I’m giving this talk / workshop in Atlanta Georgia. The client  is looking for some academic & pragmatic ways to gather a wide variety of ideas, then create ways to implement the ideas. They are trying to shift the  default mode of  problem solving away from people who are senior or tenured within the organization.

We’ll see how it goes.

Leveraging diversity to find what works and amplify it

Central Argument

Gathering ideas from a wide variety of people will lead to more innovative and useful solutions.

Overview of the session

With rapid changes to the workplace environment and more people interacting at a quicker pace, organizations will flourish when they are able to change and adapt their methods of problem solving.

This requires a paradigm change from the more senior people know what to do and the junior people have little knowledge of what works, to a method of capturing knowledge of what works (whatever your level) and creating an environment where more people can be heard.

As an organization you must be able to know where the problem currently exists in order to determine which method is most useful. Not all problems are equal or require diverse inputs. From the Cynefin model (Snowden 2007) we can make better sense of what kind of problems we are facing and when diverse ideas, experiences and safe to fail experiments are useful.

Understanding when a problem is complicated or complex having a shared method or facilitation tool that the can capture and share diverse ideas is useful. From the diverse ideas small experiments can be proposed and tested, using these tests to determine what worked to amplify and what did not work to muffle.

Specific benefits from the session

• Introduction of a model, Cynefin, to make sense of what type of idea gathering method or tool to use.
• Working skilled-knowledge of an idea gathering and perspective shifting method / tool, Nine Windows.
• Using Nine Windows to capture diverse ideas and knowledge. Using the responses to determine possible experiments that may lead to emergent solutions.

Pre-Work

• Read ‘A Leaders Framework for Decision Making’
• Read ‘Innovation Nine Windows Create Learning’
• Read ‘Quality Tools to Discover Solutions Nine Windows’
• On your own try the Nine Windows Tool

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