2.4 Engage and participate
Continuing to work in the same groups, ask the participants to begin to think creatively around the focus areas. Remind people that this is about generating ideas rather than fully defined solutions.
A Creative Workshop is a good forum to both collect and share different stakeholder experiences. Therefore, allowing time and space for people to share their thoughts is essential, and so is the need for others to listen. A certain degree of informality such as that shown in Figure 4 can be useful for encouraging a free and open exchange of ideas. Don’t be afraid to assert your role as facilitator to make sure that everyone plays an equal part in the activity.
It is a good idea to let participants move around if they wish, to help them to re-energise, spark short discussions and avoid groups becoming too embedded in a single perspective. Their purpose here is to understand the ideas of other groups and expand on their best idea in light of the ideas of others.
Case Study 2 gives one suggestion for how you can help people to think in new ways as well as encourage participants to voice their ideas, no matter how unusual.
Case Study 2: Encouraging creative thinking
Florence was facilitating workshops with non-governmental organisation (NGO) country teams, with the purpose of planning expansion and developing new business. The staff worked in small groups. Each group was given a different picture from a newspaper or magazine to prompt curiosity. They were then asked to think of any words that came to mind from the picture and write them on a flip chart.
At this point, participants did not know where the exercise was leading. The flip charts were then distributed among the groups so that each group worked with a different list of words. Florence then asked the groups to relate each word to the overall purpose, which in this case was how to develop new business and expand.
What the group found surprising was that any word could be taken and given a meaning relating to the problem. This led to some creative and unexpected suggestions, which led to further discussion, as well as much laughter. Nothing was off limits and people were comfortable about being playful enough to generate genuinely new ideas.
2.3 Display interim progress