Last week, with the sponsorship of the Macquarie Group, ROADMENDER delivered a micro-workshop as part of the national Changemakers Festival which featured over 150 events across Australia.

ROADMENDER Micro-workshops: intimate, real and impact driven

ROADMENDER delivered its signature style workshop which focused on exploring a range of collaboration concepts such as the “collaboration premium”, “collaboration intelligence (CQ)”, “collaboration instinct” and “collaboration culture” as strategy building exercises for social enterprises, government agencies, not for profits and commercial organisations interested in maximising their CSR impact. The idea behind the workshop was to bring together a mix of emerging leaders who are passionate about collaboration and it provided a rare opportunity for practitioners of this budding discipline to share knowledge, discuss strategies and connect in a new way.

As opposed to a standard workshop approach, the ROADMENDER micro-workshop is an amalgam of a number of elements designed to saturate the environment with high volumes of information, concepts and ideas which are discussed with the notion of testing the relevancy of each concept against a given problem. The micro-workshop is facilitated with an intensity of purpose that focuses on lasting effects so that participants can reflect both consciously and with little awareness after the event. Brainstorming is blended with organic, in-depth discussions around ideas and concepts that challenge participants with no specific time dedication or limit to any one particular concept over another. Instead, competing ideas create a natural flow of discussion and logic that is intuitive to the participating group. With this in mind, the micro-workshop is designed to be conducted in one block of not more than 2.5 hours, and works best when participants glean ‘a-ha!’ moments throughout the session and find relevance of these insights with regard to their current work challenges. The infographic below captures some of these ‘a-ha’ moments that the participants shared at the end of the session.

The micro-workshop was attended by a very diverse group of professionals from across the private, not for profit, and government sectors. Some were enthused to learn that their own thinking and work in the area of collaboration could be further enhanced through quality conversation. A very broad range of themes and ideas were discussed some of which were of common interest to all participants. I particularly found a discussion on pragmatic issues in respect to building and maintaining collaboration very stimulating as it became clear that each participant had valuable experience, knowledge and skills worth sharing. Outcomes included a strong sense among the group that collaboration must be a strategic, organisation-wide undertaking and not something to be treated as an add-on.

Next week ROADMENDER will share a short video from the day produced by Elana’s Creations, together with some of the resources used.

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