This question was asked in a discussion group on Linkedin this week, along with another similar one about your favourite team-building activity.

It was great to see that without any input from RSVP Design, two of our activities were mentioned: Challenging Assumptions was described as a ‘go-to’ activity by a training consultant from Australia and a number of people in the USA cited Colorblind (even if they didn’t spell it correctly!) as their favourite (or favorite) ever tool.

It is great to know that these products are now being used and recommended around the world and it made me think of my favourites from our portfolio, apart from the obvious pair mentioned above.

I guess there would be three more that I’ve used more than any others and that still give me a buzz every time I see people learning from  them.

1. The first has to be Images of Organisations. These cleverly designed and produced cartoon images of the feelings people experience in a range of organisational situations are so versatile and open discussion on everything from teamworking and leadership to change management and training itself.

2. My second choice would be Webmaster – a challenging exercise that brings large groups together in a problem-solving and process improvement activity that represents a wide range of organisational challenges. It offers masses of opportunities to learn about teamwork, planning, supervisory leadership – and appeals to all those learners who like a real ‘hands-on job’ to get stuck into!

3. My third choice would be a less well-known product: the T-trade toolbox that combines two great inter-group activities – the tough negotiation exercise that is T-Trade itself and the fantastic accompanying exercise, PosT-iT. Despite seeing this activity hundreds of times, I never cease to be amazed at the patterns of human behaviour it illustrates and the potential for conflict, competition and collaboration that it raises….

If my favourite activities have triggered your interest, read more about them through the following links.

http://rsvpdesign.co.uk/shop/colourblind%C2%AE-p-13.html

http://rsvpdesign.co.uk/shop/challenging-assumptions%C2%99-p-27.html

http://rsvpdesign.co.uk/shop/images-of-organisations%C2%99-p-70.html

http://rsvpdesign.co.uk/shop/webmaster%C2%AE-p-26.html

http://rsvpdesign.co.uk/shop/ttrade%C2%99-p-12.html

Please let us know your favourites and how and where you use them!

Best wishes,

Ann

energisers, Experiential Learning, icebreakers, introductory team activities, learning tools, Training Games, webmaster Hide

I always treat new ‘research findings’ with a degree of scepticism but I have to admit that I found this article and the associated research fascinating.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-15693508

Is our ability to empathise with others and develop strong social and inter-personal skills genetically pre-disposed? If it is, what implications does this have for those of us involved in the design and delivery of training and learning in the skills associated with relationship building and ‘soft skills’?

This research leans towards an argument that some people may have more natural, inborn empathy, and attract higher levels of trust, than others because of the presence of a specific gene.

I guess we all know individuals who transmit warmth, empathy, care and concern and seem to be naturally good listeners. We probably also know others who find making emotional connections difficult and struggle with developing and maintaining close personal relationships. So, if this research suggests that there is a genetic link, is it possible to develop and enhance these important inter-personal skills in those who don’t seem to have this inherent ability?

And is this linked to Emotional Intelligence? Are we likely to find that there is a genetic connection there, too?

The principles behind NLP suggest that the observation and understanding of excellence in communication allows for replication: ie. if we study great communicators and model our behavioural and thinking patterns on them, we too can demonstrate the ‘magic’. Does the same apply here? If we pay close attention to what the ‘natural empathisers’ do, can we all learn to relate to others in the same way?

Many of RSVP Design’s practical learning resources and experiential activities are designed to highlight and reinforce skills of listening, effective communication, awareness of the needs of self and others and contributions to the development and maintenance of effective teams.

I’ve always used the activities such as Colourblind ( http://rsvpdesign.co.uk/shop/colourblind%C2%AE-p-13.html ) to help people to observe and investigate effective behaviours, identifying what people say and do that achieves the results they want and strengthens trust, confidence and inter-personal bonds in the process. I’ve also worked on an assumption that with practice and support, everyone can develop these important skills.

This article brings us back to the age old debate about ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’. If it is true that some people have more inherent ‘empathy’ than others, perhaps it is even more important that we provide more structured support and rehearsal opportunity for those for whom ‘soft skills’ don’t come naturally!

What do you think?

Ann

communication skills, empathy, Experiential Learning, facilitation, interpersonal skills, people development, soft skills Hide

RSVP Design was delighted to establish a new distribution relationship in 2011 with Experience Corner, based in Warsaw, Poland. Experience Corner is the first on-line store in Poland offering interactive training tools from globally known brands, and following an invitation from colleagues at Experience Corner, last month I made my first visits to and Krakow and Warsaw to introduce some of our products to their customers. It is always exciting to travel to a new city and although I had just returned from a visit to the USA, I was looking forward to seeing Krakow and watching the reactions of the Polish audience to our products. Alicja and Joanna from Experience Corner met me on the first evening I arrived, but by then I had already had the chance to wander around the main square in Krakow and begin to sample what was clearly a popular and vibrant city!

Experience Corner have translated all the facilitator manuals as well as the delegate briefs for several of our learning tools, so I although I would have an interpreter with me during the events, her main role would simply be to help me understand what was being said in Polish as the groups worked with their own language version materials. The Krakow event was held on a large converted Dutch barge on the river, and I was pleased to see that Experience Corner, like RSVP Design, believes that the learning environment is important in making events memorable for participants! It was a wonderful old vessel, and I could have happily sailed along the river on what was a beautiful sunny day! The delegates were a mixture of internal training specialists and other training consultants, and were extremely enthusiastic in their participation. I used our Images of Organisations™ metaphor cards to open the session and to get pairs and triads discussing what their training challenges were, and I was delighted to see that Polish people have no problems in working with metaphor in this way. We then had a group play Colourblind® with a number of observers and again, not only were they enthusiastic, but very disciplined in their problem solving approaches, which helped them reach a successful conclusion fairly quickly. To show how RSVP Design would sequence activities we then introduced Simbols™ (using the Team Version) to show how we might build on similar behaviours using a different activity, and finished with Challenging Assumptions™ – again it was comforting to see Polish people make exactly the same assumptions in this exercise as other Nationalities we have tried it with around the world!

The following day (well, very early in the morning!) we took the train to Warsaw where I presented to a larger group (some 45 people) in probably my most unusual training venue ever – the deep end of an old swimming pool (thankfully undergoing a conversion to an arts venue!). I was interested to see if our dinner discussion the night before about Polish stereotypical group behaviour suggested by my hosts as being  ‘a lot of heated discussion, but when agreement is reached there will be a uniform acceptance of the new direction – perhaps to the detriment of thinking about alternative strategies’. During this larger session I decided to use Webmaster® to see if these behavioural stereotypes would play out. Whether by coincidence or as a reflection of these stereotypes I did indeed witness a lot of heated discussion after the initial problem-solving portion of Webmaster® (creating the first construction). I observed lots of discussion with many overlapping conversations, and several people taking a lead as to how they though they could best achieve the team performance increase required (i.e. complete the whole construction in under 2 minutes, from an original build time of 25 minutes). None of the available exercise time was used for further practice or rehearsal purposes – it was all used for ‘discussion’. Eventually as the time limit began to expire (somehow!) the group agreed on a strategy and every one of the 30 strong group delivered on that strategy and managed to achieve the objective! There was a lot of discussion following this activity (most of which I was unable to understand!), and I get the sense that Webmaster® could become a popular activity in Poland!

Although this was a very short trip I saw enough to know that I want to go back and experience more Polish cooking, Polish beer, Polish socialising and Polish customers, and I look forward to a successful partnership between Experience Corner and RSVP Design.

Graham Cook

communication skills, energisers, Experiential Learning, facilitation, learner engagement, Learning Design, learning events, Learning Games, Learning Mindset, learning tools, simulations, Training Games, Training Tools, webmaster Hide

It is always rewarding to see great professionals working and to learn from them.

At this year’s IAF Conference in Istanbul, I was fortunate enough to take part in a great facilitated session that drew on techniques and methods that are consistent with those we use at RSVP Design.

The first session was called ‘Consensual Circle’ and involved using images to help a group to move towards consensus – a point at which everyone in the group contributed to a decision that every member agree with – or at least was prepared to live with!

The process involved everyone working in one group. At the beginning of the session, each person was asked to draw a picture representing their individual interpretation of ‘Facilitation’. Each picture was then presented and explained.

When everyone had presented their images, each person was ask to choose the one that they liked best. They could, if they wished, choose their own but most people did not.

A simple tally was then taken and the image that received the most votes was selected.

This image was then re-presented to the group and every member was asked to score the image on a scale of 1-5, depending upon how satisfied they were with it as a representation of the theme. A simple show of fingers was used, in which the numbers meant:

5 – I am extremely satisfied: this image represents everything I want it to represent

4 – Generally very satisfied – there may be some minor changes I would make

3 – I can live with this, although it is not what I would have chosen myself

2 – Dissatisfied – I have many concerns  about this

1 – Extremely dissatisfied – I would fight hard to resist this image being chosen

When the ‘scores’ had been given, the facilitator went to the person who had given the lowest score and asked that individual to explain his/her concerns. This was done with everyone listening and with no response.

The facilitator then asked, “So you have given this image a score of 2. What would have to change in the image to move you to a 3?”

This was explored and the participant described changes that would make the image more acceptable. These changes were then offered to the group with the question,

“Would anyone have a problem if we made these changes to the image?”

If the answer was, “yes, “ the attention moved to the person with the concern and the same question was asked again, “So, is there any way you could suggest a change that you could agree to and that would also be satisfying to everyone else?”

The change was made to the image and the scoring process was repeated.

The aim of this process is to reach a solution which everyone scores at 3 or above. In our group this happened within an hour: the facilitator explained that in his experience of working in organisations the consensus was usually achieved even faster than that.

Of course, working with a graphic facilitator or live artist would be the ideal solution but as I worked on the process I recognized the simplicity and power of the process and also how it might be a perfect application of  RSVP Design’s Images of Organisation or Dialoogle cards.

Using these images as the start point removes any concerns individuals may have about their ability to draw and offers a range of possibilities to stimulate thought. It is also a perfect chance to begin to explain the thinking….eg.

“This picture isn’t exactly right, but with these changes it would be perfect….”

For more information, ask Ann!

http://rsvpdesign.co.uk/shop/images-of-organisations%C2%99-p-70.html

http://rsvpdesign.co.uk/shop/dialoogle-2008-pocket-set-p-55.html

concensus, consensus, Experiential Learning, facilitation, Learning Experiences, Learning Games, learning groups, Training Games, Training Tools Hide

This month I accepted an invitation to speak at a PhD Research Seminar hosted by a London educational institution, my subject being “Action Research as a PhD Research Methodology”. It was an extremely interesting event attended by potential and already-engaged Doctoral students from across the globe. I received a warm welcome and an attentive audience listened to what I had to say, many of them staying behind to ask questions and pick up on points I’d made in the presentation. Later that afternoon, nursing a cup of coffee while waiting for my train, I contemplated the expectations that guide so many students to come to the UK to study.

It struck me that a great number of the students whom I’d met came from countries where the education systems had either been established during the days of the British Empire, or had used the English school system as a template for excellence. Their national systems hark back to a day when an English Public School education was the benchmark against which all other standards were measured. India is an example of a nation who have this as part of their history, benefitting, or suffering depending on your viewpoint, from the value patterns in education that were established during colonial rule. My mind immediately recalled a conversation at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) in North Carolina only two weeks earlier, one which offered a very contemporary insight into the Indian education system.

I was speaking to Lyndon Rego, Director of Leadership Across Boundaries at CCL. “The education system in India is broken,” he told me, “it serves a very narrow section of the population, and big business in India is telling us that the education system is not producing people with the skills that they need for the nation to grow.” We went on to discuss the work of the Leadership Across Boundaries team in creating cost-effective supplementary educational responses and the potential for RSVP / MLD to get involved in the design of materials to support these initiatives. Our discussion was about India, but I’m sure that there are many countries who work within the legacy of empire and a set of expectations about how an effective education looks and feels.

Putting my two experiences together I reflected on how many of the students who are produced by these systems gravitate towards the West, often the UK and USA, to seek higher qualifications, and whether they are being well served by what they receive? A century and more ago Britain’s educationalists were hailed as what we would now call thought-leaders, cutting edge innovators who were forging methods and systems to make education as effective and efficient as possible. Is this still the case, or have we somehow failed to keep pace in applying what is known about how people learn?

It won’t come as any surprise to anybody who follows my musings on learning design in this newsletter to hear that I would answer both of these questions in the negative. I don’t think we serve our students well, whether they are national or international in origin, and I vehemently contend that we have somehow lost our innovative edge in translating theory into practice in education. Our research into learning and education is second to none, but somehow there has arisen a disconnect between this theory and the practice that is evident in classrooms and lecture theatres in both the UK and USA.

To go into the reasons for this situation would take me into the realms of politics, and well away from the purpose of this newsletter. At RSVP, and more recently through MLD, I have been trying to challenge this inherent conservatism in education by providing the materials and processes that will allow educators access to materials that are better attuned to the complexity of how people learn. I’m not alone. I meet many people who recognise a need for change, people who have the bravery to work inside of our educational structures, and those, like me, who are outside looking in. Each of us is, in our small way, trying to make a difference because we believe that the consumers of education deserve better.

I think that the UK has the talent, the potential and the track record to once again become a thought leader in educational practice. Across the world, rightly or wrongly, a great many people still look to these shores to offer an example of best practice in education, and many make the commitment to come here to benefit from that expertise. Surely we need to take this role and responsibility seriously and move to a system where we are sure that what we offer is the best we can make it? I don’t know how this can happen, but I do know that if there is sufficient will to change the system we have the tools to make the change work. Change always involves learning and we’ve proved that we know how to learn – perhaps what’s lacking is leadership?

If that’s the case then being a thought leader in leadership education suddenly takes on a whole new importance.

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My colleague Graham Cook often takes the opportunity to make jokes about the length of time that I’ve been in the people-development profession, and some of the practices that, though seemingly humorous now, were cutting-edge at the time. Our MLD visit to the Center for Creative Leadership this month offered a whole new audience for those jokes, although it has to be said that many of the approaches that these days seem crazy to us in Europe have actually persisted much longer in the US. These insights led me to reflect on how we organise learning space, and how this has evolved.

Back in the heady days of the 70’s, when Transactional Analysis and sensitivity were our dominant grouproom influences, my working space had beanbags on the floor instead of seats, and a mattress in the corner in case anybody wanted to shed a few tears or act out their anger! There was no apparent front of the room, the flipchart was pushed to one side and was open to anybody to write on, the lack of focus reflecting the ideal of an equal sharing of power between the person facilitating the group and the group members themselves.

Then came the OHP, and with it the requirement for everybody to be able to see a screen. The beanbags became seats, the U-shaped table appeared, and the power shifted to the person at the front who controlled what was shown on the screen. Group dynamics and communication development couldn’t survive this change and we entered the era of development training and leadership courses. Soon the OHP gave way to the laptop and projector, and “death by Powerpoint” became an international plague, further increasing the extent to which the development of the working group depended on the skills of the presenter as entertainer. It’s interesting to reflect on the way that control over the technology has dictated how we approach people-development, and how both the experience of consumers, and the skills of trainers, have been detrimentally affected by this shift.

But just as we blame technology for this retrograde trend, developments in this very field may offer us an opportunity to re-balance the grouproom power balance. A large and exciting part of our design efforts have been focused on using iPads in the grouproom. What makes this different from much of the technology that has appeared in the preceding decades is the way that this individually controlled, but universally linked, technology can be used to facilitate a renegotiation of the power balance in the grouproom. Individual learners can take charge of what they see, share, contribute and record in a way that puts the emphasis back on them rather than the trainer.

I have to admit that this vision of the future, perhaps virtual, grouproom wasn’t one that I immediately related to – the spirit of the 70’s still runs deep in my professional psyche.

•The emphasis will surely be all about the interaction of people and tablets, rather than the true sharing that makes it worthwhile getting people into the same space?

•It’s obvious that the brilliance of the technology will distract people from the difficult issues that need to be addressed.

•How can we expect the facilitator to control the group when everybody has so much control over how and where they are working?

All perfectly legitimate concerns, but none of them create circumstances that can’t be addressed through good learning design that recognises the technology as a tool to support good pedagogical practice. And moving away from physically shared space might offer unprecedented opportunities for real and meaningful learning.

Let’s take as an example of a familiar pattern of learning interaction:

1.Information input

2. Individual reflection/Small groupwork

3. Share

4. Discuss

The Information Input stage can happen ‘anytime anywhere’, before or during the learning interaction. It can be centralised, high production value or pretty much home-made by the facilitator.It can be as content-inert or dynamic as required, and uniquely tailored to the needs of individual learners of groups.

The Individual reflection/Small groupwork stage can happen in the same physical space around a shared device, or remotely on different devices using shared screens. It can be synchronous or asynchronous, extended or time-bounded, elaborate or simple, structured or unstructured. The facilitator can observe the content and/or process, constantly or periodically, or allow it to happen independently.

The Sharing stage can allow individuals/small groups full creative control, or be tightly defined. It can be synchronous or asynchronous. Inputs can be amended in real-time to build on other inputs, they can be dedicated to one individual or sub-group or can be automatically incorporated to create a multi-group ‘collage’. They can also be attributed to an individual or group, or be anonymised by the devices.

Discussion can be a straightforward circulate and comment process, or an incremental building of content and understanding. It can be focused on the tablet or simply use the tablet to provide stimulus for traditional face-to-face interaction. The content can use rich media to generate stronger reactions across synchronous or asynchronous discussions.

In short, the mobile device has the potential to return the power in the grouproom to the more equal distribution that we experienced in the 70’s. It remains to be seen whether there still exists in the profession of trainer/facilitators the skills, or appetite, to capture and utilise this potential.

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As part of our commitment to bringing the concept of Learning Power to businesses, public and third sector adult learning groups, we worked in partnership with NHS Dumfries and Galloway to offer a two-day programme for L+D professionals on July 13 and 14 2011.

Day 1 was an introduction to ELLI and the 7 Dimensions of Learning and was attended by seven participants, from within the NHS, the Scottish Police and Brathay: organisations with a commitment to developing people through the provision of high quality learning.

Day 2 was an optional ‘ELLI Champions’ training day, designed to ensure that those who wish to use the profiling tool within their own programmes have achieved the required level of understanding and competence to represent and administer the tool correctly and in line with the intentions of ViTaL Partnerships, who retain the ownership of the profile and associated research material.

As we have experienced in previous workshops, there was a very positive response from all the participants about the potential value of ELLI across a broad range of applications: in personal coaching and development, in career coaching and in performance management and goal setting.

Participants felt strongly that the ELLI profile is, as it has always been described, of particular value when it forms part of a supportive yet challenging coaching or mentoring relationship. Particularly during Day 2 there was a focus on the principles of effective coaching and the need to use the profile as a trigger for high quality developmental conversations with individual learners.

However, there was also strong agreement that simply understanding the 7 Dimensions, and their implications for the design and delivery of learning experiences, was of enormous value to those professionals who are responsible for the selection or creation of learning activities, programmes and events, as well as the ‘curriculum’ around formal training inputs and mandatory training.

Ann introduced a number of short, example activities on Day 1 to illustrate how, once a need to develop one or more dimensions had been identified, experiential learning methodology can support skills development. Specific example of this included short exercises in connecting apparently random images (Meaning Making), a group puzzle that could only be solved by generating multiple questions (Critical Curiosity) and the use of a visual mapping tool to review past learning and plan for the future (Strategic Awareness).

On Day 2, participants rehearsed their own coaching skills, observing each other and offering and receiving feedback. This process helped them to explore the ‘layers’ that ELLI unlocks: learners’ thoughts and feelings about learning in general, themselves as learners, their motivation and learning needs. Following this, they began to explore how and where ELLI could be integrated into their own work. Examples included an organisational induction process (with recommendations about how to make this much more learner-centred and participative), working with operational managers to help to ensure that appraisal and performance management discussions were more focused on learning and the value of integrating the Learning Power principles into Action Learning sets.

Whilst we recognise that there is still work to do in creating materials and ’seamless’ access to ELLI profiles, the programme re-confirmed RSVP Design’s belief that this is a simple and powerful model that should become core knowledge for every L+D professional.

Specific thanks go to Sandie Wilkie and Louise Hughes of NHS Dumfries and Galloway for their support in setting up the programme and providing the venue and logistical arrangements.

brain based learning, effective lifelong learning, effective lifelong learning inventory, elli, Experiential Learning, facilitation, learner engagement, learning, Learning Design, Learning Mindset, learning styles, learning tools, Lifelong Learning Hide

Writing proposal documents for learning interventions, and / or learning designs, in an attempt to secure customer contracts, is a regular and familiar part of working in many parts of the training industry. Conventionally writing proposals means just that – writing – writing the words that will convince the client that you are the right people to design and/or deliver their training. But it’s worth exploring whether, in this situation, words are an effective way of presenting this information?

Our experience at RSVP is that moving to text too early in a design process, or indeed a learning process, is often counter-productive. Words have a way of fixing content, they have a contractual effect that commits people to courses of action that are very hard to change, no matter how many times we write the word ‘Draft‘ at the top of them. Pictures allow people to explore and play, to get creative and experimental, they have a fluidity across a range of possibilities, and they are an important part of the process that moves people from vision to reality. But what would be the reaction of a training department (or worse still a procurement department) who receive a proposal in the form of a series of images, with few words to constrain the imagination of the recipient? Don’t answer that question – I think we can all guess!

Here’s how a friend of mine, Patrick Dunn, describes the situation in his blog Networked Learning Design http://patrickdunn.squarespace.com

The basic argument is this: if you believe knowledge is something that is delivered, your priority is to design the best delivery mechanism. You try to articulate the knowledge as best you can, usually in words, structure it out, then communicate it to learners. It’s likely that you’ll try to establish in some detail what the “content” is very early on in the process, as it’s the content that drives much of the project management, resourcing, and so on. This will result in an engineering approach, in which requirements are as tightly defined as possible, and are not expected to change.

If you believe that knowledge is created by learners, your priority is to establish environments in which this will most effectively occur. You become a “learning environment designer”. You think about what kind of experience you’re trying to create for the learner. It can be quite difficult to do this using words, so you’re more likely to sketch or model the solution, rather than express it as text. Most important of all, you’re less likely to assume you can define all the requirements up front – because learners are just so damned unpredictable in how they create knowledge – and therefore take a more iterative, exploratory, design approach.

So, assuming that there’s not many clients out there who would appreciate a ‘picturebook of possibilities’ as a credible proposal document, we presumably have to be resigned to writing text-based proposals to win the work, in the hope that these can be deconstructed back to something less fixed once we begin the real design process? In doing so recognising that we are accepting the original proposal as a waste of time and effort, something we simply did to jump through the hoop of the tendering process?

Unfortunately, if we’re considering a competitive tendering process, the answer is inevitably ‘Yes’. Experience suggests that most buyers of training are profoundly conservative, and to break ranks and present them with a challenging proposal is, most probably, a direct route to the “Thanks but no thanks” list.

But there is hope out there, not all proposals originate within competitive tendering processes, and I’d encourage everybody concerned with commissioning learning designs and interventions to ask whether, in every circumstance, a written form of proposal is the best way at arriving at an effective, stimulating, memorable learning experience? Think about the situation where there is already a high level of client/supplier trust, or where the learning is an extension of an existing design, or where the client understands and appreciates creativity and innovation – ask yourself whether these situations offer  opportunities to move away from the written word?

If the answer is yes then you’re into the world of storyboarding, concept boards, cartooning and multi-sensory engagement. The design meetings can become part of the learning process, co-creation can become overt and engage multiple stakeholders, selection and development of content, method and style can happen quickly and discursively, and all parties can experience real ownership of the ultimate product. Eventually there is the need to commit the design to a transferable format (including words!) but this effectively becomes the creation of a record of the true design activity.

So my message to everybody concerned with the creation and commissioning of learning materials is this:

If you believe that the learning content you need has elements of innovation, excitement, engagement and inspiration – where is this reflected in the methodology you use to select and craft it?

If you’re struggling to understand how this can be achieved – either on the supply side or the commissioning side – then contacting RSVP might just be a good place to begin exploring possibilities – we work in words and pictures.

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I recently attended a meeting with a client who has commissioned us to design the training for the customer-facing staff who will be working around London during the 2012 Olympic and Paralympics. After the hoop-jumping of the tender, interview and selection process this was our first opportunity to sit with the client and really get under the skin of the learning design we have undertaken to deliver.

The importance of these initial scoping meetings in any commission cannot be overstated, and with a high profile job like this one the importance is magnified through the wholly- expected, pervasive anxiety. One can never predict the direction the meeting will take, how many agendas will be evident, and what type of customer – supplier relationship will emerge. Even after many years, and hundreds of such meetings, I always struggle to shake the trepidation that precedes that first handshake.

In this case the meeting was pretty close to exemplary – everything we could have wanted in terms of both progressing the design and progressing the relationship building. A notable success, and all because of one fact relating to how we were able to structure the meeting. The meeting lasted six and a half hours, and for the first three hours we didn’t once discuss the design we had been asked to produce.

So what did we discuss through the course of the morning, football? TV? the weather? Well I can’t deny that football was mentioned – we wouldn’t be a successful Scottish company if we didn’t have something of an opinion there: and it was hard to ignore the violence of the monsoon that was driving the tourists away from Tower Bridge. But I’d say that 95% of the conversation was about one thing……..

……………….it was all about the people who were to be the targets for our learning design.

To me the essential first consideration when designing a learning intervention is revealed by giving full attention to this question:

“Who is this learning aimed at?”

This includes an examination of age, gender, status, needs, prior learning history and the environment within which the learning will be applied.

The trouble is that most clients, when tasked with commissioning the design, are understandably fixated on content, their usual start points being:

“What needs to be covered by the design content, and how do we deliver it efficiently?”

Now this is undeniably an important question, and it must be comprehensively answered at some stage prior to defining the design, but if a design solution is to be truly effective, it needs to be truly effective for it’s target audience.

That’s why our design meeting in London was so satisfying, and, to my mind, successful: we spent the afternoon talking content and approach – but those conversations were so much more informed in that they were never allowed to deviate from what would deliver the target learning to the target audience. This attention to all aspects of the learning environment is what differentiates bespoke learning design – yes it involves a greater scale of investment, but as somebody once said “If you’re worried about the cost of learning, be assured that it’s inevitably less than the cost of ignorance” .

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My name is Greig Mitchell, and I am spending a week at RSVP Design on work experience.

Here is some of the things I have been doing:

Monday 6th June 2011

‘Today I helped make and package the Colourblind and T-trade products. I learnt organising skills and we also packaged the goods for shipping. I really enjoyed it’

Tuesday 7th June 2011

Today I went with Graham at 6:30 to the Make-It in Manufacturing competition with McBride

Make it (the organisers) is about involving school children in the northwest of England, learning about manufacturing in a company.

They were using an RSVP Designed workshop. The aim was to make a soap dispenser and a refill pack to sell and market.

You first chose jobs within the company and giving the company a name. You chose from Managing Director, Manufacturing Manager ,finance manager ,etc. Me & Graham joined one of the teacher teams. Our team name was Squeaky Clean.

You next chose the soap and scent, then you used polydron to make prototype models. Later we had to make it through the logistics maze. You would loose £1000 for every circle that beeped. We lost £4000. Then you would meet a customer consultant and pitch the idea to them. They will then give you more money. We won £6000. After lunch, we pitched the idea in front of the dragons’. After all the teams had pitched, McBride chose the winner. I really enjoyed it.

Wednesday 8th June 2011
Today I Made the products: Images of organisations and another batch of Colourblinds unassisted. I also packaged and taped the deliveries and boxes ready for delivery ready for Japan.I enjoyed the fact I could make them myself. I also took the effective lifelong inventory profile. My results are below…

Greig's Learning Power Profile

Thursday 9th June 2011

Today at RSVP, I tidied the boxes in the store room. I also compleated the colourblinds I had started yesterday. I also tried out one of the activites with a colleague – Workstations. I went out for lunch and afterwards I did some laminating. I realy enjoyed today.

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