Early in March, I joined a three day workshop with an incredibly ambitious aim: “Creative Thinking Forum on Creating a Viable Australia”. The event drew some 60-70 people together from around Australia.
I wondered if we were all crazy.
Yet the process, ‘Design Shop’ created and facilitated by Matt Taylor and hosted at The Difference in Sydney was extraordinary and enlightening.
Matt is an irrepressible 70 yr old, with a mind rich with concepts and processes worked out over a lifetime of engagement with creative practices, coming from an architecture background, but now applying his work across many domains.
We might not have created a viable Australia in a single weekend, but what emerged was a very serious attempt to describe the conditions and processes under which such an aim was even imaginable.
What did I learn from the process? 1. Matt’s design places a high premium on ‘structure’ – the careful staging of each piece of the workshop process to create the fundamental platform for ‘unleashing group genius’. I was impressed by the rigour of Matt’s process. Unusual in the realm of facilitation and change management, he has a meticulous approach to the precise sequencing of very specific processes. In the early “scanning” phase it is open, divergent, in the middle “Focus” stage the emphasis is on distilling the critical features (indeed the very definition) of the problem,in the final “Act” phases different methodologies and processes ensure rapid action planning. Along the way, he uses constant iteration to create, test and refine the robustness of the concepts.
2. That it is worth taking two of the three days to define the problem. Normally we jump to working on solutions about a nano-second after a problem is declared. We prematurely seek alignment and agreement. This does a disservice to the complexity of much of our work.
3. That the future must be addressed from ‘there’ not from ‘here’. Like Otto Scharmer (links below), Matt Taylor’s process insists on the uncertainty of an emergent future. It is no use extrapolating from the present to address
the future.
A web site is being created to capture the results of this process, and invite other to join. Watch this space, and we will publish the links as they emerge.
Links
Matt Taylor http://www.matttaylor.com/
(enter at your peril, there is so much here, representing a kind of lifetime notebook. My current favourite is the “Solution Box” but you will have to search to find it.
An article on Design Shop
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/11/genius.html
Otto Sharmer Theory U
http://www.ottoscharmer.com/publications/summaries.php
The Difference is a purpose-built workshop space in Sydney, based on Matt Taulor design principles