Professor JNR Jeffers
D.Sc. (Lancaster), CStat, CIBiol, FIBiol, CIFor

Workshops

Creative thinking can often be enhanced by communication between individuals, and small workshops involving individuals with a shared interest provide an important opportunity for such communication. More conventional meetings such as symposia, colloquia, and lectures, with one person talking and the rest listening, seldom lead to much communication, particularly when the time for discussion is limited by poor chairmanship or the domination of the discussion by a small number of individuals. A well-organised workshop facilitates discussion and communication between all of the participants.

To be successful, a workshop needs to have a clear focus and time discipline to prevent the discussion becoming confused and unstructured. Many of de Bono's techniques - e.g. PMI, APC, C&S and EBS - can be used in a workshop format so as to structure the discussion. Perhaps the most valuable of these techniques, however, is TEC, in which the discussion is structured to discuss the Target, Exploration and Conclusions of the workshop topic in the proportions 1:2:2 of the total time allocated to the workshop. A successful workshop also requires a strong chairman, especially to prevent the discussion being dominated by a small number of aggressive and self-confident participants. Delay in reporting the results of group discussions, associated with the difficulty of deciding what, if anything was the outcome of the discussion, greatly reduces the value of the exchange, and inhibits the organisation of further meetings.

Creativity of group discussions can be further increased by deliberate changes of moods through role play. De Bono suggests giving participants coloured hats or cards which commit the participant to adopting a prescribed role:

White: neutral, giving information facts and figures without comment.
Black: negative, logical, why it can't be done, past difficulties.
Yellow: positive speculative, why it might work, possible benefits.
Red: pure emotion, with no explanation or justification, current feeling.
Green: fertile, generative and creative, new ideas, provocations.
Blue: overview, control, acting as organiser of the thinking itself.

After a predetermined time, the hats are moved round the table, with each participant taking on new role. The enforced changes in moods often give participants a wider perception of the issues behind the topic being discussed.

The rotational group workshop technique, however, is probably the most useful framework for interdisciplinary learning and exchange focusing the perspectives of the participants on the selected topics or issues. These workshops stimulate intensive group discussion and debate in such a way as to ensure the active involvement of all of the participants, so that no-one 'opts-out' of the discussion. The composition of the workshop groups is deliberately and successively changed from session to session to ensure that each participant is exposed to the full range of views of those present at the workshop. Special formats are used to record the discussions and these formats need only a small amount of editing before being distributed more widely, or, when required, published, thus avoiding the long delays which are often characteristic of more conventional methods of group discussion.


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