Project Action Review from "Going Meta" workshop at Anticipation 2022

[Joe Corneli]

1. Review the intention: what did we expect to learn or make together?

I expected that this workshop would be about little-lower-case `a' anticipation.

Shared understanding of the conference experience in some capacity, or expansion of different people's experiences.

Pilot card decks.

Came with intention to learn by doing rather than just listening.

2. Establish what is happening: what and how are we learning?

Has at a meta-level met my wish to learn by doing.  Not sure I learned a lot from the specifics but at the level of how we are doing this.

To add: I appreciate the workshop for the experience, learning through dialogue; the conference is set up to initiate spaces for this kind of dialogues whether official or not.  These have been particularly rich.

With the expansion & exploration of participatory methods, I find it hard to understand what they are unless I take place in them.

3. What are some different perspectives on what’s happening?

Sitting in a participatory method is very help.

People picked it up quickly.

The roles were easy to pick up, but some of the interactive things spoil a good conversation, but the cards didn’t help me at all.  In the previous workshop it was a bit overwhelming.  There’s nothing better than a good question well articulated.  Might have been better to have the roles without the cards.

Some of it is delivery: there’s too many words on the cards, e.g., you can think about these things if you’re missing something.  Just a word like HOWEVER or ROADMAP might have been helpful.

Not sure what was happening, or what I was supposed to be doing.  But it was an interesting conversation, and interesting subject matter.  I enjoyed talking.  Just be explicit about which hat you’re putting on, e.g., combative, suggestive, etc.  Otherwise it’s difficult to get into.

4. What did we learn or change?

Simpler than the last one but it could be simpler.

In the context we’re in, who would need this kind of guidance?  The people in this room are used to stretching their brains and happy to consider this kind of question.  But that’s context dependent.

I came to appreciate more the role of the ‘individual’ perspective, appreciating Leila’s perspective on this.  And also on how the prompting question can prevent the individual perspective from emerging.  There can be situations like what the keynote talked about, where prompts put people in a box to start with.

I felt confused whether it should be a distraction — built in as such — or whether I really need to make sense of what these should do.

5. What else should we change going forward?

Comparison workshop w/ control.

Slow down, so we have more time to have things have space — we sometimes moved on before we really had time.  Do less and slow down and let things emerge more organically.

Maybe feed this back to the conference organiser.

Kai shared an example of asking students what their user names are, to understand who they are.  There’s something about the prespective that you bring in, helping to prompt people to get into their own perspectives, rather than the collective.

So, onboarding outliers by understanding what people are oriented towards.

I sort of knew what some of my tablemates did, but some were mysterious...  Having some explicitness about who is in the room...

Not sure but, if the timing of this workshop in relation to the whole was important.  It needs to be somewhere in the middle.  But, maybe it should be done twice or split in half.  To get the onboarding, and then come back 2 days later.  So you have a peer group of detectives to figure out what’s going on at the conference...!  To work on something as high-level as a meta-reflection.

And how could it be surfaced to a larger group?  There are others working in similar spheres who could benefit from it!  Depending on the goals, what are ways to expand the participatory methods to a larger group.

Give space for us to breathe and think!  The prompt question is really rich, if you were strapped for time, half the time could just be discussing that question; we’ve come as a collective of individuals coming from different perspectives.  Then introducing the roles... e.g., to be "specific" — this got interesting because each of us had to stop and say I’m going to use my word now, and it became intention.