Who: Groundwork North Wales, a community and sustainability charity (linked into the wider Groundwork network across Wales).
The brief: To design and facilitate a 2 hour workshop on the theme of “identifying and respecting difference” for approximately 70 staff and trusteees, at their annual all team away day in Brymbo near Wrexham. The format needed to suit all the participants, who are very diverse in terms of roles, backgrounds and learning styles.
What I did: I decided to run a number of interactive activities so it would be engaging for everyone (well, so that the different tasks would be engaging for different people, and that everyone would find something to enjoy over the course of the workshop).
- I proposed an activity based on this Danish TV advert called All That We Share, which was a bit different and bold, and which I was delighted the team agreed to. I called it 20 questions (though there were a few more than 20 in practice), and we had a sports hall to run it in, which was a real gift in terms of the space.
- Then we had some reflection time and group reflections and discussions.
- I folded cardboard bricks and brought craft supplies for people to make themselves a reminder artefact, something to capture their thoughts from the session (because after a workshop we can quickly forget the new insights when we go back to our day to day).
- Finally I got them to write notes of appreciation to colleagues – and each person also received a personal note of appreciation from their management team.
It was a very varied 2 hours, and not everybody engaged with everything, but that’s ok because I was deliberately offering different ways to interact with the question: “why does difference matter?”. People could choose what they enjoyed more, and even for the tasks they participated in to a lesser extent, it still created space for reflection.
What they said: I got some positive verbal feedback after the session, and a lovely thank you email from the team. “A big thank you from us for facilitating the Identifying and Respecting differences session last Thursday. We’ve had great feedback from the team as a whole. As a senior management team, we’ve got some things that came out of the session to discuss and celebrate!”
Some of the artefacts produced on the cardboard bricks… and my breakfast croissants!