Dr. Douglas Reid presents Appreciative Inquiry to the group. This introduction to the approach was followed by a practice session.
Join Design with Dialogue from 6-9 pm on the second Wednesday of every month at OCAD’s sLab. We are a community of practice who learn together how to lead conversations for meaningful action through participatory design, strategic dialogues and the co-creation of emerging facilitation methods.
August’s session will be hosted by Kaleem Khan and Peter Jones based on the design-friendly practices of Appreciative Inquiry (AI) and World Café. Due to interest from last month’s participants, we will move forward with our group’s scenarios (for a near-future Toronto) as triggered by themes from our experiences of recent G20 events.
To address the concern for “What should we do now?”, we’ll use AI to create a positive framework for working together and then gather in a World Café to generate new possibilities for action.
Improv play and drawing are rumored for this session. For newcomers to visual thinking, we introduce approaches to structured and informal sketching to enhance the dialogue with a graphic representation of our conversation.
Please join us for another lively, engaging and educational session and forward this invitation along to anyone you know who might be interested in attending.
How to apply game thinking to your business challenges:
www.gogamestorm.com
Dr. Doug Reid’s presentation on the facilitation method Appreciative Inquiry:
Thanks to James Caldwell for posting a review of our June DwD session on his blog.
James discusses our learning of Appreciative Inquiry…
and the case study performed on OCAD University’s rebranding exercise.
July’s session was Framing Reality and Scenarios of Social Meaning, hosted by Greg Judelman and Peter Jones.
In each session this year we have explored a pressing issue or question from the group’s experience, or brought to the sessions as a concern for dialogue. Reality handed us a good question after the recent G20 meeting.
We explored ways of framing the concerns we sometimes call “problems.” Impelled by the urgent and messy mix of issues we saw emerging following the G20 security event in Toronto, we inquired into the framing of the situation. What are the opportunities inherent in the problem as constructed? How do we establish and pierce through a problem frame so that the true concerns we share in common might emerge?
Our deck presentation:
A visual reflection from Patricia Kambitsch reveals impressions of the dialogue leading into scenario formation.
In June’s Design with Dialogue we go in-depth with Appreciative Inquiry, a technique for affirmative conversations that lead to shared understanding about situations or goals. The session will be led by Dr. Douglas Reid, a strategy professor at Queen’s University School of Business and graduate student in OCAD’s Strategic Foresight and Innovation MDes program. Appreciative Inquiry,, developed at Case Western Reserve University in the 1980s by David Cooperrider, was originated as a practice for coordinating positive dialogues in organizations, and it has emerged as a social design approach over the last few years.
AI built on earlier work conducted by action research theorists and is intended to expand a system’s capacity for cooperation and change potential by aligning members through shared affirmations of what is best, desirable, or cherished in a jointly-faced situation. After briefly outlining the rationale and background of AI, Doug will lead the group through an exploration of a sample problem (created and confirmed by the group) so as to demonstrate the AI technique and show how it expands the potential for cooperation through definition of shared aims or goals.
Doug provides a brief article discussing Appreciative Inquiry that may help participants gain an orientation to the practice and its power in design, organizational inquiry, and social action.
Register today on Eventbrite, and introduce yourself if your first time!
The May Design with Dialogue featured The Presence Workshop was hosted by Dexter Ico.
The Presence Workshop is about play and public speaking. It’s experiential, intensive, and spontaneous; having fun with the serious. It’s about sensing your self and censoring your self-doubt, because the knowledge you communicate to others is also always felt. People listen to presence, let’s practice speaking from it.
Even my mom is reading about “Design Thinking” in the newspaper, which means it’s gone mainstream. But aside from being a term that empowers designers to act in the business realm and vice versa….what does it REALLY mean? Who is doing an incredible job of defining it? Who is really doing it? Who can explain it in layman’s terms without using the term “design”?
Roger Martin‘s recent presentation on the subject:
Here’s Humantific‘s perspective:
Dotmocracy: Large Group Decision Making
September’s session on large group decision making was hosted by Jason Diceman, Senior Public Consultation Coordinator for the City of Toronto and author of the Dotmocracy Handbook.
Dotmocracy is a transparent, equal opportunity, and participatory large group decision-making tool. It is a simple method for recognizing points of agreement among a large number of people. Participants write down ideas on specially designed paper forms called Dotmocracy sheets and use pens to fill in one dot per sheet, recording their levels of agreement. The result is a graph-like visual representation of the group’s collective opinion. Note, this is not sticky dot voting like you may be familiar with. It focuses attention on each idea in turn, as shown here in the session:
Dotmocracy has been proven to:
We will learn the details of facilitating this technique and apply the tool in a real life scenario, discuss approaches to various challenges and hear stories from Jason’s experience in Venezuelan communal councils, Canadian co-operatives, un-conferences and public consultations.
You can download a free PDF of the Handbook and learn more about Dotmocracy at Dotmocracy.org