SPA Conference session: What's up with all the cynicism in IT? | |||
| One-line description: | Use De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats technique to generate fresh insights into cynicism in IT | ||
| Session format: | Workshop (150 mins) [read about the different session types] | ||
| Abstract: | De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats technique is often praised for being highly effective for meetings and group work. This hands-on session will use it to generate fresh insights into what is cynicism, and why there appear to be so many cynics in IT, and what can we do about improving matters for the cynics and/or the industry? This is a workshop to give a large, unaligned, unrelated, group of people a new lateral-thinking technique for managing meetings and generating fresh ideas. Participants will learn sufficient Six Hats’ theory and then experience it hands-on. The workshop aims to give people comparative exposure around a very rich and stimulating topic that all are aware of in the industry, or will become exposed to as they gain more experience. The primary outcome of the session is new knowledge, new experience, and to take the very useful Six Hats technique further afield and use it as a tool at work for various purposes such as retrospectives, architectural decisions, problem analysis and solving. The secondary outcome focuses on the cynicism that could be undermining our daily experience at work, and blocking us from achieving far more for ourselves and for our clients or employers. The workshop will generate real new insights into the cause(s) of cynicism in the industry, the dangers of it and what can be done about it. These last three topic-specific insights could be taken further by myself and/or other interested people and eventually lead to other natural outcomes. | ||
| Audience background: | Some experience in IT. Looking for differences of opinion, differences of experience level, differences of education, projects, products and organisational cultures | ||
| Benefits of participating: | Learning and practicing an effective group work and creativity technique –Edward De Bono’s “6 Thinking Hats” in order to utilise this technique in your management meetings, retrospectives, design sessions and much more. Gain insights into why cynicism exists, what are the possible impacts at work, what can be done to improve the situation for those attendees who are cynics as well as those attendees who work with cynics! | ||
| Materials provided: | Typical workshop materials suited to the technique including A3 paper, markers, at least some form of “Blue Hat” or marker for each of the groups to indicate clearly who is facilitating, printouts of “cheat sheet” | ||
| Process: | Foundational presentation on 6 Thinking Hats followed by group brainstorming and group presentation sessions on the 3 sub topics: "Cause?", "Effect?" and "Solution?" The timetable below indicates the breakdown | ||
| Detailed timetable: | 00:00-00:10 Introduction into session agenda and an introduction to cynicism 00:10-00:40 Introduction into Edward De Bono’s 6 Thinking Hats technique 00:40-01:05 Divide into groups of 6-8, each group chooses its facilitator or facilitation approach, and generate ideas for why there is cynicism 01:05-01:15 Presentations back to all on technique as well as topic 01:15-01:25 Answer questions about process and make sure people are feeling effective (group time slots become 5 minutes shorter on purpose) 01:25-01:50 New groups (possibly), generate ideas for what the impact and dangers are for IT workers 01:50-02:00 Presentations back to all on technique as well as topic 02:00-02:25 New groups (possibly), what can be done about it 02:25-02:30 Thanks and end If time is available: 02:25-02:35 Presentations back to all on technique as well as topic | ||
| Outputs: | Form: - Web page / Blog entries - Email to participants Content: - Summary | ||
| History: | None. | ||
| Presenters | |||
| 1. Robert Brown Zuhlke Engineering |
2. | 3. | |