Workshop Overview
The main workshop components
Summary
This workshop is designed to explain why these conversations are happening and to begin exploring people’s views on what is important, together with their hopes, fears and intentions for the future.
Time: 2 hours
Modules included: 1,2,3
Aims & Objectives
Overall the goal is to answer 3 questions:
- Q1: What are the most important factors for a good life?
- Q2: What are your hopes and fears for the future of this community?
- Q3: What kind of future does the community want to work towards?
The questionnaire responses and in-workshop discussions will provide rich, comparable data for the Central Team to analyse and feedback to the Scottish Government.
Requested outputs
Please ensure that the following are sent back to the Central Team:
- A completed questionnaire for each workshop participant. If they didn’t have time to do it before the workshop, then please ask them to spend 5 minutes at the end to do this;
- Please take a picture of the completed response quadrant for the full group;
- Please take pictures of the fear + what-if clusters from Module 3;
- Please send the pictures to emily@darkmatterlabs.org
Sections to deliver
The workshop is divided into 7 sections
1. Welcome
Welcome the group. Let them know that for the next two hours you are going to work through some questions with each other. During that time you will be guiding between the full group and smaller break-out groups to make space for everyone to speak.
Your job is a time keeper and to read out the questions to the room - in a nutshell that's it. Keep people to time, explain the exercises as you go and watch the magic of a community in action unfold.
2. Warm-up (15 mins)
Over a period of 15 minutes people will partner up with three different people to answer three different questions. Ask people to form their first pair and start the sequence:
- Tell everyone that they will each have 4 minutes to share their answers with the other person to the following question: Describe a moment in your life where you felt most alive?
- Let them speak to each other for 4 minutes, then stop the room and ask them to change partners.
- Next question (again let them know they have 4 minutes): What are you most proud of in your life to date and what would you like to be remembered for? Please share with your partner what you would like to see when you look back at your life?
- Again after four minutes stop the room and ask them to change partners for the last time and give them this final question: I want you to imagine that a future version of yourself has come back to give you some advice about how to live your life to the fullest right now... What is that advice?
- After four minutes, ask the room to say thank you to each other in any way that feels appropriate and then go and sit in small groups ready for the workshop to begin.
3. Module 1: why are we here? (10 minutes)
We suggest that you base this on the From/To Table in the Framing & Contents Section, but please feel free to interpret it using your own experiences. The key point is that we will be communicating the outputs from the workshops to the Scottish Government to feed into the National Outcomes Review.
However, please emphasise that if people would like to share their thoughts after the review period they can of course do that via their MSP.
In the Free Tools section will be adding recorded responses from workshop participants explaining why they came, why they felt it was important, etc. As we run new workshops we would like to add more voices to this section so if any of your participants would be willing to do this, please send the recordings (voice notes or videos) to the Central Team and we will upload them.
4. Module 2: what matters most? (35 minutes)
This module is designed to help process what matters to people and to capture this in the quadrant response format. It is a follow-up to the pre-workshop questionnaire and is broadly based on the same questions, but this time using a more open format.
Introduce the response quadrant and highlight some examples;- Split people into groups of around 5 and ask them to set up their own quadrants (one per group);
- Give everyone 5 minutes and ask them to write down anything that comes to mind in relation to having a meaningful, thriving life, now and in the future. These can be both positive and negative, factors and feelings - there are no rules. The idea is to answer instinctively and just see what comes up.
- Spend 10 minutes sharing what came up and putting the themes into the quadrants in their smaller groups;
- Ask each participant to circle the response that matters the most to them personally and ask them to share why that is with their sub-group;
- Give the full group a 5 minute warning to let them know the exercise will be ending and that you will be transitioning to the next one.
- STOP the whole room and ask everyone to stand up. Spend 5 minutes transferring the responses from the sub-group quadrants to the main workshop quadrant.
N.B. in the test workshops we found that people were very engrossed in the conversations that developed during the first exercise. Although Module 3 builds on Module 2, it is important to help people mentally transition by giving them some warning that it is going to happen and encouraging people to get up and move about.
5. Module 3: hope & fears for the future (40 minutes)
This module is designed as an open conversation in small groups.
- Split the group into sub-groups of 5 and spend 20 minutes discussing the following 2 questions:
- 10 mins - What do you wish for the future in this community?
- 10 mins - What do you realistically think will happen?
- After 20 minutes, stop the room and explain you will move to the next exercise;
- Give everyone 3 minutes and ask them individually to write down the things that they are most worried about in the next 10 years;
- Give the group 15 minutes and in their sub-groups ask each person to share their greatest fear. After each fear, the rest of the group should respond with potential options (e.g. ‘but what if we could.......’);
- Place each fear on the table and cluster the what-if responses around it.
- Please explain that it is absolutely fine if people have the same fears, the group can just move to the next worry;
- Please give them an example to set the scene. For example:
Fear: ‘I am frightened that people will become very aggressive if prices keep rising and there is not enough food to go around’.
Response: ‘what if we start using empty space to create community gardens......what if we start speaking about how this might happen and what we could do to support each other’......’what if we campaign for our supermarkets to stock more locally produced food’.- At the end of the 40 minutes please remember to photograph the fear + what-if clusters to send back to the Central Team.
6. Capturing: what are people leaving with? (10 minutes)
Spend 15 minutes helping people to make sense of what has come up for them during the workshop.
Give everyone 5 minutes to write down some thoughts in response to the following question - What are you walking away with after today’s session?
Please ask participants to add these thoughts to the main workshop quadrant.
7. Check-out (5 minutes)
Thank everyone for coming and let them know the following:
- If they would like to run a workshop themselves then they can access the Playbook at www.cornerstoneconversations.org
- If they would like to attend a 2nd workshop then please let you know;
- If they would like to continue the discussion as a group then suggest that they set up a WhatsApp group before they leave;
- If they have any further thoughts then please feel free to send them in to the Central Team (emily@darkmatterlabs.org).
