Pro-Action Café
I was honoured to be the Event Moderator and facilitation design consultant for the EU Ideas Lab 2018, which took place in Brussels over 3 days at the beginning of March. This was the second edition of the Brussels event and I had performed the same professional role in 2017. Last year we had just under 400 participants with 27 of the 28 EU states represented. This year we extended the event by half a day and managed to attract a 20% increase in the number of participants and in the end we had over 500 participants registered. It was a challenge for the organising team to improve on the 2017 event but working with the organsing team in Brussels and my two visual facilitation colleagues Lara Listens and Jakob Kohlbrenner, I think we pulled off an even better event in 2018. Among the facilitation techniques used during event were Open Space sessions that were led by Lara and a Pro-Action Café which was led by Jakob. These and other facilitation techniques are very much cutting edge technologies and we were thrilled with the reaction and output achieved by the participants. In addition, Lara and Jakob built a Harvest Wall, which graphically captured the outputs of the entire weekend. The short video below captures the atmosphere of the event.
We have received great positive feedback from the participants including this piece that was written for a publication in Italy “The first thing that struck me was the organization of the event itself. I have no experience of events organized by political parties in Italy (I have never been invited to Leopolda, to say), but I have participated in recent years to dozens of conferences and meetings in Italy on topics “politically” on digital issues, in which Italian parliamentarians were present. There I never met an Italian politician, right or left, who seemed curious and really interested in the ideas of others. Normally they arrive, they make their inevitable more or less stimulating intervention, they greet those who by their standards deserve to be greeted, they apologize and leave. Listening is not part of the protocol. Participation is worth. In Brussels there were two days full of meetings in which there was in fact no scheduled speaker (only an initial keynote speech by Bertrand Piccard); no one who came to the chair to show off, but a perfect machine that coordinated with chronometric precision (for us unthinkable) over 300 people in dozens of meetings, work tables, work-cafes and simple chats that produced reports shared in plenary sessions very informal. MEPs were listening, they were curious, asking questions. Maybe it was just political marketing, but I had the feeling of being in another world, in contact with an open policy, made up of ideas and not slogans.”
Expectant faces just before the prize giving ceremony
It has been a hectic couple of weeks but yesterday I as a judge for the Fingal #StudentEnterprise Awards I was really inspired by the students from secondary schools across Fingal who displayed the achievements of the various businesses that they had set up in their schools over the past couple of months. Some of the entrepreneurial endeavours were extraordinary. One of the winners had spotted that school teams and club teams often lost many footballs as any markings reflecting their ownership were washed away over time. They designed a professional and indelible marking system that will ensure that ownership is clearly visible and I have no doubt that this technology will be professionally marketed and traded for many years to come!
