It is now five years Perspectivity has been running for the International Management at Cumberland Lodge for MSC Students from London School of Economics (LSE) with 40+ students each time.
We based the design of the ‘extended workshop’ that sees students play the game in the morning with space at lunch to reflect then an intensive afternoon of structured discussion on Sole Riestra’s successful format – (https://perspectivity.org/index.php/game-news/game-news-immensely-compelling-game-with-masterstudents-london-school-of-economics/] from last January’s LSE workshop, again at Cumberland Lodge.
As usual in the morning the students approached the game with some vigour and after finishing they then settled down in their groups away from the game table to consider how their actions affected the outcomes on their table.
A small facilitators summit at the end of lunch suggested that the students might benefit from being able to unpack the various experiences from the hightened passion and emotion of the mornings activities. We used the ORID framework with 9 small groups clustered around tables. This helped to unpack the experiences and separate out the observations from further reflections, interpretations and decisions.
The exercise helped the students to focus on what was most at issue for them with the Decisional section that seeded ideas for our last section: a ‘mashup’ of Open Space and knowledge cafes with suggested rotations and emergent questions. Thanks to Benjamin Taylor for ‘cooking’ this technique up!
9 Students came forward with their own themes to explore on a table with flipchart paper. The other students were free to choose which table they joined, and to move tables at several points during the session, inputting to any themes that interested them,
Amongst those who led the themed discussions was Eve Wagema who has experience of running a climate focussed game with the Red Cross in Kenya, and is now investigating with another 4 students from the workshop how to take the Perspectivity Game further into LSE and potentially beyond.
- Could there be a tie up with Edinburgh or other student led Perspectivity Branches elsewhere?
- Could we help students then take Perspectivity back to their home countries after their studies?
Benjamin Taylor is exploring the opportunity of using Perspectivity in his visiting lecturer post with Cass Business School, City Univeristy, London where he teaches Applied Systems Thinking to undergraduates on ‘Management and Consulting’ BSC.
Do we have a provisional workshop design / structure to help spawn new Perspectivity groups. Is this a model we could further research and refine?
The workshop was designed by Philip Hellyer, Sarah Wilkie and Tom Hitchman using the version Sole Riestra designed in January 2014 at Cumberland Lodge. The Mashup was the brain child of Benjamin Taylor (who is also hosting the boards and open sessions at RedQuadrant in Vauxhall, London). Philip and Sarah took on sorting out the briefing beforehand in a spontaneous adhocracy and Philip, an experienced enterprise architect, ran the briefing on this his first Perspectivity workshop! All facilitators, including Natasa Sears, were new to Cumberland Lodge and 3 of them came from the Train the Trainer session in London in the summer.
“All the students I spoke to were immensely excited by the way it allowed them to experience the challenges involved in making environmentally sensitive investment decisions”
“I am sure we will continue to incorporate it into our future programmes”