Ai with a College Board of Trustees
People's College, Nottingham
Patrica Lustig
LASA Development UK Ltd
Cirencester, United Kingdom
Date 03/31/2003
Annotation: In March I did a similar session with The People's College in Nottingham.
It was NOT however, a whole systems summit - there were respresentatives
from each of the stakeholders (including the students). One works with what
one has - and this was quite a stretch for them. Because time was so short,
I had to force the pace quite frequently. (What we call 'hot-housing'). I
also did things myself that I would not do if I had more time, I would let
the group summarise, for instance.
We met up the night before and had a few questions for people to interview
each other over dinner with. The feedback I had on that was that people
really enjoyed it. The next day, we began immediately with consolidating
the interviews in larger groups - they had to come up with a 'report' to
present to the whole group.
I took notes of 'The best of' and hung them on a window (we were lucky
enough to be in a room with windows on BOTH sides (daylight surely helps
people with energy). From this, they then did their dreams. They split
into groups - a bit messy, since I let them choose themselves - then
assembled around a flip-chart paper on the floor and drew their dreams (they
were not allowed to use letters or write yet), each taking a turn. This
included, by the way, members of the board and quite senior people. After
an initial unease, they really got into it. The groups then presented their
dreams. They refined them until we got a provocative possibility statement
and then all the groups began 'horse-trading' until we got a reasonable
number of statements that everyone could agree with. During this time, I
was not just facilitating, but also clock watching and pushing them when it
seemed that we would run out of time.
Finally we had three statements and people grouped under the statements to
work further on the design with the statements that they each had energy
for. If no one had gone to work with one of the statements, we would have
known there was no energy there. Again, we had to push people, but by the
end of the day, they had priorities, action plans and ideas to work on. At
the end those who were willing stood up to commit to doing what they each
had energy for. Some really wonderful things came out of this and I think
we were true to the spirit of Ai, while having to drop some of the things
that I would normally do in a Summit (for instance, we did NOT do a proper
reality check as there was no time).
I also had to do a lot of pushing for time otherwise we wouldn't have had
something concrete at the end. People did appreciate it, but found it
frustrating. It is really hard work for the facilitator!
Online Resources:
LASA Development
Resource Files:
Questions used at the AI session (doc )
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