We often experience that people in an event – sponsors, organisers, participants – express their expectation that the outcome of the event is innovative, yet they are not really open to be innovative in terms of how the event itself is designed, structured and facilitated. That’s a bit of a startling and daunting situation:how can you expect outcomes to be innovative if you stifle innovation along the way to that goal? How (and why) can you expect things to be different and change if you yourself are not willing to be innovative in the ways to get to innovation?

The leas, innovation demands inevitably in terms of a meeting format is, that the meeting itself embodies innovative ways of thinking, engaging and working. Based loosely on Einstein’s quote “Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them”, one could say that it is not possible to produce innovative ideas and solutions by using conventional forms of workshops.

One needs to consider how innovation takes place. First it must be distinct of “incremental improvement”. Experts – due to the characteristics of their knowledge and expertise (which relies on past experience that they analysed and researched extensively) – are often among the most conservative people and as such seldom the source of innovation; what is often largely underestimated is the fact that any expert – like everybody else – has a particular and as such very limited perspective on complex issues, ie. only perceives a limited segment of reality (ie. the “expert’s view”). What is needed is to bring together an abundant group of different people with different perspectives that collide and – in this space of confrontation of thinking – cross-pollinate.
On the ambiguous role of experts with view to innovation, you may want to watch this video of Dave Snowden: http://youtu.be/B2AijRoXnvE

Furthermore, what is needed is the creation of a significant level of discomfort and confusion (in some form) as the basis of innovation (the “room of confusion” in the terminology of Claes Janssen, or a “shallow dive into chaos” as Dave Snowden calls it). It is indispensable to leave the ground of certainty, people must be shaken up! This causes the pressure to abandon fix positions, to shift perspective and look at things in different ways. In fact Snowden says it takes three elements – starvation, pressure and a shift of perspective – as necessary (yet not sufficient) preconditions for innovation: http://youtu.be/IlmesbbPqtU

Lastly, fragmentation of issues into “topics” is often detrimental to the discovery of new, improved solutions, because they lead always to a loss of the big picture, of the understanding how different elements and aspects of a situation or system interdepend and interact. An issue must be dealt with in its entirety and interconnectedness. The Sufi proverb goes: “You think that because you understand one, you understand two, because one and one makes two. But you must also understand and”. This is often grossly violated in many events (by “cutting the issue up” into different themes, topics and sub-issues, that are dealt with in individual sub-sessions or parts of the workshop).

So if we want to have any chance to be innovative in our events, it may ask from us to be really innovative in the way we design those very events in the first place…

Interestingly one of them send me notes from a preparatory discussion around an event we were about to prepare – and in there I found the following:

“Mr. XYZ brought up the need to ask and address the question of what are organizations, countries and other players in the response going to do differently that will get us out of the reality of today.  He noted that around the world there are the “right” programmes and technology but it is still not working.  Following that, the [group] should ask if the current response and targets are realistic, considering the [...] donor situation.  Finally he noted that many of the problems aren’t technical but rather based on a lack of an enabling environment and a need to find the social and cultural solutions.  Beyond the consultation, are we getting commitments? Who is taking the responsibility to get more money in country budgets? How do we move from analysis to doing something about the current levels?

Mr. UVW acknowledged that there is no shortage of actions verbs being used to describe the next steps but it remains unclear what it all really means.”

(Emphasis and removal of names by myself)

These gentlement were expressing and sharpening the issue we hear so often… So what do we then do? Well, we have to acknowledge the complex nature of those circumstances, issues and the systems they are part of – and then deal with them accordingly.

Things to Promote

• Expound complexity: the complexity of an issue/situation must be consciously addressed and worked through. This can only be done by engaging different part of a complex system into a dialogue and avoid “monopolisation” of “right « wrong” or “best « bad (practice)” by a few (experts). An open conversation must aim at creating an understanding for the bigger picture for everybody involved in a peer-to-peer process, not by a few experts sharing the “right” perspective with everybody else.
• Leverage diversity: as a consequence from the previous point, homogeneity in background, experience, thinking and opinions levels the appreciation and assessment of an issue/situation. It is important that different people bring this diversity into the room/conversation and allow a real-time interaction. Stimulating pro-actively dissent, disturbance and deviation is essential to realistic and meaningful engagement with complex issues/situations. This diversity must be actively promoted, managed and leveraged.
• Promote shared understanding, sense-making and emergence of common grounds: in complex situations, sense-making is a critical task. While the facts often may be on the table, they are often not enough; the crucial task is to make sense of them, to come to a shared overviews and interpretation, to identify and recognise patterns (often more than stringent, mechanical cause-effect relationships, which in the face of complexity often fail to persist). By engaging in a process of mutual learning and sharing among peers (who each contribute a particular “world view” and as such are “experts” in their own rights), common grounds are identified. Common grounds are those stepping-stones, which everybody authentically can adhere to without compromising. These common grounds are the basis of further understanding and hence engagement and commitment.
• Foster learning and growth: getting to terms with complexity always entails an initial intensive phase of learning and growth (in terms of ideas, perspective, understanding). During this phase, it is of paramount importance that everybody suspends their judgement and fully engages in a process of disconfirming previous knowledge, learning about new (often surprising) ideas and facts. Jumping to conclusion or seeking to confirm pre-existing knowledge and assumptions are detrimental to a genuine and adequate understanding of a complex issues and circumstances. A properly designed event/ workshop will take people through an initial phase that is exclusively dedicated to learning, where all decisions are suspended towards a later stage of the event.
• Iterative working approach: complex issues and systems cannot be understood in a straightforward, clear-cut manner. Inherently – and in distinction to “technical/mechanical” issues – they need an iterative (step-wise) approach, encircling and narrowing down the issues and possible responses. To avoid the ascendancy and supremacy of authorities and their preferred ideas/views, it is important to provide structures that withdraw the possibility of a few selected individuals to dominate and determine a situation. Working constantly and consistently in parallel, yet shifting sub-groups provides the golden opportunity.
• Follow an inherent flow of process: it is critical to design a process that on the one hand provides containers for the topics (content) to be dealt with extensively, and on the other hand leads the group of participants towards an objective and the production of results. This inner architecture of an event must caters for the defined outcomes and incorporate the flow towards that point. It is critical to move away from a “line-up” of individual thematic sessions; this produces often fragmentation in thinking, leaves things erratic rather than interlinking different aspects and it leads often to disorientation, the individual being lost in the succession of events, mental leaping and eventually lack of coherence of workshop outputs. A coherent architecture can guide participants through a full-fledged thought and learning process and eventually converges towards shared outputs and results.

Things to avoid

• Fragmentation of events, topic hopping, disruption of flow: “topic-based agendas” (listing individual sessions dedicated to individual topics or issues) should be avoided → cf. above
• Cognitive overflow (avalanches of information, overstretching of attention span): the workshop format of presentations is by design only suitable for simple messages. The human cognition is not capable to absorb larger amounts of information in this format. On top of this, the human attention span is limited to roughly 20-30 minutes – anything delivered beyond gets lost in the black hole of human exhaustion. Presentations are uniquely suited to bring across 2-3 key messages or ideas, which are very simple in nature, yet critically important and must be highly sticky. Yet, it takes a top presenter (professional in the art of presenting) to deliver such a presentation. The usual pitfalls (ie. projecting “speaker’s notes” by PowerPoint instead of visual supports and symbols → split of attention between media) can be very damaging – and many presentations fail to fulfil their purpose. Therefore they are a very risky format that requires a lot of care and knowledge to handle.
• Frontal formats: format like presentations, plenary Q&A’s and panels suggest – through the physical arrangement – a sense of “we” and “they”; they suggest and install hierarchy and superiority that are not conducive to the understanding of complex situations and issues. What’s more, they are detrimental to ownership, engagement, and commitment. What is needed instead is an atmosphere and a set-up of “us”, of co-thinking and co-creating.
• Sustaining authority & hierarchy: the dominant (and loud) voices – of authorities of some kind – often tend to level and paralyse the creative thought processes (based on diversity), that are indispensable to come to terms with complex issues and situations. For instance are classical plenary sessions (and classical Q&A’s) prone to be dominated by a few authoritarian individuals and tend to suppress dissent and deviant minority views. They often create an ambiance of aggression and controversy. For these reasons they can be “toxic” to gaining profound understanding, creative thinking and innovation, and therefore results.
• Jumping to conclusions: we always have the habit and inclination to prematurely rush to judgement, conclusion, decision; this stands in the way of thoroughly explore and understand alternative perspectives and ideas, which consistently leads to mediocre results that are more reiterating old ideas in new words.
• Hamper emergence, cross-fertilisation, innovation: many workshop formats don’t have the openness and freedom to allow for novelty to take place and emerge. They stifle innovation by not providing (enough) open spaces for the unplanned and unforeseeable to take place – and therefore prevent innovation by design.

Roles & Responsibilities of the Facilitator – and the Participants

In events and workshops of the nature described above, it is highly critical to clearly distinguish and separate the different roles in the event. Contrary to more conventional modes of facilitation, the facilitator is only responsible for the structure and process of the event, ie. she/he guides participants towards the sequence and flow of modules towards the defined goal. She/he ensures that the “containers” remain intact and integral, opens and closes them properly and ensures that rules are observed. That way she/he ensures that the results are achieved.

Participants as far as they are concerned take care of content and outcome: they contribute their expertise, reflections, ideas, suggestions, knowledge, they observe the content level, unearth insights and patterns and take charge of moulding outcomes.

The facilitator must strictly abstain from summarising, paraphrasing, assessing and the like (which is quite common in conventional forms of facilitation), as this constitutes an inside-out interference on the content level. Since the facilitator is mostly perceived as an (informal) authority, this will inevitably bias and distort the content level to the disadvantage of an optimal outcome, will hamper or even stifle the emergence of higher levels of understanding and insight; lastly there is a high risk that at least a few participants will perceive this kind of intervention as manipulative towards a predetermined (and superimposed) outcome. In this light it becomes understandable why in fact the less the facilitator knows about the theme of the event, the more can he fully focus on the actual social process – which is her/his defined role and responsibility – and the less is she/he tempted to interfere on the content level. Likewise the documentation raw material is largely produced by participants themselves and must be an output of the processes, which in its turn must be consolidated into an actual report by a (small group of) content matter specialists and managers.

Following the above it also becomes clear that the most important task of the facilitator is actually not the delivery (→ facilitation) of the event itself, but the design of the architecture, flow, structure, process and methods used during the event before it actually starts. Once it begins, facilitation is largely delivering and executing what has been designed – and the success of the event is largely determined by the preparatory work.

We then try to demonstrate (and convince people) that there is another way of designing these events. What we keep hearing is that (and I quote from an e-mail of a senior manager of a large organisation) “more substance should be reflected in the programme, instead of the process”. What we see is this constant misconception that it is either content or process, that process stands against content, that the two are a zero-sum. This is fundamentally untrue:  process is the underlying structure that creates the container for content and leads to results (or not – if badly chosen).

The relevant comparison is rather the following one:

When we come to process and the format of the event, we find ourselves with the choice between two paradigms:

So we could rather say that we have to choose between content and results – and the process is the underlying means to determine which alley we go down…

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.

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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/.

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!

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”

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.

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.