facilitation camp
Last week, Ian Drysdale and I were lucky enough to be able to go along to Facilitation Camp. The event, or “unconference”, was organised by DecisionLab and LondonCreativeLabs and aimed to bring together anyone involved in facilitation. So on the day that included people who had been involved in facilitating conversation between gangs in New Mexico, teachers, designers and psychotherapists, to name but a few.
It was an open space format where all the participants co-create the agenda on the day, and get the opportunity to learn, play and network.
As well as attending sessions, we ran a brief session on facilitation within live prototyping, discussing what we learnt from out recent projects, and learning from other people’s experiences. The three points we covered were:
- By visualising and prototyping ideas you can often find the debate vanishes - the conflict was over language and not the actual concept
- By creating multiple versions you can stop the group going round in circles debating the best approach. Again, the tangible makes things more straightforward
- It’s a cost effective way of testing out concepts
Sessions that spring to mind as particularly inspiring are; Susie Steed from NEF talking about Social Return on Investment, which was mind blowing, and Emily Wilkinson running a session on visual facilitation which was really interesting and inspiring.
Also David Pinto took us through his game called Action Cycle, which is a game that makes a group come up with, and committing to doing something amazing within a week. It was amazing!
It was a really interesting and exciting day and we feel very lucky to have been a part of it, and to have met so many fascinating, open minded, and generous people.
