Hi there!
This fortnight’s creative prompt is centred around collaboration and the shared values that underpin it.
I am fixated on this right now because I am preparing to deliver a workshop on this theme for the Association of Tertiary Education Managers on the 21 November.
We all understand the reasons why collaboration is beneficial and even essential. Collective imagination and a pooling of skills, knowledge, experience, training, and personal strengths can allow teams to transcend individual capabilities and achieve unique outcomes. The best collaborations also afford individual team-members the opportunity to develop both technical and collaboration skills, equipping them for their next collaborative project.
Good collaborations take effort and demand much of their participants in terms of personal skillsets and mindsets. It is easier to approach being in a collaboration if you understand what the collaboration mindset entails – how to shift in perspective from working alone to co-creating. And this becomes easier when a team can identify a set of shared values that will inform their collaborative process and ground the work of a team from different disciplines.
This theme of the importance of collective-values has, unsurprisingly, come up a few times during the interviews I have been doing this year for my Near and Far project, which is all about the arts as a transversal skillset, especially within collaborations.
Paulina Larocca, creativity author, trainer, and provocateur, had this to say when I asked her whether people understood the importance of a shared value sets within collaboration:
“I think there is. I think there’s a general understanding that you need to have it, but I think we get a little uncomfortable about how to actually probe those things.”
Now, as a facilitator, I have a couple of little tricks up my sleeve to use to get a conversation going in order to probe these things. I should mention here that this week’s creative prompt was also inspired by a recent request for advice from a client on how to approach such a conversation.
So, my challenge to you this fortnight is to get creative about experience design.
If you were facilitating a conversation with a group of co-creators and getting them to talk to value-sets then how would you do it?
What creative prompts would you use? Thought-exercises? Drawing activities? Embodied activities? Listening exercises?
If a face to face event, where would you have it? Would there be catering? Design a menu! Would you take it outside? A walking meeting or sitting inside on squishy sofas?
If online, how would you animate or ground the discussion to get past the discombobulating effect of online meetings?
Most importantly of all: How would the design elements you choose be in service to a conversation inviting co-creators to deep dive about values?
Let me know what you come up with:
By the way, if time zone differences work out for you, the ATEM workshop is still taking bookings:
Shared values and collaboration mindset: Be inspired and equipped to identify and develop a shared set of values to underpin collaboration. Online. 21 Nov. 11am-1pm AEDT.
Otherwise, I’ll see you here on Substack soon.