So, to summarize the ground we’ve covered so far:
(a) In order to think effectively in a given context, we need to think first about thinking itself: to be mindful of our default modes of thinking; to be proactive in gaining access to other ways of seeing and understanding. Mental catalysts such as metaphors and other artful devices can project us into new perspectives; secondly, the emotional leading edge of our thought-feelings can serve as our scout in identifying new horizons.
(b) Our orbital model of thinking and learning is well matched to these higher order challenges and can take us into a wide-angle search of the idea space surrounding our point of focus. This broad sweep of the neighborhood activates intuition as well as observation, our senses as well as our imaginations. Our choice of satellite ideas and catalysts to move us through this space should be rich in personal meaning and alive with potential connectivity.
(c) Given our findings, we can say with reasonable confidence that: The arts, in their richness of content and evocative power across our senses, memory and imagination, can serve as a rich source of satellite ideas and catalyst activities for our orbital explorations of complex subjects.
Now let’s get more specific about how to do this!
Step One: Getting Ready
Getting ready is a layered and inclusive affair, as essential for the design and facilitation team as it is for the participants themselves. In a very real sense, everyone will undertake this journey together. And so both must enter into the space of new thinking and imagination; both must jump into the process of thinking about thinking. Of course, the guides of the experience will need to be at least a couple of steps ahead of the participants, both in the moment and above the moment. But their experience of the journey must be as authentic as those they facilitate or the spell will be broken. A skilled facilitator will have mastered the art of dual awareness: immersion in the moment, vision above the moment, a trusted keeper of the group’s relationship with both present and future. And also, an observer and manager of the group’s energy: its individuals and the collective as a whole.
Establishing signposts to trigger exploratory leaps and dives above/below our more ordinary thinking can be as simple as drawing attention to a series of keywords such as our word “craft” mentioned earlier, rich in layered meaning. Craft: the vessel, container or form which floats our idea. Craft: the skilled shaping and making of our idea. Craft, as in craftiness: the tricker element of unseen action. Setting the mind in curious exploratory motion and then unpacking the experience together is precisely the impulse we wish to liberate in getting ready for our journey. And as we know, the arts are a treasure trove of such launching points cued to each of our senses. The spirit of the moment? Curious, playful, reflective.
Step Two: Identifying the Tools, Designing the Journey
This level of planning belongs to the designer/facilitators and is necessarily grounded in two kinds of knowledge: (a) knowledge of the participants, their organizational culture, history and vision for the future, and (b) knowledge of the arts and a methodology for utilizing the arts as a catalyst for new thinking and process facilitation. The first type of knowledge is research-based and customary in working effectively with every variety of participant group. The second type of knowledge has only more recently been brought to bear on issues of strategy crafting, leadership development and higher order thinking. Working in collaboration with seasoned artists or more optimally with those called “teaching artists” is something to be recommended as their expertise will certainly include the arts but also extend beyond the arts per se to the application of the arts in the service of thinking and learning in other domains. Yet another recommended approach to launching the design process is to play on the artfulness of the participants themselves and guide and facilitate their own expression from a variety of perspectives or activities.
In selecting artful catalysts and satellite ideas for the exploration of a special point of focus, it is important to cast one’s net both near and far: to reach for the periphery and far horizons of shared knowledge and awareness, and to swim intermittently in the shallows and utterly familiar. The former are the domains of imagination and invention, the latter – just as important – keep us grounded even as we are challenged to see the familiar with new eyes. Ultimately, it is the flexing of perspective from near to far and back again, from the familiar to the unknown and back again, which builds our capacity for agile, adaptable and adventurous thinking. This is precisely the skill set most valuable for participants to take home with them: not some golden nugget encapsulating the idea of the month, but a habit of mind that has become a part of them.
Step Three: Activating the Orbital Experience
Here once again, the spirit of the enterprise must be curious, playful, reflective. Only this time, the dive will be deeper and the leap will take us farther from home. Participants should be ready and eager at this point to jump in and be fully immersed. After all, thus far, it’s been safe, fun and curiously inviting. Some may even have developed an intuition for where things are headed. However, no one will have a strict read on the future. What comes next will by definition, be learning by surprise. This means that their emotional self will be in the game now too. Emotion, imagination, memory and senses together will be evoked and called into to play. “Ah ha” moments await them, simmering in the sensory interplay of sounds and stories, touches remembered and imagined, visions and images just out of reach, just coming into focus, words pronounced or unspoken, poems, whispers, songs and symphonies, catalysts all!
The role of the facilitator here is both critical and subtle. Manage the process too closely and the magic closes down as participants lose those crucial degrees of freedom so loved in our own moments of discovery. Fail to manage the process or manage it too loosely and the magic evaporates into thin air as participants lose their grounding and their ideas fail to find their containers. The skilful facilitator, again both in the moment and above the moment, will guide the process lightly but surely, assuring journeys both inward and outward, thoughtful and full of feeling, introspective and in dialogue with others, and most importantly, allowing the unknown and the ‘not yet’ to have their moments of hidden action, the “trickster” element that runs ten paces ahead of clarity and illumination. Much depends on the skill of the facilitator in partnership his or her artist collaborators. In special instances, artists and facilitators will be one and the same. In sum, the process requires constant engagement and vigilance while applying a consistent soft touch.
Step Four: Reflecting, Discussing, Debriefing Together
When participants have spent an hour or more wholeheartedly immersed in a new experience, they are often near to bursting with a desire to tell someone about it, especially someone who’s just completed his or her own version of the experience. This is a threshold moment for the facilitator and participants alike. Generative and interpretive processes are both in “on mode” at this point. The internal mix of fresh experience and perception is still registering, still flooding conscious awareness while early interpretive reflexes are already active. This is a tricky moment and not necessarily the best moment for participants to be chatting with one another. Why? Because that would be cutting short the crucially more important conversation barely begun with oneself. The skilled facilitator will be aware of this and create a space for this inner conversation to deepen and run its course. This time of quiet reflection or quiet writing is invaluable to a person’s knowing her own experience: the thoughts, feelings, inspirations and memories which belong to her alone.
The next step of gathering in conversation circles can then bear its own fruit without pre-empting the individual’s internal discussion. Indeed, each person is now far better prepared to engage with others, to listen, to take in other perspectives and to share one’s own unique contribution. Step by step, the group process can be guided to move its focus to learning mode, to the multiple perspectives on the subject at hand, to emerging lines of deeper inquiry and to potential reframing of the original problem. From conversation circles onward to group reports back to plenary and open discussion, the diversity of reflections will gradually over time find their commonalities, their nuanced contrasts and next set of burning questions. A process of guided reflections will help the group to generate not only the outcomes they set out to produce from the beginning but also to capture important surprises, learnings, and insights gleaned from their orbital journeys.
Step Five: Opportunity for Extension Learning
This is one point in the process that is especially ripe for serving up one or more tasty entrees from content specialists. Some of these offerings will have been lined up well in advance per the carefully crafted plan of the design team. Others will have arisen more spontaneously and just as spontaneously facilitated by content specialists from within the group. Topics selected by the design team might well be governed by the same rule as their selection of artful catalysts and satellite ideas, namely “casting one’s net both near and far”. This would mean offering: (a) deep dives into content areas immediately close to the point of focus, and (b) expeditionary dives into content areas approaching the far periphery. The value of the former is practical and immediate, the value of the latter is a second invitation to imagination and invention. Stan Gryskiewicz, founder of the Association for Managers of Innovation, refers to this reach to the periphery as “positive turbulence”, a fundamental strategy for embedding both resilience and innovation into one’s organizational or personal culture.
Opportunities for extension learning, ‘both near and far’, can be positioned at any of several junctures in the strategy crafting process. In some instances, it can be part of early preparation or pre-work. In others, it may cycle intermittently through a multi-phase process. In the scenario of the paragraph above, it follows on the heels of debriefing an art-based orbital journey. It’s worth noting that the deep dives of extension learning, whether ‘near or far’, generally call upon a modality of thinking which stands in contrast to the arts-based mental processes of our orbital journeys. This contrast in modalities is something to be exploited. For it turns out that alternating our modalities of mental processing keeps us alert and energized in the short term and enhances our mental flexibility in the long term. Expert designers and facilitators can bake in opportunities for extension learning and positive turbulence, but perhaps even more importantly, they can recognize unexpected opportunities to allow them to emerge while in the process of facilitating.
Step Six: Synthesis, Discernment and Recycling
In the process of strategy crafting is important periodically to take stock of where the process to date has taken everyone, in other words, to think and reflect together on what has been accomplished, what has yet to be accomplished, what is clear, what is still unclear, where there is consensus and where there is not. The process is iterative and provisional, but intentionally progressive, and ultimately, it will have an endpoint. Along the way, however, successful designers and facilitators will be prepared to re-enter the catalyst stage and orbital processes as often as needed to refresh, sharpen or shift participant perspectives. This process might be conceived as a regimen for maintaining peak performance readiness. It may also serve to boost morale and keep the group mind agile and energized. The group will gain awareness along the way of when the process has achieved enough results and when it has not – and if they don’t, the facilitator can help guide them to discover this.
In the final stage of the strategy crafting process, as the living document is created and readied for formal adoption, it will be crucial that its form or container be equal to the task of holding its ideas securely and accurately (the craft must float), that it be drafted in language and images equal to the task of expressing its ideas with compelling elegance and power (the crafting must be masterful), and lastly, that it be presented and shared in a manner equal to the task of capturing constituents’ imaginations, winning their hearts and minds, and acquiring their ownership (the curious, ‘crafty’, magical nature of unseen action).
Check back next week for various applications of the arts in strategy crafting: practical catalysts large and small.
Robert Brodnick, Ph.D.
Vice President for Strategy & Innovation
530.798.4082
John Cimino
President
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