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The Art of Gathering

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Innovation work from identifying problems in need of solutions, generating ideas, creating things, and simply providing the inspiration and mutual support for doing the work often requires gathering.

Whether it is face-to-face, online, or some hybrid option the same general rules apply for what makes a good gathering when it comes to the up-front work.

Priya Parker has made the art of gathering a focus of her life’s mission and work and has pulled together some brilliant resources for those of us who are looking to bring people together.

These opening questions are the starting place by asking some fundamental questions about the purpose of gathering (something too often forgotten about).

Here are Priya’s recommended questions to help guide you in gathering:

  • Who is this for? What is it that this person loves to do? 
  • What are the various gifts or talents or skills of the people invited? 
  • How do you actually want to spend the time? 
  • How will you create a “moment of focus”? 
  • If this is a digital gathering, what are simple ways you can have guests bring something or wear something that connects them to the purpose, the person of honor and each other?  

Among the most valuable assets engaged in any innovation effort is time and attention and by asking these simple questions we can best use and respect both.

Perspective Taking Circles

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The power of perspective is one of the things that differentiates high output and impact innovators from others. It’s easy to get lucky or have good timing, but it’s another to create value when those things don’t happen.

One of the ways we do this is by engaging in some perspective-taking. This simple exercise and question set can help build some of the ‘thought muscles’ that can help encourage us to see, imagine, and engage things differently for creative benefit.

The Exercise

This works best when physically in the same space and can work online as well. What you need is to create a space where people can re-position themselves against a central object that can be almost anything except a ball (because it looks the same from every angle). Place your participants around the object with a comfortable space to sit or stand.

You can do this virtually using a dynamic space like Kumospace or some other virtual reality-like environment. It can also work using a board like Miro or Mural with some designed object in the middle, but it is more awkward.

The idea is that everyone has a chance to literally see things from a different point of view.

This can be done as an observation exercise but is more enhanced when it is combined with drawing. Asking people to draw what they see — no matter what kind of skills or abilities participants have with sketching — is a great means to engage people in thinking more deeply about their perspective.

Once individuals have had time to observe and reflect on what they see, the next step is to have everyone share their perspective. This is where drawings are useful as people can speak to what they drew as drawing focuses us on certain elements and provides a means to account for those perspectives. It also allows others to point to the drawing and make specific, not general comments.

It’s that specificity that is key to illuminating and articulating differences of perspective.

Uses

The role of this method is to reveal how where we sit in a system — even a small one of people interconnected around a shared experience of an object — can have remarkably different perceptions of the same thing in the same space.

It begins to build cultural practices around creating space for exploring and sharing perspectives within an organization and can serve as a base for better organizational design and learning.

It’s simple, engaging, and revealing in its method.

Designing for Awful

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One of the most profound, fun, and engaging techniques for creating an attractive service or product design is oddly focused on the exact opposite: Designing for Awful.

How to use this

This strategy is as simple as it is effective. When workshopping ideas allot some time to have participants develop ideas and designs for the worst possible version of the thing they are designing.

This is a flip of a traditional ideation session where people try to develop suggestions for what to focus on, whom, and what the best use of resources might be. In Designing for Awful, we do the opposite. It is used usually in tandem with ideation sessions that are focused on surfacing ideas in general.

This can be used to frame a service, product or describe the experience of doing something like a survey or participating in an event. It’s a simple, fun, and sometimes counter-intuitive way to surface assumptions, biases, and qualities in what we want, need and don’t want in our design.

Like any ideation-focused exercise, it must be managed appropriately. Individuals need to feel safe in surfacing ideas, free to discuss them, and preferably, offer an opportunity to share at least some of them anonymously. People generally have a lot of fun with this simple exercise.

Benefits

The benefits of this are many.

Firstly, it focuses on the things we tend to avoid — unpleasant feelings, experiences, or sensation — and thus, might be missed in consideration of our design.

It also overcomes an optimism bias. Design is largely a positive-oriented practice where we look to solve problems, not make them. Designing for Awful helps us to move around this bias by looking at what is not addressed.

This approach is also excellent for helping surface values in practice and in specific terms. To illustrate, it’s one thing to speak in a positive or affirmative tone such as a statement like “we value inclusivity.” Designing for Awful could lead us to be specific “Our service is inaccessible to someone with a mobility disability” or “it is sexist” or “our product can only be used by people who are right-handed.” By surfacing what makes something not work we are better able to see what will.

This approach is also excellent in helping, paradoxically, surface what we want by framing things in terms we don’t want. How often have you met someone who first tells you what they don’t want in something before they get to describing what they want?

This allows people to have a little fun and we find that some people are more bold and assertive with their creativity in the negative, than the positive and this technique lets that come out.

Lastly, the exercise can be a useful way to surface who needs to be at the table moving forward. We find that the need for having the voices of certain individuals, groups, roles, or departments in the discussion is better clarified when we consider how bad things would be without them.

Try this out at your next design session or team meeting as part of a check-in and you might find some laughs and some deep insight along with it.

If you want to inspire new thinking and better design in your organization for engagement and impact, reach out and contact us. This is what we do.

Seeing Futures: The Long Now Approach

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No one can see the future, but we can gain a glimpse of what might come and how what we are doing today might take us there by using this technique or tool called The Long Now.

The Long Now involves taking an idea that might be on the horizon or emerging and envisioning what it might look like when adopted and carried into the future. The approach is inspired by long-term thinking and gets us to frame ideas that might be attractive, threatening or unclear today and builds a future for them over time.

Designing with the Long Now

Identify a trend that is emerging and is likely to affect the near-future (e.g., 6-12 months). This could be anything within a STEEP-V (Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political or Values-based trends) framework or something similar.

Now imagine that phenomenon coming into being. This means that children born today will only know the world with this in their lives. They and everyone else will grow up with, interact with, adapt to, adopt, and work with this ‘thing’ in their lives.

Imagine what kind of barriers, enablers, and circumstances will accompany this new thing.

Then imagine what it will look and feel like in five year increments as it evolves along.

To illustrate, consider those people who first encountered the Internet in the early 1990’s and then what it looked like as the decade moved on to the dot-com boom and bust, the dawn of social media, the rise of the app and mobile handset and so on. That’s a retrospective look. What you are doing with The Long Now is creating a prospective, visionary look.

Sketch out a series of snapshots at 5-year intervals that allow you to highlight and uncover ways in which this idea will interact with the systems — technological, social, cultural, and environmental — around it. (Five Year intervals are chosen because it’s enough time to see change, but close enough to be able to stitch together patterns of plausible development between them)

What this approach can do is help see threats, opportunities, and identify possible pitfalls, benefits, and choices that could affect the design of something moving forward. It also is useful as a means of assessing the plausibility or viability of something that is emerging. Could it be a fad or does it have the means to be adopted into the fabric of everyday life?

Taking The Long Now approach provides a small window into a much larger, unknown world ahead to help strategize, design, and anticipate possible futures.

Using Timelines To Track Activities

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Just as parents will use pencil notches in a wall to track the height of their children as a developmental marker, so too can innovators and evaluators use timelines to help gather and track the development of programs and projects over time.

A timeline is a simple linear visual that gathers activities together that uses time as the variable of distinction.

What makes a timeline useful is that it provides a visual display of temporal relationships between events, activities and outcomes. It makes explicit what we might have in our heads, but are also prone to confusing and forgetting over time.

When to Use Timelines

Timelines are useful in a variety of situations:

  1. Projects with activities that can be organized into a sequence (whether planned or not). They are less useful for projects where there are many activities happening simultaneously.
  2. Projects with a long time horizon.
  3. Projects operating in an environment with many different levels of activities and influences. For example, when there are external factors like policy decisions that have discrete times attached to them and can influence a project’s course, this is a good use of a timeline.
  4. Projects that have a story to tell that involves a beginning, middle, and end.

A timeline can help provide anchors between project activities and events — whether those are policy-related, tied to human (or other) resource use, environmental disruptions, seasons, or cycles. They can help provide hypotheses between causes and consequences or explain mediators.

For example, one non-profit project we worked on had a planned roll-out that was moving along well until their funder abruptly cancelled the program that they relied on. This meant that the six-months after that announcement involved finding new sources of revenue, reductions in staffing, and changes in some activities, yet also persistence in trying to adapt to the situation and still execute the original plan. By showing the data on a timeline it helped explain what happened to project activities, outputs, and outcomes within a certain time period and how that related to the overall project plan.

Examples

Below is an example of a timeline that illustrates distinctive markers along the route. These are clearly defined events that took place on specific dates. The selection of events includes those deemed to be meaningful and significant to the project.

What makes a timeline a powerful tool is that there are many different ways to illustrate events. The example above is a relatively straightforward set of data.

Below is another example that involves much more data and in different forms. This example creates a hybrid of timeline and categorization exercise.

Creating Timelines

There are many templates and tools that can be used to help develop visual graphics. The examples above are from Lucidchart, however, tools like Miro, Mural, SmartDraw, PowerPoint, Google Draw, and many others have templates that can be modified to create useful timelines. These are all simple tools that can be manipulated easily so you’re able to build them as you go.

If you are looking to develop more sophisticated models, we suggest employing a visual communicator or graphic designer to take advantage of the many ways you can represent temporal data.

The result is something that is engaging and can easily be discussed or presented to diverse stakeholders involved in a project who might be able to validate, contribute to, or constructively challenge the arrangements. We find this to be a powerful way to organize our findings, refresh our memories, and recognize all of the activities that go into a project.

Documenting Innovation Development

Lastly, if you are developing an innovation where there is no clear ‘end’ known at the beginning, timelines are useful in telling the story of the project and documenting the different pivots, changes, adaptations, and their consequences. A timeline can be a powerful asset to Developmental Evaluation and a complement to the Living History Method that we often employ in those kinds of evaluations.

A timeline can honour all the work you put into coming up with your final product and can be an engaging way to get people involved in celebrating, documenting, and tracking what you do and create.

We use these all the time and can help you track and evaluate your project. Contact us and let’s talk about timelines, innovation and impact.