Prototype everything. Everything.

Any prototype is better than none. Just doing a sketch can clarify complex models in seconds and erases hours of discussion in circles where it´s less about context and content and more about individuals who “want to be right”. Prototypes can break through these circles leading nowhere.

A prototype

• visualizes what´s going on
• erases language and (miss)understanding issues
• enables a more in depth discussing by stepping through the details of the prototype

And, maybe most important: if people criticize certain parts of the prototype it feels more like they find fault with the prototype and less with the person who had the idea. Over time this also enables the participation of more introverted participants whose voice and valuable insight might get lost in a heated debate.

With a little more of material like cardboard, markers, tape and  plasticine also haptical, senseful play can fuel the debate what makes even the tryest of all topics fun to think about. See some examples below:

And because we found it quite hard in the beginning to get an idea what prototyping materials we should provide participants with we´ll share our material list with you. This set of materials was put together for a small team of 4 people and can be downloaded right here.

Besides this analog prototyping participants of course could also use technical tools and software. For example you could also do quick sketches in powerpoint/ keynote, scribblerToo or an editor of your choice, what makes sense especially in coding. Disadvantage: in most cases this is less collaborative. So for local teams we strongly recommend analog prototyping ´cause it´s way more interactive and very often simply more fun too.

Plan for improvisation.

In the conceptual phase before a workshop it can be quite a tough job to decide how much fixed structure you want to “force” the participants into. We design and facilitate workshop so it´s obviously part of our job to offer a structure for orientation in our workshops. This propably does not sound like a big thing but if you´ve ever experienced a bunch of arty designers blocking any progress by discussing even the smallest little aspect of how to go on or if you ever stood in front of an IT department of an insurance company experiencing first hand what it can take to provoke 100 analytic brains into “creative mode” you´ll probably understand the importance of adapting the concept to the target group.

In 9 out of 10 cases the only problem is: we don´t know our target group and believe me: “IT department” isn´t a helpfully defined target group.

Because we almost never know the people we´ll be working with in the workshop upfront, we developed a “plan for improvisation”: a way to tailor a workshop for a more or less unknown audience. Roughly this means to always have a backup plan: we prepare helpful questions, methods, and a tight, detailed running plan, but: We don´t tell anybody. We only give the participants a rough (~5-7 bullets) structure for the day but don´t go into detail too much. By not telling exactly what we plan to do we don´t have to stick completely to the plan and keep the freedom to change things while we go if necessary. So it´s not us “manipulating” the workshop participants but them “manipulating” us and we react spontaneously to the situation, setting, people, emotions, needs.

In my opinion this is only possible with an experienced team that works well together. A peek must be enough to give each other hints within the situation, too much interaction or even talking could interrupt the flow of the workshop and would leave participants with the feeling of artificiality.

This way we achieve a very subtile, but effective guidance alined with the participants needs; it´s the balance between us leading, facilitating the workshop on the one hand and listening closely and sensitively to the participants´ needs on the other hand that fuel powerful workshops.

Be yourself. Be authentic.

This might sound like a little contradiction to the above but I think without being authentic, being yourself, no social situation can be fruitful and good workshops are very social situations. So let me explain:

In my opinion it is one thing that we, the professionals, try to frame the flow of the workshop without interrupting individual and team flows of the participants like described above. But it is a very different story to fake a “we know it all” attitude following a very strange idea of professionalism, that we found quite widespread in agencies and consultancies. We think it is absolutely indispensable to be “real”, to be honest and to be open. Open about fears, needs, expectations regarding the workshop, its goals and the time spend together. This is what we expect from our costumers and this is what they can expect from us too.

I´m really keen on your insights or personal experiences in working with teams and workshops in general so please feel free to comment.

The Ad-Hoc Impact Camp

The Ad-Hoc Impact Camp is a fast, open, participatory, inclusive format that frames “ad-hoc opportunity spaces” where people can collaboratively engage with a topic and create new solutions. Where they can meet in person, share time, knowledge, skills and experiences, build trusted relationships and collaboratively develop new solutions whenever a new problem of global scale is emerging.

We envision an Ad-Hoc Impact Camp as an unique space of freedom: The freedom to experiment, to think the unthinkable, do the “undoable” and to focus entirely on a chosen topic. It will take place offline and online at the same time to enable intensive face to face collaboration on the one hand and global feedback and input loops on the other hand, to tap into the collective intelligence and listen to as many people as possible.

Deriving from the above some cornerstones of an Ad-Hoc Impact Camp might be

• living and working together in one venue
• duration of at least 7 days to come from idea to first prototype
• fast iterations in sprints and parallel processes of collaborative groupwork (think of agile development like Scrum)
• close interaction with the network (documentation, discussion, voting, feedback, additional support, expert sourcing …)
• a mixture of sponsored and crowdfunded budget to enable the realization, testing and implementation of results

To realize such a camp it will be essential to use and “surf” network effects in the web shortly before the topic reaches mass media awareness. These network effects (= more and more people are talking, posting, liking aso stuff regarding the topic online –> leads to exponential spread of the information throughout the networks –> more awareness and attention for that topic at a certain time) will be helpful at various levels like reaching out to people that want to get involved or kickstarting crowdfunding, so …

… Let´s say it´s day x

There is a global topic emerging (like there was the financial crisis, wikileaks or the revolutions breaking loose in many Arabic countries these days), everybody is talking, writing and reading about and it is about to arrive in mass media. More and more people that know about the idea of the “Ad-Hoc Impact Camps” want to try to take action and don´t want to stop their activism after voting at some poll or sign a petition for or against sth again. To do so these “chaordinators” start to join forces to realize a first prototype and kick-off in a rapide parallel collaboration process. That means that because of time pressure (let´s assume we have 2-3 weeks preparation time before the topic will disappear out of most people´s minds) it will not be possible to use standard project management organisation where a small coreteam is controlling all tasks, next steps and milestones. Consequentially several small teams and individuals will have to start in parallel what could look a little bit like the following, quite colorful:

In addition to the concept of parallel processes in collaboration, when speed is essential and there is only little time for discussing the “right way” (nobody can know anyway at that time), I think for hitting the common goal of an Ad-Hoc Impact Camp the following will be crucial:

At the beginning people involved the most have to gain a common understanding of their expectations, motivations/ (hidden) agenda and goals. Therefore as much energy and time as necessary have to go into the “why” and the “what” while the “how” will unfold on the way powered by the experience of the people involved who´ll bring to the table the methods they have worked best with in the past.

Obligatory feedback & orientation loops we call “heartbeats” will be scheduled every couple of days to check if everything is on track, where changes have to be incorporated and where the most help is needed to remove identified obstacles.

What it takes to make the first Ad-Hoc Impact Camp a reality (besides your and my guts)

We would like to start with the development of a minimal set of common values that will be the basis of all action and that frames a possible Ad-Hoc Impact Camp. This is a work in progress so please feel free to add your thoughts here in the comments or directly at http://untilweseenewland.ietherpad.com/common-values where we collect ours.

Another next step will probably be the development of some kind of “action plan” that can spontaneously function as a commonly agreed on framework that will enable people to channel their collective will and action towards a common goal. Think the picture above in way more elaborated.

To sum it up …

… what we imagine is a global, agile, responsive solution force.
Whenever there´s a new pressuring topic emerging it gets activated by its members to:

• trigger and use network effects
• to connect
  • smart mind´s skills and knowledge
  • and ressources
• to tackle problems in a fast, open and sustainable way.

And Ad-Hoc Impact Camps might become its format where online meets offline activism to create working solutions.

As we really want to get this going we need you, your thoughts & feedback on the above. So if you know people you think we should talk with, if you know organisations who already do sth like the described or if you would like to get involved to further elaborate the sketch please get in touch! Comment here, mail us at hello[at]untilweseenewland[dot]com or when you´re in Berlin, simply drop by at our office at Blücherstr. 22 in Kreuzberg.

Within the last 20 years the world wide web became the biggest connection machine ever. It connects millions of people (what also means that 5 billion people still lack internet access. Check out ahumanright.org that tries to change it!) all around the globe and enables them to communicate and collaborate in new ways. In no time we all can befriend each other, show what we like and share almost anything. So the web is an absolutly great thing and Liu Xiaobo, awarded with the Nobel peace prize 2010, even called it “God’s gift to China”.

On this “Information Level”, the “surface” of the web, we are connected and can reach out to people everywhere but we still only can share what is digital. We can sign petitions and express that we´re for or against xyz, we can talk about new ideas and spread important news in no time, but we can rarely act. It´s still hard to collaboratively develop new solutions to tackle problems in the offline world only in an online environment. Taking real action and starting to shape the world around us needs more than some clicks and ever will.

Basic change on a personal and thereby cultural and structural level can only happen as a result of common experiences.

(Graph trendistic.com)

Let´s take “Wikileaks” as an example: the graph clearly shows enormous peaks around the end of november and beginning december, when a lot of people (re)tweeted about the topic. They helped to spread the information around the globe. But as fast as the hype around wikileaks was created it collapsed. Everything back to “normal”.

So in retrospective on the “Action Level” of the following graphic more or less nothing really happened besides very few things like the internet meme Anonymous and also they did not really change something. (“Action Level” = people engage with a topic and meet for intense face to face collaboration to come up with new solutions as fast as possible.) Did you quit to use your Visa creditcard or to buy stuff at Amazon? Or did you maybe even collaboratively develop something new to mirror wikileaks servers when they were under attack, or to make it save for wistleblowers to deliver their leaks? Me neither.

And that´s exactly the point I´m trying to make here: Although I´m sure there are a lot of people out there who are not only willing to help to spread the information but would also be willing and in the position to help to develop new solutions for concrete problems this global potential is more or less left untapped so far. There are almost no fast, open, participatory, inclusive formats that enable these needed common experiences:

Formats that frame “ad-hoc opportunity spaces” where those people could collaboratively engage with the topic and create new solutions. Where they can meet in person, share time, knowledge, skills and experiences, build trusted relationships and collaboratively develop new solutions whenever a new problem of global scale is emerging. That is what I mean by “Impact Flow”, a 3rd “level” that yet has to be developed. It will fuse the “Information Level” and “Action Level” and unite the best of both “worlds”.

So to sum it up in my opinion the web helps us to connect and to talk to a much wider audience but we need new formats to unleash these “online forces” into the offline world. The 1st step was to understand the network effects, the 2nd step will be the development of concepts/ formats for the “Impact Flows”  to use these network effects to positively form the world around us. Our ideas for “Impact Flow” formats will be the topic of the next post that will be published within the next few days.

To get a first idea you might want to take a look at our documentation of the visioning workshop we did with Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research: Point 3) “Filling the Gap” – Model is a first sketch into that direction.

Looking forward to read what you think. All feedback is warmly welcome!

A part of his presentation that really resonated with me was his “idea-formula”: Idea = People (Knowledge + Information).

That´s why the “western world” is probably well advised to look to China and India regarding the future of innovation.

Thank you Fredrik it was our pleasure, and also thank you everyone who showed up at the first event in our new office. Stay tuned, more to come for sure!

A special thank you goes out to Laurent who created this beautiful short video giving you some event impressions:

(Photo credit: Laurent)

We would like to invite you to an evening event on the 24th of March in our new office in Blücherstraße 22, Kreuzberg.
Fredrik Härén, founder of Interesting.org, author and publisher of international bestseller “The Idea Book” will give an inspiring talk about how to transform good ideas into great business.
Afterwards there will be time for discussion and networking while having some drinks and snacks.

To get more information and to register online, please visit the event page.

We are looking forward to see you there!

After a long lasting and exhausting search for a new office we finally found it! 3 weeks ago we moved into our new officespace in Blücherstraße 22 in Berlin Kreuzberg together with our friends of nest and traverdo.

Jointly we will establish a hub for sustainable and extraordinary projects where we also will host evening events. But we are still in the beginning and that means that we renovate the space by ourselves right now.

By the way we are looking for inspired people or a team who might be interested in joining us here. We have some space left for rent and we are sure, even if it looks quite chaotic on the pictures, in a few weeks we will have a nice atmosphere in here. Just drop us a note if you are interested.

Some impressions of the space how it looks right now. Work in progress of course: