(no subject)
Andy T turned up to the pub quiz on thursday, which was a nice surprise, him living in Argentina and all. He seemed well and happy.
On Friday, I was at a creative thinking course at work.
It was run by Barbara, who ran the first line management program I was on last year. I gave her one of my Moo cards with a picture of the little lego house we built in the "teamwork" session.
The course was good fun, with a few interesting ideas. We had to work on a real-world problem someone in each grup identified, using a method of our choice from theose we'd learned about. We used the metaphor method, in part to see if it could actually work. It did, surprisingly, and was fun to work through.
There are two departments in one of the schools working at cross-purposes and not communicating with each other when they should be working closely together, apparently.
"How does that make you feel?", we asked the woman who'd raised this problem.
"Like I'm alone in a desert!" she said vehemently.
So, "alone in a desert" was our starting metaphor.
We brainstormed what we could do to help find other people in the desert:
"Look for tracks", "find an oasis", "send a messenger on a camel", "move at dawn and dusk - it's easier, and the other tribe will be doing the same", "light fires by night, smoke columns by day", "pass messages via passing caravans and explorers", "intermarry with the other tribe"(!) etc...
Then the interesting part was where we had to translate these metaphorical ideas back into what they could represent in the real-world situation.
"find what the other department sees as its role and goals", "talk to colleagues at the water-cooler", "make formal overtures to other department", "pick a time of year when neither department is overworked", "look out for equally frustrated colleagues in the other department", "use contacts in management, other departments etc to lobby for teams to work more closely together", "actively mix the two teams together on shared projects" (literal intermarriage was discarded as too radical).
It did work, I think in part the same way that Tarot cards can work as an aid to meditation. Fitting the metaphorical solutions to reality make you use the symbolic framework to bring ideas to the fore.
On Friday, I was at a creative thinking course at work.
It was run by Barbara, who ran the first line management program I was on last year. I gave her one of my Moo cards with a picture of the little lego house we built in the "teamwork" session.
The course was good fun, with a few interesting ideas. We had to work on a real-world problem someone in each grup identified, using a method of our choice from theose we'd learned about. We used the metaphor method, in part to see if it could actually work. It did, surprisingly, and was fun to work through.
There are two departments in one of the schools working at cross-purposes and not communicating with each other when they should be working closely together, apparently.
"How does that make you feel?", we asked the woman who'd raised this problem.
"Like I'm alone in a desert!" she said vehemently.
So, "alone in a desert" was our starting metaphor.
We brainstormed what we could do to help find other people in the desert:
"Look for tracks", "find an oasis", "send a messenger on a camel", "move at dawn and dusk - it's easier, and the other tribe will be doing the same", "light fires by night, smoke columns by day", "pass messages via passing caravans and explorers", "intermarry with the other tribe"(!) etc...
Then the interesting part was where we had to translate these metaphorical ideas back into what they could represent in the real-world situation.
"find what the other department sees as its role and goals", "talk to colleagues at the water-cooler", "make formal overtures to other department", "pick a time of year when neither department is overworked", "look out for equally frustrated colleagues in the other department", "use contacts in management, other departments etc to lobby for teams to work more closely together", "actively mix the two teams together on shared projects" (literal intermarriage was discarded as too radical).
It did work, I think in part the same way that Tarot cards can work as an aid to meditation. Fitting the metaphorical solutions to reality make you use the symbolic framework to bring ideas to the fore.