”. I asked them “What do you mean, which approach?”. One of them pointed out that in a conversation, of more than an hour, I had constantly suggested that there is something like an I-P-K approach, without ever making it explicit. The second instance was the editor of our handbook. She came back to us after her first read through asking: “You constantly use the term “our approach” without ever clarifying what it actually is…”.

I realised that although I had a sense that there is something like a red thread that runs through our facilitation and change work, I constantly tried to avoid spelling it out in explicit and clear manner. What ensued was a debate, whether it was an “approach” in the first place – or rather a method, a style, a worldview, a set of principles? But since our handbook is in the making, I no longer had a choice. Or rather a good invitation to get to terms with it. I gave it a try. Read on here:

The Approach of IngeniousPeoplesKnowledge

I-P-K has been designing and facilitating the Interagency Conference on Local Economic Development, which took place in October 2008 in Turin, Italy. The conference was hosted by the International Training Centre of the ILO. More than 120 participants gathered over 3 days, shared experiences and knowledge and looked for new ways of how to address the challenges in this field.

The conference built on many of the methods and approaches that we promote. To get a brief overview over some of the methods used, watch this brief video: