For my PhD research my plan was to conduct a series of workshops for the local entrepreneurs and organisations to see if any of this designerly methodology brings anything new to their repertoire of working together or solving challenges. (btw, work here = problem solving, there are no clear,
functioning processes to such simple things as paying salary or fulfilling an order). One thing is to arrange a workshop, to agree a time and a date, to make sure that people actually get to the workshop, and to pray for some mythical elf to have electricity on that very day. Postponing workshops about eight times just… because turned out to be fairly common. Another things is to introduce new and random methods for the people to use and to motivate the people to engage in using them. It’s not once or twice that I see confused faces and participants in disbelief. And maybe unlike the above, this is the fault and the challenge of the facilitator – me.
The easiest thing to get to work are those warm-up exercises that for an average person don’t have any other objective than to accomplish the task given. For example, I pulled the good-old spaghetti ‘n marshmallow challenge to demonstrate some simple issues in group communication. The groups were excited trying to build the highest tower, fighting, failing, showing their ideas with the actual material, and taking a bit different roles. It was fun and it worked. Then we switched to deal with actual challenges that the organisation faces. The goal was first to understand the two different phases of problem formulation and problem solving. We first took on the formulation phase. Some simple tasks to e.g. ask five times why to find out more thorough thoughts on the causes, or to arrange the insights in a two-by-two matrix to arrange information and to spot the root causes that are fairly readily solvable. This phase already caused a lot of stops and stuttering in the groups. What surprises me the most was that somehow they get stuck to rules and don’t dare to do much in their own way, but more wait until the rules are explained to them so that they are confident to do exactly what is told. Just so that they don’t feel like they are failing to accomplish the task. It seems more important than the actual issues at hand. I don’t even want to go to how uncomfortable they were and I was when I asked them to act and simulate their problem situation in their groups… taller3 One thing gladly worked pretty well. In another workshop I was with the few Hilanderia (yarn factory) managers discussing some of the challenges they have in their production. I made a small board-game-like production simulation to basically try out how can they increase production with the same amount of workers by re-scheduling them or by hiring a few more (they had more demand than they could produce). I was so delighted when the game actually provoked some exchange of thoughts among the participants. Some little kid in me woke up when they started to take the little plastic soldiers and moving them around and saying ‘what if this guy goes here after his finished there and helps this guy out.’ : ) taller2 Anyways.. need to just go onwards and find some new tricks to engage and motivate people to get out of their comfort zone and usual habits. Learning all the time! fuente modosalinerito 
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