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Creative Ideation Workshop | Facilitating Inspiration (aka Herding Cats)

The components of effective facilitation.

Last week I attended a ‘Creative Ideation Workshop‘ organised by Wellington NZ (the city’s and region economic agency) and facilitated by Creative HQ (my attendee experience tweet thread) to:

We need to get ideas into action and we are keen to work collaboratively with you and other creative minds who are lucky to call Wellington home. We’d like to invite you to an ideas hui to brainstorm creative solutions to some of the city’s challenges following the economic impact of the Covid19 pandemic. We will take some of the best ideas generated at the hui, develop these further into tangible solutions and work to secure funding to turn them into reality.

From the original email invitation.

Was great to see so many souls respond to the call of collaboration and the energetically run afternoon session certainly generated an array of ideas based on the challenges laid down.

It was shared early on that the ideas from the session would be directed towards the City Recovery Fund (a new amount of money made available and administered through the city council which TEDxWellington recently applied for). The criteria was displayed to the participants as part of the intro:

  • contribute to the immediate recovery of the City economy;
  • enhance or protect Wellington’s position as a leader in innovation and creativity;
  • seek to use innovation and creativity to support recovery, revitalisation and job protection or creation;
  • contribute to sustainable economic outcomes; and
  • align to the WellingtonNZ promotional campaigns.

The session however missed some crucial and foundational elements to catalyse appropriate ideas (and totally appreciate the challenge of managing any group of humans coming together for the first time within the 2.5hours allocated).

What follows is a list of those elements which needed more attention and which can also assist anyone else reading when approaching creative facilitation:

Looking forward to receiving and seeing all the ideas from the sessions which was discussed as an action at the end of the session plus hearing how some of the ideas will be progressed.

Image credit: Two Cats, Blue and Yellow (1912), Franz Marc (German, 1880–1916)
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