Open Space and Graphic Recording

The inspirational new head of the HASS Faculty and Newcastle University has launched a Faculty-wide discussion about the values of the Faculty. She is pursuing this in various ways, and in conversation with her a while ago, we agreed that an Open Space event might be a valuable part of the process.

We held the event last week, at St James' Park (home of NUFC)  and around a hundred academics and professional support staff came along for the day.  As ever, I was slightly apprehensive at the start of the day: a hundred people and no agenda...  But as ever, people were full of ideas about the important questions to discuss, and quickly generated a large number of options.

Then there was the slightly messy business of constructing the agenda: people signing up for the questions they personally wished to discuss and then arranging the timings of the sessions so that as many as possible could get to all the topics they had chosen. Some people find this stage of the process uncomfortable,as it is somewhat chaotic and, finally, arbitrary. I always enjoy it: seeing order emerge from the chaos.  And in my experience, the group always manages to produce an agenda that works very well.


We had also invited John Ashton along - a graphic facilitator, recommended by Eleanor Beer, with whom I have worked before. John started with a blank sheet of paper, which mirrored our process of course, and over the day built up a comprehensive record of all the many discussions that had taken place. A number of participants were intrigued to watch this process, and the resultant poster (and electronic copies of it) will be very helpful both in reminding attendees and informing others who were unable to attend, of the range and key themes of the many rich discussion.

What I particularly enjoyed about the day was the huge, and unexpected, range of topics discussed: from how to have fun to how better to engage with the city and region.  But you can see the full range of the discussion in John's graphic poster, below. 

Not Quite Open Space

I helped to run a large workshop this week for the Medical Education people at Cardiff University. We wanted to run a very inclusive event, so as well as the academics, clinicians and administrators involved, we invited students and patients' representatives.  So it was a large group, with over a hundred participants.

The agenda, in broad terms, was to agree how to build on the significant improvements already made to medical education, which has seen Cardiff making rapid progress according to almost all the relevant measures.

We also wanted to demonstrate from the word go that it was only through the engagement of all that further progress will be sustained.

So given those considerations, we decided against any formal presentations. Instead, we sent people a small amount of background information in advance, for context. Then we invited them to decide what it would be most valuable to talk about.

This was not quite an Open Space event: we did not solicit their ideas for the topics to discuss on the day. Instead, we had generated some ideas in advance, and circulated them, asking for additional suggestions.  That meant that on the day, we were able to present a list of possible topics, which participants signed up to. We were also able to prepare a briefing note for each topic, suggesting some questions to explore, and stressing the need for action ideas.

Then, after a brief intro and a fun icebreaker, to warm people up, we threw it over to the participants: they chose which topics they wanted to discuss, discussed them, and then reported back in plenary. We then did the same again, and concluded by checking that we all knew who was going to type up the notes for each of the groups that had met and, crucially, who was going to take responsibility for taking the action ideas forward.

The event generated a lot of energy, a lot of discussion and learning, and many significant ideas to move the agenda forward. It also fostered a real team spirit, and along with that a real commitment to implement the ideas.

It was interesting and fun for me to build on the work I have been doing using an Open Space approach, in a different context where a full Open Space event might not have been appropriate. And once again, I am grateful to a client for allowing me to experiment with something slightly different from anything I have done before.  We all learned a lot!

Collision Spaces

Over the last week, I have begun reviewing the series of Strategic Workshops I have been co-facilitating at Cardiff University over the last academic year.

I always find that a useful process: it is invariably interesting and sometimes humbling (in different ways) to hear what people have taken away and implemented from events.

One thing that has struck me has been the importance of collision spaces.  This has come at me from three different angles, as it were.

In the first place, we have been using an Open Space approach. I have blogged about Open Space (albeit in a different context) before, here. But one way of thinking of it is that it provides precisely a collision space: we start with no fixed agenda (though there is a clear theme) and participants propose what they think it would be most fruitful to talk about, team up with others who think they too would like to talk about a particular issues, and ideas and experiences thus collide. As a result, new ideas can (and do) emerge.

The process is simple: we start with an empty agenda: merely some time slots and some available rooms (first picture). People then propose ideas for discussion, post them on another board or wall, and sign up to the topics they most want to talk about (second picture). They then pull together an agenda with different conversations taking place in different rooms at the same time, trying to create a sequence that allows all to participate in the conversations they have signed up for (third picture).

One of the gratifying things I have been told whilst conducting the review, is that many people found this approach particularly helpful, to the extent that they have been running Open Space events themselves since, to address a range of issues; and that these too have been very valuable.

Related, but different, is the drawing together of people from different places within an organisation, so that they collide, or at least come into contact, with those who they don't normally speak to. Again, the feedback has been consistent that this is very valuable; but people report that they are too busy to make this happen unless some structure, such as a workshop (or even a regular coffee break) is put in place that engineers it.

The third angle on this was a topic that came up frequently in the discussions. Many people suggested that the University needed more physical collision spaces - coffee rooms, water cooler corners, cafés and so forth - where staff would bump into colleagues in an environment other than formal meetings, and where different types of conversations could happen, perhaps with different people. Many spoke of the value of such serendipitous conversations, which can build relationships, smooth processes, and even lead to new research collaborations.

So it is worth considering how we can create such collision spaces - whether the physical space, or the enabling events such as agreed coffee or lunch breaks with colleagues, or indeed the larger scale workshops and Open Space activities.

The temptation is always to get on with the work, of course; but again and again, people attest to the fact that taking a break and making time for others is not only humanising, but also truly productive.

Open Space

Yesterday we had the day on Learning and Teaching at Cardiff Futures.

We ran the day as an Open Space Event.

So the agenda at the start of the day looked like this:

Tricia Price, the PVC for Student Experience and Academic Standards set the context by telling us some of the issues that 'keep her awake at night.'

Participants then said what they felt it would be most valuable to discuss and crafted an agenda for the day, based on which of them wanted to discuss which issues.

 So a little later, the agenda look like this:

So that's what we did!

The beauty of this process is that people get to talk about the issues that they believe to be most important and interesting: it should ensure that nobody leaves feeling 'the one thing we really needed to talk about was...' and it acknowledges, honours, and draws upon the high levels of expertise that reside within the group.

Towards the end of the day, we came back together in plenary, and some highlights of the discussions were shared with Colin Riordan, the Vice Chancellor and the Tricia Price, the relevant PVC, as well as between participants.

We ended the day, as we usually do, with 'brief Action Learning' in the small sets that have been running throughout the programme.

This is the penultimate day of the programme: we have a final day of reflection and celebration in June; and then kick off a new programme with a new cohort in the autumn (book early to avoid disappointment!)