IdeaBehindTheSession

From SPA Wiki

The first idea for the session came from seeing J. Weinbergs book More secrets of Consulting ( http://www.amazon.de/More-Secrets-Consulting-Consultants-Tool/dp/0932633528) on my bookshelf one afternoon I sort of like the metaphor that we as professionals carry our own toolkit with us - using the tools i.e. technical tools, methodologies, best practices, mind sets to help in every day working life. And I liked the idea of sharing about our toolkit and being inspired by other people's tools and adding new tools to our toolkit - hence enhancing our tool kit.

But in my experience sometimes we tend to carry around tools we have acquired somewhere (at some course or other, or have heard our mentors use) but somehow not be able to use them too effectively. For example when learning for exams I frequently heard of the tool of marking text in different colours to better enable learning… and I tried it a few times - but it never really clicked for me - and so I finally chucked it from my toolkit - never having completely understood in what context it might have worked....

So my thought was that we could obviously benefit by sharing about tools we use - but instead of just trying to brainstorm a great number of tools and leave it at that, I wanted to see if we couldn’t try and dig into the question why somethings work. What the upsides and downsides are of different tools - and whether we can put our finger on the reason some work and some don’t.

Through this I had the goal that we would not only go away with ideas of new tools to try out - but also with a better understanding of how and why our tools work or don’t work.

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