Fiona and I chorused in despair at the final session in a World Health Organization work/learning programme on collaborative meetings and products. Here’s a bit of the backstory but first I’ll tantalise you a bit with the rhino photo then wind my way back to it.
This is the second outing for a six-session series I ran for Alim Khan, working with WHO practitioners, whose projects and challenges range across the world, both in working to build robust health delivery capacity in a ‘business as usual’ way and in preparedness for, and response to, emergencies. There will be a book, almost certainly we’ll stay true to the spirit of the programme in using paperspaces, so there’ll probably be postcards and worksheet and storycube templates. There may be T Shirts. This time round I ran it with David Gunn from The Incidental, and it was a true delight to spend a couple of months that close to his inventiveness as a practitioner of participatory processes. Here’s an extract from the invitation
PRODUCING COLLABORATIVE MEETINGS & PRODUCTS AT WHO.
A programme of six half-day modules, run over two months where you will learn how to run meetings/projects in more effective, participatory ways and apply those skills to one of your projects as we go along
What will you get out of it?
- more choices | when designing meetings and workshops to engage participants, to move beyond traditional presentations, and to build substantice outcomes
- a wider range of engagement tools | for producing products (guidelines, technical documentation etc) and offering truly collaborative alternatives to traditional ‘draft and circulate’ practices
- confidence to leverage a range of technology | including in-house solutions such as GoToMeeting as well as a variety of external tools at varying levels of complexity and cost
- the full range of analogue to digital | stretching understanding of what makes a collaborative tool - from objects, to paper spaces, to room layout, to different facilitation tools and so on
- redefinition of the meeting space | rethinking what needs to be done in’the meeting space’ and what can be done before and after to build momentum, focus and depth over a project journey
- theoretical underpinnings | that allow you to grasp the broader impact of choosing or not choosing a particular set of tools as you implement your workplaces
- case examples | from both WHO and external sources, including writeshops, unconferencing, meeting wikis, and more - from simple tools to improve a particular meeting to toolboxes that will improve the effectiveness of broader workstreams
- a chance to contribute | to a creative, innovative WHO learning programme which will result in a published archive of practice in participatory techniques. This archive will be shared throughout WHO and with selected external audiences.
And we really did do a lot of that and were lucky enough this time, to have people who went off and tried stuff out, including a workshop in Mozambique, and came back to tell the tale. We also played with working in googledocs this time, where we’d used socialtext last time, and we were lucky enough to have a brilliant repeat webinar about webinars, through GoToMeeting, with Clive Holtham from Cass Business School. More will unfold, bit by bit, as we assemble our final document and I’ll share a bit of that here as we work on it, with Sebastian and Adeel, the two interns who have been with us for the last part of the ride and will see the project out with us.
[Marginalia | The best anecdote from our farewell drink with them. They’d just been to the CERN reactor Halloween fancy dress party for interns across Geneva, the only Halloween party, they said, where you’d find nuclear physicists dressed as molecules and Higgs boson particles….]
As we work up our final documentation, we’re being very much governed by Brian Eno thinking that David shared early on, and by our mutual passion for curation of experiences in order to show them from the inside out:
‘We are convinced by things that show internal complexity, that show the traces of an interesting evolution… An important aspect of a design is the degree to which the object involves you in its own completion. Some work invites you into itself by not offering a finished, glossy one-reading-only surface. I think that humans have a taste for things that not only show that they have been through a process of evolution, but which also show they are still a part of evolution. They are not dead yet …’
Meanwhile, a few snaps from my own collection. David insisted, after the first session, that we used the Hipstamatic app on iphones and the android equivalent (generation gap, David and I on iphones, Adeel and Sebastian on android phones). I’m afraid he only taught me how to shake it around to randomise lenses rather late on, although I think i did it by accident, and he was quite stern with me about getting odd angles to improve the wit. I’m working on it. Most of my shots look like the bottom of an uncleaned swimming pool, which I like but which David insists isn’t quite right for the aesthetics (a word he’s very fond of). Anyway, here goes.
The first couple are from module 3, when we played with storycubes as an extension of paper spaces, and as kind of three dimensional postcards. We also used a polaroid camera to collect portrait pictures of participants which we annotated in different ways, so you can see the camera, and Adeel’s hands, laying out the photos as a briefing session in the third shot.
This next shot is of Yolanda (whose first event is coming up in Colombia in November, and she’s also looking at using some of the approaches in development of training for ship sanitation certification. She’s having a lively conversation with Clive Holtham before the webinar, down the the other end of the webcam.
[Marginalia | satisfying that I’ve been able to hook Yolande up with people in Bogota from my May trip to Colombia, and to Juanita Brown, the originator of World Cafe, which is one of the tools Yolande is looking at using]
The final couple of shots are from our next-to-final event. We had to lug a ton of heavy chairs out of the room to stand a chance of rearranging it, and the symbolism of chairs in the corridor says a great deal about the default meeting room, but we did hang on to the tables to do a lot of archetype and clustering on pinboarding cards. Having got Adeel’s hands in earlier, here are Sebastian’s rather fine pair. The day had been pretty gloomy but the sun came out while we were doing this work and I tried to get the slanting shadows across the table.
[Marginalia | We’d thought about hexagons, but decided to stick with pinboarding cards, messier but nice. The clustering led to a neat concept that ended up being labelled as ‘wiggle room’: those parts of a meeting or collaborative process where you have a chance to reinvent, as opposed to those where to fly in the face of tradition and protocol is simply too hard until, unless, there’s a cultural tipping point. Talking of paper space, I’d become quite obsessed with the idea of using sandwich flags to map our landscape of collaboration on to David’s rather nice fractal maps, but we never got round to using either, partly through time and how the rhythm of our sessions unfolded, but also because the sandwich flags wouldn’t stick easily into the boards we had we we didn’t have time to get styrofoam backing for the maps. Next time. It’ll be the only expenses record ever that comes from Partyrama I expect.]
To the wrong-way-facing rhino.
We’ve been big on touch during these sessions, and on imagery, metaphor, mnemonics, rituals, having strong mechanisms, however subtle, of arrival, beginning, ending, departure.
[Marginalia | William Bridges is pretty good on this in Managing Transitions, but with a less storied feel than we were seeking: Daniel Kahneman on the remembering self is also an influence here.]
We wanted a good ending, which was also a beginning (a final session of transition, with people, having faced backwards or into the immediate present, or faced each other, turning together to face outwards towards the future and the next thing). So we asked people to bring with them an object that for them symbolised this experience of a cooperative enquiry into collaboration in some way or another.
Luck gave us a final meeting room in batiment X (definitely a kind of shadowy netherworld in WHO spaces) on the ground floor with windows that opened out onto a raised piece of land, now the ‘meadow’ with the WHO panoptican of a building rearing up over it in the background.
Chance had it that on our stroll up through leafy alleyways from the WHO building from a latish number 8 bus to our youth hostellish dwelling, we walked past a little ‘vide grenier’ outside a grand Swiss chalet in the lanes behind the UN complex (a bizarre juxtaposition of worlds and cultures). An old chair, a picture, a few bits and pieces of trash, and a children’s multi-coloured desk. We decided this would be our display cabinet. So David lugged it home and then back again the next morning, and we shuffled it past a very confused security guard and into the main atrium, along corridors, and into Batiment X where we tucked it away in a corner for most of the session.
With 30 minutes to go, we invited people to step up onto a chair, out through the window and onto the meadow and into our ritual of ending and beginning, in full view of all the (many) offices on that side of WHO.
Here’s David on his way out of the window:
I have to say, it was easier getting out than stumbling back in and here’s the ‘true’ position of the desk and objects while we did our ending thing:
I’m reminded very much of a bit of an interview with MarK Wallinger that I read in the Guardian during the time we’ve been running this CMP series:
‘I made a breakthrough when I realised that meaning is something you construct … it wasn’t until I separated out the elements of my art and began to trust them that I felt I made real progress. It was opening up to an honesty about the ingredients I was using. Not thinking there was some sort of magical sleight of hand that generates art. Actually you can put three things together” – he reaches out and randomly nudges together a phone, a ruler and a photograph on the table in front on him – “and you can say ‘have a look at that.’ Those three elements still retain their separate identities, but somehow, just by their juxtaposition, something else happens. I liked reaching the point where it felt I was opening up a dialogue with the viewer. That seemed more honest.’
Mark Wallinger from an interview in the Guardian newspaper September 2011
David decided to move the desk for a final photoshoot (the picture I opened with) with the WHO building in the background and then we had the most peculiar and delightful negotiation, quite spontaneously, about the arrangement of the objects. Adeel’s lunchbag on its side or standing up. It was quite odd we had a collective understanding. Except that David turned Fiona’s rhino to face outwards and we both yelled in unison, and quite distressed in fact:
‘but the rhino is facing the wrong way’
I have no clue why we both knew or why it mattered so much, but David reluctantly turned the rhino round (composition weakened, aesthetics under threat) and we were both mightily relieved. (We discovered some other things that matter to us both too, like closed doors and contained spaces.)
One of the shorthands we’ve evolved (derived from the project narrative worksheet we worked on in the first module) is ‘before the before’ and ‘after the after’, the parts of projects and meetings and collaborations in general that get overlooked but matter more than almost anything. In any case, David’s object was ‘Species of Spaces’ by Georges Perec. He’d bought it to lend to me, decided to read it first and so deferred lending, used it as his object (for very good reasons) and then decided it had become so freighted with symbolism that he needed to gift it there and then after the ending, so maybe just stumbling into after the after, at the Number 8 bus stop as we headed down to Le Rouge et Le Blanc before heading to the airport. I am reading it now, and only just restraining myself from quoting large chunks of it in delight.
Instead, I’ll end with a bit David Bohm and that seems like a good place to end for now:
‘…awakening…the process of dialogue itself as a free flow of meaning among all the participants. In the beginning, people were expressing fixed positions, which they were tending to defend, but later it became clear that to maintain the feeling of friendship in the group was much more important than to hold any position. Such friendship has an impersonal quality in the sense that its establishment does not depend on a close personal relationship between participants. A new kind of mind thus beings to come into being which is based on the development of a common meaning that is constantly transforming in the process of the dialogue. People are no longer primarily in opposition, nor can they be said to be interacting, rather they are participating in this pool of common meaning which is capable of constant development and change. In this development the group has no pre-established purpose, though at each moment a purpose that is free to change may reveal itself. The group thus begins to engage in a new dynamic relationship in which no speaker is excluded, and in which no particular content is excluded. Thus far we have only begun to explore the possibilities of dialogue in the sense indicated here, but going further along these lines would open up the possibility of transforming not only the relationship between people, but even more, the very nature of consciousness in which these relationships arise.’
victoriaward
