I am increasingly trying to eradicate Powerpoint from my stakeholder engagement sessions whether for employees or external people. Tomorrow I'm jetting off to deliver the first of many energy awareness sessions for a major manufacturer armed only with a flip chart, pens, Post-its and some A0 prints of the Terra Infirma Brainstorming Tool (above).
Why? Well my favoured approach to engaging employees is to get them involved in developing new solutions. The benefits of this approach are:
- People feel they are being taken seriously;
- Individuals find it hard to switch off in exercises - so you get more attention;
- You get automatic buy-in as people get excited about their ideas;
- You usually get some cracking new suggestions;
- If those suggestions are implemented then they're more likely to be accepted by employees.
The problem with Powerpoint (or any other presentational form) is that people reflexively sit back in their chair and go into passive listening mode. It is very hard to get their brains warmed up again to start generating ideas - much better to challenge them from the start.
The A0 sheets are highly effective too. They are fresh and novel for most participants, a big group can crowd around them, they encourage a more kinaesthetic approach to the problem, and the big sheet takes a lot of filling with Post-its, encouraging more ideas. The brainstorming tool itself is a simple fishbone diagram designed to ensure that all four main bases are covered. The top of the diagram is about doing the right thing, the bottom about doing it right. The left of the diagram is about people, the right about kit. This gives us four bases: formal procedures, actual behaviour, choice of technology and the application/maintenance of that technology.
Paper - it's the future!
BTW: Check out our new white paper on Fostering Green Behaviour At Work.
I think it sounds like a very good idea, and worth trying for sure. I don't know how many times you have found yourself wondering off in your thoughts during presentations where participation from other than the person presenting is not encouraged. So if a powerpoint is yet to be used, it should contain at least some points where the listeners get to participate in discussions ets.
And about 'getting some cracking new suggestions', absolutely! Who knows, that quiet, shy person who does not like to speak up unless someones asks her, might be sitting on that great innovative idea everyone has been waiting for!
Thanks Linda, I've since developed an enhancement. If you put a different sustainability objective on each of 3-5 sheets, then you can rotate teams around each. Give each team a different colour of post-it so you can see who did what and ban them from replicating answers from previous teams. Then, by the time they're the third on a sheet, they really have to think hard as all the easy answers are there already. It worked a treat for a major manufacturer client this week.
That's a great idea! I can imagine the brainstorming it gave rise to when you had to take your thinking one or a number of steps further! I bet there would definitely be some new thoughts and ideas on the table as a result!