Leading Creatively Workshop

“Am I innovative enough to be a leader?” “Do I have any qualities within me that need to be unearthed in order to be an effective leader?” These, and many more questions ran through our minds as we approached the venue for the workshop on a sunny Monday afternoon. Thanks for the “distraction” from the usual Monday blues and office/lab routine.

The session began cheerfully where our enthusiastic facilitator, Colin Funk prompted us to pick two images, one that best described ourselves, and another that described what we hoped to achieve by the end of the session, from a picture gallery arranged round the room. As one was called upon in impromptu to describe their images to everyone, many of us discovered or revealed something about ourselves, our passions, fears, emotions or feelings and what we hoped to eliminate, empower, unearth or achieve from the session. This formed part of the first component of the session; Powerful Expression- a way to increase effectiveness of how we express and communicate with others. This exercise made us reach within ourselves and live in the present moment as we handled this unexpected “task” passionately, to communicate congruently with voice and body, mind and emotion and also learn the technique of deep listening.

We then divided ourselves into groups of threes or fours and each one narrated a short story about a past leadership task, the challenge encountered and how we went about solving it. At the end of this exercise, the listening members gave feedback highlighting the strong qualities of the one narrating. Some of the qualities that seemed to resound were: resilience, planning, flexibility, humility, risk taking, compassion, hard work, growth, among others. This exercise enabled each one of us to discover or appreciate personal qualities that one possibly wasn’t keen about and to be vulnerable to accept feedback or criticism.

We had a number of games that enabled us to interact with each other freely. These included passing an imaginary ball to a partner and leading by the palm of the hand. We made new connections with people we had not interacted with before and the air was more relaxed afterwards.

The second component of the session involved Creative Facilitation. This involved innovative approaches to leverage and enhance group facilitation and engagement. To demonstrate this, we divided ourselves into four groups. This exercise involved Foursight Breakthrough Thinking, the key principles of a creative process- Clarification, Ideation, Development and Implementation. Everyone was then asked to outline the order in which they handled a task, a project or a challenge; Clarifiers (spend time getting a clear understanding of a challenge or issue before leaping into ideas or solutions), Ideators (generate broad concepts and ideas and are less concerned with details), Developers (spend time analyzing potential solutions, breaking them apart and examining their strengths and weaknesses), Implementers (strive constantly to take action on ideas).

What followed was a timed activity which involved constructing something that the world needed from the materials provided, making sure to utilize every piece. This was fun and involved a frantic exchange of ideas, with the groups became louder as the clock ticked. Implementers, if they were the majority in a group, immediately jumped to building something that they would attempt to explain afterwards. A group with more clarifiers and ideators, spent almost all the time trying to understand and come up with possible ideas before implementing and time caught up with them causing them to gather things together creatively in order to “survive” the test. Each group creatively came up with something; a water purifier, a windmill using turbines, peace keeping troops and a ship to facilitate more affordable transport in sea-locked countries. Listening, working in unity and being flexible to new ideas were the key qualities here.

 The last activity was an interesting timed game that involved directing a marble ball into a common cup strategically placed on the ground. Once again, we divided ourselves into four new groups and each was group given a ball and four pipes with which they would use to come up with the quickest common strategy to let the ball roll into the cup in the shortest time possible. Two volunteers acted as facilitators for this activity. At first everything was chaotic as each group desperately tried to device the fastest way to get their ball into the cup some without first understanding clearly the instructions and rules of the game. The facilitators managed to explain clearly what was expected and the groups that appeared to master the game, demonstrated to the rest. This marked the turning point. After a number of attempts, we were all in sync and ready to perform the activity simultaneously. The fastest group dropped the ball, supported the cup and cheered the rest on as we collectively geared towards dropping all the balls using the shortest time possible. With each practice, the performance improved and we all won. This activity clearly demonstrated key qualities of facilitation in a group to achieve a common goal: effective communication, unity, support, listening, resilience, practice, enthusiasm, identifying strengths and weaknesses of each member, encouragement, flexibility, taking responsibility, motivation, being optimistic and as a facilitator, grab participants’ attention without holding it.

It was now time to call it a day after four hours of fun and learning as leaders. We are very thankful to Colin Funk for the creative fun-filled and very enlightening afternoon session. At last, Monday was over!!